Today I’m going to be Ginger! (I would say Sydney, but in my entire DTWOF oeuvre, I could tellingly find only one scene where she’s actually teaching a class, and it didn’t work out of context.) My friend the Queer Theory Professor has been out with a broken arm, so I’m going to teach her class this afternoon. ENGS 296 A, Sexual Dissidence. Well, I’m not really going to teach it so much as go in and talk about my memoir Fun Home, which was on the syllabus for this week.
If you happen to be in Burlington, VT this evening, come over to the Outright office for their annual reception. I’ll be there schmoozing.
And thanks to NLC for sending me the link to this really cool Gigapan photo of the inauguration. You can zoom in and out of the crowd like in Google Earth. Can you find Yo-Yo Ma taking a picture with his iPhone?
I was just talking to a friend in San Francisco who said it’s been weirdly warm there. The magnolias are blooming and freaking her out. That makes me feel grateful for the very cold weather we’ve been having here in Vermont. But I was happy about it already. Here I am this morning. It looks like it might be even colder tomorrow.
…it’s just a query. I’ve been googling all day long to no avail trying to find something out, and it just occurred to me that the people of this blog might very well have the answer.
Does anyone remember a children’s educational tv program from probably 1970, where a guy in a suit and narrow tie would read a book to you? Actually, he would read the first chapter, and then urge you to finish it on your own. At my quasi-experimental school, we would actually watch this show–unheard of in those days to have kids watching tv in school. So it was on during the day. I kinda remember something about birds in the logo…or a mystery…maybe it was set up like, here’s the beginning of the book. Now you be the detective and find out how it ends. I remember watching The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe on this show. And My Side of the Mountain. And racing right out to the library to get the books.
It was probably on PBS, right? Hmm. PBS was founded in November of 1969, taking over the operations of NET, National Educational Television. Actually, NET kinda rings a bell.
Jeanette Winterson just wrote a very funny column in The Times (UK) about buying The Essential Dykes To Watch Out For at her local bookshop, The Borzoi, in Stow-On-The-Wold. That’s an actual place, not made up for effect. I just googled it. It’s in Gloucestershire, which is sort of interesting since I’m in the middle of reading The Tailor of Gloucester. You might think a person could get through the Tailor of Gloucester in ten minutes or so, but I’m on my third night now. It has great soporific powers.
Winterson also talks about being identified as the “homosexual authoress” in her small village. “I suppose I should be writing racy novels in a tweed skirt and brogues, but then everybody else around here wears those.” This calls to mind my own experience of lesbian rustication here in New England, where everyone dresses like a butch dyke, even the gay men, which is sometimes confusing.
But I digress. I think this is Winterson’s influence, as you will see if you read her piece.
Whew! Thanks for all the menopausal remedies. I’m gonna go chug some Barlean’s flax seed oil, insert a hormone pellet in my, my, …you know, my noun, then massage some neutral Kiwi shoe polish into my scalp.
Look, I just got the latest issue of Granta. This is a very fancy schmancy literary journal, to which I have contributed a short graphic essay.
See my name on the cover? Right there with Siri Hustvedt and Ali Smith and Jonathan Lethem? There’s also a clever story inside by the wonderful and terrifyingly prolific Emma Donoghue.
Meanwhile, Holly decided we should move the birdfeeders closer to the house. Dr. Winnicott thinks this was a splendid idea. Click the below picture, it’s a video. I still haven’t figured out how to make my videos show up with that handsome, graphically lucid and self-explanatory “play” arrow on ’em, which would make this entire sentence, as well as the last one, unnecessary.
