cover girl, in theory
June 6th, 2010 | Uncategorized
My friend the Queer Theory Professor just wrote an article on my graphic memoir Fun Home for GLQ: A Journal of Gay and Lesbian Studies. It made the cover, with this image of me searching the HQ shelves in a library.
It’s an odd sensation, reading an academic examination of my work. It’s sort of like being psychoanalyzed in public, but not exactly, since it’s the book and not myself on the couch. And because I don’t really have any training in critical theory, I only have a partial grasp of what people are talking about. The QTP’s article is called “In the Queer Archive.” I can’t really summarize it accurately, but it’s about the way I try to provide documentary evidence in my memoir—maps, photos, newspaper reports, etc.—and how that relates to something that Jacques Derrida calls “archive fever.” Here’s a nice disorienting quote.
We know, of course, that the historical person Alison Bechdel is distinct from the “I” of the narrator’s voice, and that this narrating consciousness, whose words fill the top of many graphic panels, is also none of the past selves, the Alisons aged two to twenty whom we see on the page. In part this proliferation of subjects is endemic to the autobiography, which must re-create past selves through retrospective projection and, in so doing, must cause them to anticipate the author who is to come.
Hmm. I’m not sure which Alison is making this blog post. The one who logged in to WordPress and hit “new post,” or the one who is just about to hit the “publish” button.
131 Responses to “cover girl, in theory”
Just so long as it’s not the Alison with the ill-advised haircut!
Hey, one of my goals in life is to wear my hair just like Alison’s! 🙂
Family photos are important because they bring back memories. Good or bad, but accurate. Most of my family photos disappeared after my father died, and it feels like there is a hole in my mind.
And, I still think your idea of having Sydney accidentally submit a queer theory paper to the Society of Women Geologists* is a good one!
All (from previous post). Thanks for your advice, but in a town of about 50,000 people seeing the man who assaulted drive by on the street probably wouldn’t fly as evidence of stalking. Some people dismiss me as an hysteric for not forgetting this ever happened; it’s like someone set the wayback machine for 1958 as far as speaking out about sexual assault is concerned here.
* – I just made this name up. There is a professional organization called the Association for Women Geoscientists, though.
Makes me smile. The distance between how academics talk and how the real world things about identity, memory, etc. is so huge sometimes.
But watch out, because reflecting on this will just fuel more academic discussion about autobiography, memory, representation, identity, and intense examination of that gap. 🙂
Wow, ‘disorienting’ is right. I didn’t understand most of what was in that quote. But I absolutely love the heading of this post in context of the post.
And Kate L, I think you are a strong and brave woman to live in the same city as that man. I’ve been less than courageous in the past on certain similar fronts, and ran. Kudos to you and I hope you are feeling better.
That book, with the narrator’s reconstructed, imaginary “I”, is a paint-sample fandeck. Closed, it’s The Unitary Alison Bechdel. Fanned out, shade upon shade upon shade… Each part of AB, none all of AB.
The cited passage tries to express this without metaphor. Wordy because not easy.
When I tried just now, the “Current Issue” link on GLQ’s home page took me to the previous issue. You can find the current issue here.
¿Que?
Interesting that the “historical person” coexists with multiple “past selves”. I would have thought that the person and the self were probably the same thing, or at least would be in a one-one relation.
Alex K, I dunno, paint samples? Are you reminding us of how Bruce Bechdel could look at a paint sample and see a whole finished room?
That’s hilarious. I definitely wouldn’t have the stamina for the whole article
To create your own convincing academic gobbledegook, you can enlist the aid of Pootwattle the Virtual Academic, who will create a random academic sentence for you at
http://writing-program.uchicago.edu/toys/randomsentence/index.htm
The one I just received is “The poetics of an anthropocentric history revisits the reinscription of commodified objects.’
On Sundays. you receive a bonus sentence from Smedley the Virtual Critic.
Memory and the self continue to fascinate me.
Am I the same person as I was at age 8, 18, 38? (How do we define person?)
I’ve been writing a memoir about my mother’s death, and I am a changed person from the one who began writing it 18 months ago–in fact, part of me is different specifically for the writing it. The most current self is editing the older selves and my changing memories of those months.
Harkening back to an earlier post, when I tell my students about volcanoes, one of the images I show them is a University of Washington webcam shot showing 12,000 – foot – tall Mount Rainier (an active volcano) looming behind the UW library. The fact that there is such a web cam image may come as a surprise to UW faculty, staff and students, but one morning here on the High Prairie I happened to be on the UW website as the sun rose on an unusual clear morning in the Puget Sound area!
Identities: ‘skip fluid and go to liquefy’ springs to mind when reading this. And the concept of yourself as separate selves at different ages, rather than one developing entity evolving over time strikes me as a slippery slope to multiple personality disorder!
That quote, my friends, is why I didn’t study literature….
A woman in one of my choirs is just about finished with a Spanish Literature PhD, and has decided to leave academia because, as she put it, “the theory killed the passion.”
Sweet! American Masters is on my PBS station: Joan Baez!
Funny, I didn’t find the quote hard to follow. I just had to read it slowly and thoughtfully a few times. Maybe because the questions it raised were familiar to me.
Ellen, please don’t imply that the rest of us didn’t read carefully or thoughtfully.
Gosh – not to disparage any analysis and theories…(in fact cheers to the attempt at educating and enlightening us about “that Bechdel book”)… but when the new graphic novel about love and sex comes out, I think i shall just read it prior to exposure to mind-numbing, klit-killing, and laugh-supressing theory.
I’m with Lois: theory gives me hives.
Kat: I love Joan Baez!!
Maybe because I had to get used to this kind of writing in grad school, I didn’t find the paragraph hard to follow at all. What frustrates me is having to pay $15 to read the whole thing.
Basically what she said is that the narrator isn’t actually the person she represents at the ages she’s writing about. The narrator is Alison but an Alison who has historical perspective about her life, and that this is true of all autobiography.
Interesting, but not earth shaking theory. I suppose if I want the earth shaken, I have to shell out the $15 bucks.
Kat – I wasn’t implying anything about others’ reading experience. Just shared my own.
Because I live in a world with information overload (largely my own choice), I often skim or skip.
But when I take the time to slow down, read, ponder, and re-read, what seems alien (academic?) becomes clearer. Perhaps that paragraph could have been written more clearly, but where’s the line between clarification and dumbing down? Between the language of a particular discipline and absurd jargon?
kay, thanks.
A bit crude, but I loved this joke:
Buffalo Police have reported finding a man’s body floating in the Niagara River, near the Peace Bridge. The man’s name will not be released until his family has been notified.
The victim apparently drowned due to excessive alcohol consumption, combined with a drug overdose.
He was wearing black fishnet stockings, a red garter belt, a pink G-string, a strap-on dildo, purple lipstick and a “Sarah Palin for President in 2012” t-shirt. He also had a cucumber inserted in his rectum.
Police removed the Palin t-shirt to spare his family any unnecessary embarrassment.
Dag-nabbit. I’m going to have to read and summarize that for the “Fun Home” Wikipedia article, aren’t I? Well, it’ll have to wait until after we move next week. I don’t think I can cope with abstruse theory and packing up the house in the same week.
I just got home from taking the GMAT. Came here looking for a little frivolity, but instead found the above quote…perhaps I’m not really home yet. Where are the darned accompanying questions?! Now that I have gotten that out of my system. What an honor to make the cover of the journal!
A spirited mazel tov for Jane Lynch and her partner, Dr Lara Embry, who have just tied the knot.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/06/fashion/weddings/06JLYNCH.html
Ian’s #13 reminded me of that saying: “You can’t step into the same river twice.” Could say that we can’t step into our own flowliquid twice, either.
Although, hmm, we CAN step into the same bathtub twice.
Although the water’s colder the 2nd time.
And by the 3rd time it starts sucking the heat out of me instead of the other way around.
Which always bums me out. I wish I had that limitless on-demand hot water. Instead of this entropy thing.
KSbel, I just saw a car in my neighborhood with the license plate KSBEL. don’t tell me you hang out in the greater Nashua NH area!
about family photos telling the truth, sometimes that is so uncomfortably true. Great picture of family with father gazing lovingly at 3 month old son in his arms, Mother with hand on my shoulder, gazing into the distance with an unreadable expression on her face, little sister clinging to me in terror at the person who is taking the picture and who has been abusing her sexually for eons at this point, and me, staring staight at said abuser. Who, it must be said, really knew his way around a camera.
@Therry: I’m much too private to have such a proclamation on my plates, so, nope, that’s not me. It would have been kind of cool if it was though!
Also, I agree, pictures do not always get the story right.
Therry, after having spent years listening to sexual abuse survivors and often looking at family photos, I think it’s probable that what is going on for a child is captured in at least one snapshot. We can’t help but show it. And it gets ignore, which (a) adds to our conviction that nobody cares or wants to know and (b) our shitty judgment as adults choosing intimate partners. Why women survivors keep picking pedophiles as fathers to their own children.
Perpetrators have a strong tendency to document their offenses in a coded manner — think about Fun Home and AB’s archeology of the photos from Greenwich Village. It’s similar to how the Nazis diligently recorded their atrocities, a mix of asserting they are beyond reach and a covert scream for intervention.
@29 / Therry — @31 / Maggie:
Ah, Therry. Somehow what you wrote hit home. I’m so sorry…
And Maggie — sometimes you scare me a bit. It’s a good “scared”. It’s a “My, she knows a lot and puts it together insightfully: If ever we meet I’d better be in fifth gear”. Thank you, not just for this post but for a raft of others.
On a happier photo note, I took a picture of a friend and her new boyfriend at a party on Saturday. She’s in profile and he’s looking at her with such amazing affection. That emotion didn’t come across as we were talking and laughing during the evening, but there it is, in the photo.
Maggie, I never thought about the documentation of atrocities as a covert scream for intervention. I’m not sure I agree, and would be curious to hear more about that angle.
(Therry and St. Jerome #29) This morning, I saw a car with Vermont plates outside the local Mad Wimmin’s! Coincidence? I don’t believe in coincidences!!! But what message is the universe sending with this sign? They say that the LGBT community decided to move en masse to Vermont in the late twentieth century (I missed the memo). I’m kind of hoping they’re now trying to establish a colony out west!
I’m not sure I’d describe it as a ‘covert scream for intervention’. That’s being too generous a description. Although the Nazis knew what they were doing was wrong otherwise why else would they have spent so much effort burning records and documentation so they wouldn’t be found out as the Red Army pushed them back across Eastern Europe?
As an abuse survivor myself a relative has photos of me together with the abuser from the family (there are no photos of me with non-family abusers). I don’t see any signs at all of what was going on. But then I had dissociation which is quite a remarkable state. It’s not a good thing, but it gets you through.
Although I don’t actually recognise myself in photos when I was young. I have literally pointed to myself and asked someone “who’s that?” It’s a bit embarrassing sometimes. And large sections of long term memory are gone. That’s why an almost forensic memoir such as Fun Home is fascinating to me as I can’t imagine what it must be like to recall and detail events in that way, although it must be very useful.
Ian, all the way back at 13, Rohy isn’t suggesting separate selves rather than one developing entity. The historical person Alison Bechdel is a single entity. A question has to be how the multiple selves are related to the historically continuous person. (Another question would be how to tell which stages constitute separate selves, and which are stages within a single self.)
Everybody, there’s very little jargon in the passage Alison quoted. The only term that’s being used quite differently from its usual meaning is “projected”. (“Archive fever” is also jargon, but it’s not used in the passage.) People are having difficulty understanding the passage because the issues are difficult. They include:
– Continuity and change: the relation between the ongoing person and the stages of her life;
– The relation between language (narrative) and the reality it purports to describe;
– The specific nature of autobiography: why “must” it cause the past selves to anticipate the author?
These are difficult questions, and Rohy’s paragraph seems to presuppose answers to some of them which may or may not be correct. But her expression is admirably clear and jargon-free.
Ian, judybusy, I am feeling generous today. I don’t believe anyone is born with the drive to sexually abuse others. I think it is always learned behavior, usually by the perpetrator having been abused himself. It’s been handed on in our culture for millenia and buttressed by things like Christianity and nuclear family definitions.
I believe every perpetrator knows they are doing damage, although most rationalize they are not in order to go on living. They feel powerless to change. Pedophilia is a sexual orientation as deep and seemingly “innate” as hetero- or homosexuality. But it is conditioning that can be unlearned, although little in our culture actually supports the process of unlearning.
The key step is to prevent a damaged child or teenager from proceeding across the line into actually acting on feelings of predation, because the prospects of healing fade astronomically once you add on the damage of damaging others. As Joan Baez said “If killing is human nature, who do soldiers have to be trained how to do it?” But once having acted on it, my rule of thumb is that a perpetrator will ALWAYS act on it, with increasing success, if the circumstances present themselves, until they are forced to stop or actually healed of their pathology. Male conditioning, i.e. the twin lies that males cannot “control” their sexual impulses as females do and that males are not responsible for their own emotional difficulty, it should be outwardly directed for someone else (a female or another underling) to make it better, combines with the passing on of predation.
And 99% of pornography puts forth the idea that coercion, a power imbalance, is sexually exciting. It’s hard for anyone, much less a predator, to find sexual definitions not based on a doer and a do-ee. The sexual attraction to children is just part of that continuum.
So, I believe predators would, if they thought they could, stop their behavior. Underneath it all, they hate themselves and want out of the compulsion. But covert cries for help and self-incrimination should not be mistaken for actual movement toward healing on their part. They have to be forcibly stopped, and long-term, our entire culture and conditioning must be changed from the inside out to rid ourselves of this learned behavior. Check out Staci Haines’ Generation Five for a coherent theory and strategy.
http://www.generationfive.org/
I used to date a Women’s studies professor in the 70’s. I still remember the exhaustion I felt trying to understand those journal articles. She’d actually give them to me and ask me for my thoughts. It’s not that I couldn’t understand them, I suppose. It’s more that I couldn’t Stand them long enough to put together the arguments she was looking for. Plus, I was more interested In beer and sleeping with girls.
I’m the anonymous above. Didn’t mean to leave out my name.
I didn’t mind the paragraph–it just seems to me that the author doesn’t want to oversimplify and say that we don’t want to think, after reading the book, that we know all there is to know about Alison Bechdel or that she is a close friend of ours.
Many people read autobiographies as if they are chatting with a person directly and know a great deal about them–and, sometimes, this results in their feeling overly chummy with the author. Autobiographies, though, are just as selective as any other sort of art–the author shows you the image s/he wants you to see, which may or may not be historically accurate.
It is interesting that Alison uses so much documentary evidence, as though it bolsters the “truth” of the piece. But, it is still constructed–simply because a person creates an image out of a thousand cropped candid photographs doesn’t make it any the less a constructed piece with a certain “vision.”
It just seemed to me that the author was trying not to oversimplify and act as though the autobiography is a “true” story of the life as Alison lived it from ages 2 to 20. As Rigoberta Menchu said of her own “auto”biography–it’s just a little story. We can do with it as we please.
H’m, rereading that paragraph seems to have triggered Wire’s “40 Versions” in my mental iTunes. “I never know which version I’m going to be / I seem to have so many choices open to me ..”
I am not making this up. Variety has criticized Toy Story 3 for failing “to explore the curious ontology of being a toy”. Shouldn’t that be “being-a-toy”? Link is here. Now that is jargon.
This tickles me. I wrote a beloved term paper about Fun Home my senior year of college two years ago (thesis: the circular structure of the narrative has implicit moral lessons for the reader). I found it recently while packing and couldn’t decide whether to put it up on the internet.
Maggie – pedophilia is a sexual orientation? Yowsa. I consider it a sickness, and sympathy for the sick notwithstanding, one that must be stopped By Any Means Necessary. (but as you said, you were feeling generous).
AB, you’ve outed your “friend the queer theory professor,” who I always thought was your inspiration for Sydney… academically, as least).
To a comment I made on the previous thread (not attempting to hijack) — why I said, “I’m a Jew. But I prefer you call me Jewish.” I think that bean pretty much hit on it, if I recall. I am reclaiming a derisive term for myself, refusing its pejorative connotation (dyke, anyone?), claiming it as a powerful statement about my identity. But unless you’re another Jew, who has more or less done the same, I prefer the “politer” term Jewish (lesbian, anyone?).
Back to the topic at hand (was it bacon? I forget): Pootwattle the Virtual Academic, Maggie? Bwa-ha-ha-heeeeeeeeeeeeee!
(What I don’t want the listener to infer, however, is that I am somehow stating my inferiority, which is sometimes what I fear occurs when I say it.)
oops, paragraphs above out of order. (Preview-avoidance: guilty as charged.)
About the quote: oh my. We academics really do speak our own arcane language, don’t we?
When I read a quote like that, I usually think that the writer is deliberately using opaque language to obscure the fact that he/she is actually stating the very obvious.
Hi. I’m writing from Brazil, first of all, to say how much I loved Fun Home. I just read it and it soon became not only one of my favourite graphic novels (maybe the top one), but one of my favourite novels – the best I read this year. Right now I’m taking my Master’s Degree on Literature and I’m writing an article on your book and Persepolis (by Marjane Satrapi), concerning mainly the construction of identity on both books. I’d love to read the article you mention in this post. Do you believe it would be possible for you to send it to me as I don’t have this magazine subscription? Thank you very much. And thank you very much for your beautiful, funny, moving book.
@Dr. E: I agree. As a mathematician, I can spout some very opaque language just to get to the point that in addition, it does not matter which number comes first (for example). Unfortunately, I think folks analyzing literature are required to use that language in order to be published, or taken seriously.
Translation of the opaque paragraph: Alison isn’t a college kid any more, and the way she remembers and presents her experiences as a college kid are colored by her subsequent experiences.
Shorter translation of the opaque paragraph: Alison isn’t a college kid any more.
My response to the opaque paragraph: “Well, duh.”
Queer Theory Professor acknowledges this by prefacing the opaque paragraph with “We know, of course…”
Ha! I may have just had an unpleasant anniversary and have been run into by a drunk driver, but things are looking up! The food court in the local campus student union is getting an Einstein’s Bagelry!!! Soon, I shall be able to dine on bagel and lox with a schmear of cream cheese. And capers! Capers, I say! Up until now, the nearest Einstein’s that I knew of was in suburban Denver, over 500 miles west of here.
Oh, for a bagel and lox with coffee. Coffee, black. Janeway always took her coffee black!
I like the analogy of math and academic jargon (#50), since certain words in the thorny-type jargon seem more like symbols (or even proofs?) that have been agreed on in advance. (It’s not my field so I’m probably stating the obvious, but the math analogy does show me a way to look at it.)
I get that soul-crushing feeling from that kind of writing because words seem less free to me when they are used to stand in for really complicated “symbolic” things. And also, in math using symbols makes the “sentences” shorter and faster to grasp; but this academic language doesn’t make the statement of the idea that much shorter–or does it?
The way Andrew B #36 ‘translates’ the passage (although you point out there is not much jargon there) is so much more direct and comprehensible to me.
I mean, I think I get that, around the 1970’s-80’s, the way “texts” can be interpreted or discussed changed. But did the way of using words itself also change into this more self-referential way of writing? The way the passage is written even seemed to channel the discussion here into two separate streams: the ideas that she is talking about vs the way she wrote it.
bagel and lox with coffee, oh yeah. Closest place for me is 25 minute drive.
Just got my copy of GLQ in the mail, and came on over here to see if you’d gotten the news of your “cover dyke” status yet. Um, that would be a yes!
I taught Fun Home last year with the Cvetkovich essay mentioned in the article, and look forward to my students’ pleasure in your text again this coming year.
Brava all around…
I say, when in doubt, always quote Derrida.
@Kate L: Don’t leave out KC you big silly! There are Einstein’s all over that area, and it should really only be about 60-90 miles from you, right?
Jen – I could not agree more!
Viva la differeance!!
I don’t want to jump into the middle of this thread, but just want to note the background to the cover shown above with the passage from the diary of “The 14yr-old Alison”, complete with the fraught-with-meaning curvy-carets.
“cover girl, in theory” indeed.
Hi, ksbel6! 🙂
Oh, ksbel6, what does my craving for bagel and lox matter on a day when the Big 12 conference is falling apart while we speak?
… The Pac – 10 athletic conference has just announced the defection of the University of Colorado at Boulder from the Big 12 conference of the midwest to the Pac – 10, which currently includes Stanford and the University of Washington as members. And so it begins. On the Pac – 10 website, they call UC Boulder and the Pac-10 conference a good athletic and academic match. I agree! UC Boulder might as well be UW East. Tomorrow, though, could be different, if the rumors of the University of Nebraska and the University of Texas also joining the Pac – 10 turn out to be true. In that case, YEEEE-HAWWW!!!
Kate L.;
I know,right? So it looks like it’s going to be the PAC 16, the Big 10(plus 2),which leaves us, the fantastic four?
Shadocat!!! Welcome back! How did it go? Not a blog post goes by but that somebody writes Has anybody heard from shadocat? Well now we have, so details girl, none of this cavalier basketball idle chat.
I’m at home recovering right now, and I wish I could say all went well, but…there were some problems during surgery and I ended up in ICU for nine days, then a regular unit, then a rehab unit until just recently. But hey, I’m home, I’m on my way back to normal (whatever that is). Thanks for the welcome back, Therry!
Shadocat! Yay! Thank goodness you’re back and at home and, yes, hopefully back to normal. We’ve been wondering how you’ve been getting on. It sounds like you’ve had a tough time in hospital, but it’s really good to hear you’re on the mend.
I like the effect the old strip and the blog has on bringing people together. We have genuinely missed you Shadocat. Inspired by the Librarians doing Gaga, I rejoined my local library. Do you remember the strip where Mo meets (and shags) Sydney in the Uni Library? Well, prior to that she feels a mystical connection and wonders at all these books and the little worlds inside them. It was very weird – I hadn’t been in a proper library for a long time and I felt the same – all these books, free to borrow and enjoy. It was strangely thrilling. I do love reading but I’d never felt quite like that about books before.
Aw Shadocat, 9 days in the ICU – that sounds tough! Sounds like you’re on the mend, though. Hang tough!
Reminds me – Renee S. you get that knee surgery done yet?
@those interested in NCAA: I heard Nebraska and Missouri were going to the Big 10 (which would actually give it 13). Mostly the non-Texas teams in the Big 12 are all angry about the way that conference hands out money. The BigTen takes all the winngs from the year and splits them evenly among all the teams.
@shadocat: glad to hear you are on the road to recovery. I have no idea what you went through, but I was very sick and in/out of emergency rooms for 4 months this year before they figured out my gallbladder wasn’t functioning and had to come out. Much better now!
Hi Shadocat, we were worried about you!
Turns out Philly Pride is this weekend. It was under my radar, but I’m going to be downtown all weekend for the comic book convention, so maybe I’ll go take pictures of the parade.
The comic con looks to be pretty lame. Philly has dropped this year from a third-tier con to a fourth. I’ll have to wait until New York Con in October to truly get my geek on.
Hey shadocat, I’m really glad to see you back! Please take gentle care of yourself.
The above post was posted from Chicago, new home of the Stanley Cup. That is all.
Glad to hear you are getting better, Shadocat! I seriously have thought about you every day, and had assumed things had become complicated. I hope you had good people around you as you healed.
Ian, I hope you love the library. We have new one here, and it’s always such a treat to go there and browse. Our system is online so you can browse the catalog, order, and get an email telling you when it’s arrived. James Sturm’s Market Day is waiting for me now!
The librarians are also usually super friendly, too. (There is one at my local branch that is _seriously_ grumpy. She won’t even return a smile, and makes me wait EVERY time about 15 seconds before she looks up and reluctantly asks if she can help me. Ugh.)
shadocat, I’ve never been so happy to see a post in my life! Glad that you are on the mend. Welcome back!
Hi, shadocat! Welcome back! Hi, Ginjoint! I was worried about you, too!And, has anyone heard from hairball, lately?
Our fair midwestern university has a thriving women’s basketball team. Let’s hope that the ongoing breakup of our collegiate athletic conference won’t change that! Oh, and watch out, Pac-10 athletic conference schools! One of your possible additions is Texas A&M university, home of both the George Bush, Sr., and the George W. Bush presidential libraries! Or, is the George W. Bush presiential library at Baylor University in Texas? Doesn’t matter… Baylor is another of the possible Pac-10 additions! My point (“and I do have one”) is that, while the University of Colorado at Boulder really is a sister school academically and athletically to the other Pac-10 universities it has just joined, some of these other possible additions most certainly are not!
I’m so flattered by everyone’s warm welcomes; thanks again to you all!
Kate L.- One of the things I really am concerned about is how these conference shifts will affect the women’s programs. All these changes seem to be motivated by what is “best” for the men’s teams (and the big bucks they bring in). And what do you think about the Lew Perkins deal? Something fishy about that.
I come here to get away from the football world cup, and what do I get? Basketball. Sheesh.
Here’s an early example of graphic narrative:
The Silk Princess
Marj, that was wonderful! I wish we had the name of the Silk Princess. Do pass on (here or at FB) the next installment, about the Mayan queen.
I am a serious fan of the Tradewinds computer games and Tradewinds Caravans, based on the Silk Road, is the best of the lot (despite the Greek version having Amazons and lesbian communes!) In order to succeed, you have to be a proficient trader and you have to know which goods to take where. As far as I can tell, it’s historically accurate in a basis way, And yes, Khotan is one of the cities you can visit.
Although in this piece of art, a god is inserted to divert condemnation against the Silk Princess for being a “mythological gift-giver”, it’s mostly a story about culture and artifacts. Perhaps it’s my bias, but I am depressed about how completely European art was dominated by Christian dogma for so many centuries, beating a dead horse, as it were. It will be okay with me if I never see another madonna.
shadocat (# 75)
Chancellor Bernadette Gray-Little was very quick to absolve Athletic Director Lew Perkins of any wrong doing in the athletic tickets for favors charge, and she even let him get away with admittedly letting bigwigs “borrow” university athletic equipment. I’d hate to see what would happen to me if I let non-university folk “borrow” several thousands of dollars worth of university property for their personal use!
Marj (# 76) What, there’s some sort of soccer tournament going on???
The Topeka Capital-Journal newspaper is reporting that Lew Perkins will receive a $600,000 “retention bonus” from the University of Kansas if he stays on until 2011, as he has just announced he will do.
Blogjack: The ECONOMIST reports this week that not testosterone-exposure levels in utero, but variation in oestrogen-receptor types, may underlie development of the freakishly long ring finger (I paraphrase AB, as channelled through Sydney) sometimes found in the lesbian…
How very odd that use of the definite article reads so objectifyingly, so — contemptuously. Switch to “sometimes found in lesbians” and I take no offence.
Extraordinary what cues lie buried in language.
Now, what is the DTWOF odds spread for tonight’s football match? A cultural note: The streets are full of people chanting Inge Lund! Inge Lund! Some Swedish rock star, no doubt…
Alex K (#80),
To say, “the lesbian” is, no doubt, meant to suggest the solidarity and sisterhood of the lesbian and of all women in general. It is, therefore, an empowering and uplifting turn of phrase that we should all take comfort in and use whenever we can. Examples can include, but are by no means limited to, “How will the lesbian vote in this November’s off-year congressional elections?” and, “Where can the lesbian go in (this midwestern college town) and get drunk with the other lesbian?”. I came up with that last one, myself!
…but enough about my social life. Here, direct from The Onion Channel, is what every parent needs to know about shamanism…
Kate L, #82: “Military schools, where the trickster god Coyote persuades boys to kiss other boys.” Hysterical!
“Now, what is the DTWOF odds spread for tonight’s football match?”
Dunno, but I was mad at England’s goalie for letting the US score…
yes, folks, in the duel of Kat’s passports for FIFA support, the red one wins.
Wow – came here to take a break from my dissertation writing and I am taking the post to mean I must return to my own rhetoric! Maybe it is also a sign from the universe that I will be interviewed for the upcoming Women’s Studies position at my institution? Love this conversation!
Maggie #77: “It will be okay with me if I never see another madonna” – I’m with you, up to a point. But I see the persistence of the madonna as a potent vestige of pre-Christian goddess culture, alive and well. Christianity has also retained the ancient gods and spirits of place in the local saints and shrines which flourish all over Europe. Not that I’m making any excuses for it.
Kate L #81: Snicker…
Marj, you’re right, of course.
But also, Maggie and Marj, we’ve got to follow the money trail. It’s likely that in early post-Roman Europe (up till when? The early renaissance, maybe?) the catholic church was the only entity able to pay artists for works (and likely the only entity that had structures of enough permanence to help those works survive).
It wouldn’t surprise me if the artists themselves even got tired of madonnas. That might be part of why medieval and renaissance biblical characters are often shown in clothing and settings contemporary to their creation….sneakily commenting on or simply documenting the current state of things?
In the renaissance (before, as well? Not sure), there were now dukes and princes and whoever wanting art for their palaces, so maybe artists could get away from strictly religious subject matter.
Ooh, and I just thought of something: Previous to the Renaissance, the church pretty much had a strangle-hold on culture, so they were likely regulating what could and couldn’t be created and shown publicly.
and since idolatry was ‘illegal,’ it could be that non-Madonna representations of women (and unchristian animal figures) were defined as dangerous, destroyed, buried …
I’ve just started reading Michael Gough’s book “The Origins of Christian Art” which is fascinating. I don’t think the debate about idolatry was properly settled until fairly late in the establishment of the church. As I understand it, Judaism held that what man created held no essence of the divine, therefore was not fit to represent the divine and that they were worried that people would come to worship the objects rather than the God the object represented.
The early Christian Fathers, thanks to the Jewish rebellions of 66-70AD and c.160AD it was the least fashionable thing to be Jewish in Rome, so they sought to identify with Roman culture rather than Jewish culture. It’s astonishing how easily they adapted pagan imagery and iconography.
In fact, it’s very troubling to see how ‘paganised’ Western Christianity has become and how different from its origins. In some respects it bears virtually no relation to those original Jewish evangelists.
Oh and yes, I should imagine quite a few things have been lost to actions against heresy. *sighs*
Fun Home leads off another article on comics – The Observer UK is launching its annual graphic novel competition and the writer cites FH as being the second book (after Maus) to turn her onto graphic novels as A Serious Art Form.
For anyone with a half-finished comic strip needing an incentive to finish it, there’s a 1000GBP prize. Click through to last year’s winners for some neat and varied short strips.
Ian #90: Oh and yes, I should imagine quite a few things have been lost to actions against heresy. *sighs*
Since this is radically off-topic I’ll be brief, but in regards to Ian’s point a very good, very readable source on this exact topic is Bart Ehrman’s recent book Jesus, Interrupted[*] which describes the many variants of Christianity that were in play before things settled down to “orthodox Christianity” in the 4th and 5th centuries (e.g. Marcion, the Ebionites, the Gnostics, all those folks).
[* Ehrman is a fine scholar and an excellent “explainer”, but his publisher has a habit of giving his popular book somewhat dippy titles.]
Anybody heard from HOH? It seems odd not to hear from her for this length of time.
I think Jesus, Interrupted is a wildly funny title and I’d reach for that book immediately.
Khatgrrl, I’m worried too. I’ve made comments in her direction and it’s completely unlike her to leave us hanging, she’s a direct responsible sort. Does anybody have a clue how to reach her in meatworld?
P.S. Ian’s use of the word heresy made me wonder about its exact origins. The result was interesting: [Middle English heresie, from Old French, from Late Latin haeresis, from Late Greek hairesis, from Greek, a choosing, faction, from haireisthai, to choose, middle voice of hairein, to take.] So basically heresy meant to exercise your choice, to “take” the right to have an opinion. Count me in, then.
Wasn’t sure if you had seen this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2010/jun/13/graphic-novels-rachel-cooke
Our Smallville public library has set up a display of graphic novels. And, of course, Fun Home is among them!
Natalie Maines of Dixie Chicks got a buzz cut! Check it out!
Oh, and in news of the universe, the Japanese unmanned Hayabusa spacecraft re-entry capsule landed in Australia this morning. The mere fact that it survived to parachute to a soft landing on the Australian desert is remarkable, because it was traveling much faster than the Apollo missions when they returned from the Moon. Also remarkable is the fact that the Hayabusa capsule should have picked up some loose rubble from the Itakawa asteroid that it visited a few years ago. A press release this morning called it the first “robotic sample return mission from a space rock”. In fact, the first automated probes to return samples from a celestial object were the three succesful Soviet Luna missions of the early 1970’s. The Luna 20 landing site was photographed by NASA’s Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) earlier this year in stunning detail, as part of a program to document the Soviet and American lunar explorations of the 20th century as important archeological sites. You can even see trails of footprints in the LRO photographs of the Apollo landing sites.
@NLC(92): Thanks for pointing me to Bart Ehrmann’s book NLC. Despite the awful title, it sounds really interesting and I’ll have to have a look. I’m sure it’s found its way over to this side of the Atlantic. I find the early Christian history fascinating, although it generally leaves me with the feeling that the only things we’re doing properly are the Eucharist and giving to charitable causes. I think I’m exaggerating when I say that!
And yes, HOH, where are you?
I thought Mags did a great HOH imitation in #95, but it’s no substitute for the real thing. Mentor, do you have a phone number for HOH?
Ian, look for the documentary “From Jesus to Christ.” It aired on American public television at least a decade ago, but available on DVD, I think, and it’s very interesting. Sounds similar to “Jesus, Interrupted”.
I hope Hairball’s ok!!
Pam I @ 91 .. thanks for posting that. I’m going to have to keep an eye on the results of that .. I’d love to enter but would surely be outclassed quickly. Those are great judges too: Paul Gravett, “The Man At The Crossroads”, and Audrey Niffenegger, whose book “Her Fearful Symmetry” I just finished reading ..
I, too, have been troubled and perplexed by hairball’s absence.
Ian#99:
I apologize; I named the wrong book. Ehrman’s book dealing with early variants strands is his Lost Christianities.
(The book above, Jesus, Interrupted deals the significant, often contradictory differences between the books, etc, that did make it into the New Testament. I highly recommend any of Ehrman’s books, but I didn’t want to possibly send you out after the wrong book.)
I don’t know what I was thinking. Going to get some sleep now…
HoH,we miss you.
(… sung to the theme song of “Car 54 Where Are You?”… “Hairball of Hope Where Are You?” …)
Yikes! I didn’t mean to worry y’all. I’ve just come up for air after the fifth and final week (for now) of stupid training sessions that I’ve been presenting, and I see my week-long Internet hiatus has caused you to worry. So sorry, didn’t mean to make you fret.
I’ve been running on fumes for what seems like forever. I took an Internet break to conserve my energy, I was putting in way too many hours and was frightfully low on sleep. I had practically no voice by the end of this week. I’m still hoarse.
I’m catsitting for some friends right now. Their cave-like apartment gets no natural light, faces the back, and has thick brick walls that prevent cell phone and Wifi transmission; the isolation and quiet have been a godsend. I literally slept for two days straight this weekend (or at least as much as a couple of felines will let a human sleep).
Now about about that bagel and lox… add scallion cream cheese to it, and toast the bagel. Yes to the black coffee, no sugar. Had I actually gotten my butt out the door for brunch today, I would have walked to any one of maybe a dozen places nearby where I could have indulged on some variety of smoked salmon, most likely nova.
Maggie… MEATWORLD? Knowing the denizens of this blog, it’s most likely BACONWORLD (and you won’t find me there!).
Shadocat… so glad you are back and on the mend.
Same for ksbel… hope you’re doing better.
Anyone hear from Renee lately? Hope her knee replacement went ok. I thought about Renee the other day, it was a trading places déjà vu moment from Renee’s life.
I was in line for yet another inedible lunch during the training session, and I was pawing around a pile of unmarked wraps and sandwiches trying to figure out which one might be safe to eat. Someone pointed me to a wrap with some white stuff in it and said it was tuna salad. I took a good look and told her it was chicken salad, no thanks. I resigned myself to eating a pile of potato salad for lunch again. The same person told the guy next to me he could “pick off the meat” from a turkey and Swiss cheese sandwich. I looked up, and met the eyes of a Hindu electrical engineer. That’s straight out of Renee’s life.
“Nothing for you to eat either, eh?”
“Nope.”
“Do you know who ordered the food?” I asked. “Don’t they know enough to order some vegetarian and non-meat sandwiches?”
“She sits two desks away from me,” he said.
“Oh. She must not like you.”
There must be a lot of clueless folks ordering food, or perhaps spiteful ones. The day before I faced a six-foot hero piled with ham, turkey, swiss, roast beef, and the heap of potato salad. I filled my plate with potato salad, and a woman in a stage whisper said, “Gee, you’d think she’d leave some potato salad for the rest of us.” I kept my mouth shut. The prior week, there was a hot lunch spread, nothing I could eat, even the baked ziti had meat sauce. At least there was a green salad, a break from the usual potato salad. One day I ate a corn muffin for lunch, saved from the breakfast tray, and a banana from the corner street vendor. No wonder I have been wiped out.
Various and sundry comments on the recent posts…
Missing article or no, at least they are using the word lesbian. I saw an ad in the subway for some TV show called The Real L Word, and it occurred to me that the “L Word” is still “the love that dares not speak its name.” Haven’t we advanced at all since Wilde’s trial? The women in the ad all looked like Sex In The City clones, not a speck of plaid on them. Sure didn’t look like the lesbians I know and love.
Fab music video from those librarians, they can dance for me anytime. And they can ca-ca-ca-catalogue me to their hearts’ content.
Idolatry, etc. in Christian and Jewish art… There is the legacy of the Golden Calf, which is probably what lead to the concern about worshipping objects instead of the idea represented by the object.
Artists of all persuasions have to pay bills, nothing new there. The artist produces what the patron expects and paid for, be it the Church, Stalin, or the guy who wants a “sofa-sized” painting that is color-coordinated with the furniture. If the Church is funding the art, the artist/musician produces Madonnas, radiant yet suffering Christs, soaring Masses, and other safe themes (although perhaps with some subtle subversive content).
Therry, Kat… opera and trapeze? Somehow, I can’t imagine Marilyn Horne or Renée Fleming on the high wire. Dawn Upshaw, maybe. She’s an amazingly adventurous singer, perhaps she’d sing from the rafters.
Last, but not least, fútbol. Given the timezone difference between SA and the US, the matches are taking place during the breakfast hours. That has not stopped ethnic bars in NY from opening in the morning to accomodate their rabid countrypersons rooting for the home team. Don’t know how much booze they’re selling at 8AM, but it might be more than I expect.
(… goes back to her galley slave rowing existence …)
So relieved you are back, Hairball!
My ex-employer, a large public sector body with multiple equal opportunities policies, had a bit of a local reputation for its vegetarian buffet options. The worst in my opinion was a coleslaw sandwich on white sliced bread. Although a roll filled with left over cous cous and garnished with a bit of cabbage ran it a close second. These are not really sandwich fillings are they?
Glad to have you back HOH! Sorry about your lunch woes.
HoH! Whew.
The decision to not include vegetarian options is not just accidental, not on someone’s part. There was at some point an option advanced by the food provider to include veggie options (PB&J, if mothing else) and someone said “No”. I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts the decisionmaker has hostility toward vegetarianism, probably conflating it with librul or forrin. It’s worth making a stink about. If you don’t feel like it, perhaps a meateater who “gets” it would take the ball and run with it; I certainly would if I had the chance to do it for vegetarians. Having a veggie option includes the level of nutrition for EVERYBODY.
And part of the problem is not just the general public’s abysmal ignorance about nutrition, a la Jamie Oliver, but also their distance from comprehending how food is prepared. At the cancer clinic where I worked, drug reps brought in free lunches for the staff every day. One guy always got muffalatas with no alternative sandwich. I love the flavor of olive oil but cannot eat olives, I hurl every time. So I asked him, very nicely, if he could maybe bring a few non-muffalatas next time for folks who didn’t eat olives. His response was that I could “pick out the olives”. Yep, and extract the gluten from the bread while I’m at it.
It is crazy how many folks these days do not have gallbladders, mostly because of all the crap in our food. I found out more than I wanted to know about what we eat and how it is prepared over the last 5 months…I hate it now when I am trapped by meals. I almost do not travel without a box of low fat crackers handy just in case the food will all have too much fat in it for my system. The plus side…I have now lost over 30 lbs. and feel the best I have felt in years!
Maggie, I’m not certain that the lack of vegetarian lunch options wasn’t accidental. I’m not certain that if I were to order some sort of lunch tray, in my geographical location, that they would necessarily offer a veggie option to me.
I think that it was thoughtless, but not necessarily malicious. The meat eating general public seems to think that everyone eats what they do. Unless they have vegetarian friends they don’t seem to understand the need for alternate lunch options. (This does not include picking the meat off of a sandwich!)
That being said, I am not a vegetarian, but I am very happy to find a low fat meatless option for a meal. Too many people seem to think only about themselves and not the needs of others.
Oh, lord, Hairball, I’m reading your lunch stuff right before heading off to a day of staff meetings and such. On these days, the lunch is always from the same place, and I’m getting a little nauseated just thinking about it! The salads are ok, and at least they have lots of veggie options (never any vegan ones, though), but the sandwiches are nasty and always served on this bread that’s swirly looking (part white and part brown, but suspiciously brown. Not the color of real wheat bread) and really, really sweet.
Now seriously, a turkey sandwich on sweet bread? What the hell, yo!
It wasn’t until I lived in England that I realized how sweet most American bread is. And came to hate that.
Oh, and opera on a trapeze? I bet Natalie Dessay would do it.
@Kat (#112)
I don’t think Dessay has sung Carmen, but I could envision her swinging from the trapeze while singing the Habanera…
L’amour est un oiseau rebelle
que nul ne peut apprivoiser,
et c’est bien en vain qu’on l’appelle,
s’il lui convient de refuser.
Si tu ne m’aimes pas,
Si tu ne m’aimes pas, je t’aime!
Prends garde à toi!
Love is a rebellious bird
that no one can tame,
and you call him quite in vain
if it suits him not to come.
If you love me not,
If you love me not, then I love you!
Watch out!
(Selected lines from the aria, you get the drift)
Ksbel. I really hate to (maybe) argue wuth you — but the link to cholecystectomies is more likely dieting than fat in food per se. Rapid weight loss clinics and gastric stapling side effects include a stat that 40% of those who undergo their service will need to have their gall bladder removed within a year. Weight loss by caloric restriction in a short frame of time, where the signal to eat is ignored, is interpreted by our bodies as starvation and various metabolic responses kick in, some of which overwhelm the gall bladder. Chronic dieting, by the way, is also linked to hypertension — studies of fat peopke who do NOY diet show the same blood pressure curve as non-fat people.
One liquid diet clinic I transcribed for had as part of their intale packet a form patients were required to sign waiving the clinic of responsibility if the patient needed a cholecystectomy within six months. It just so happened the clinic was associated with a surgical group who were always ready for your gall bladder removal needs. But I’m sure that was coincidence. 😉
@Maggie: Along with the not really arguing point, I have NEVER been on a diet, so that was not my issue. Unfortunately I did do the awful trick of assuming that what made me sick was probably what made everyone with gallbladder issues sick, which I certainly should not have done. The surgeon made it seem like if we all had less fat in our diets, over our lifetimes, there would be many more gallbladders still in folks.
I’m a healthy type and get lots of exercise. I have always been able to control my weight by running further the worse I ate. You know, I had 2 extra cookies, so now I have to run an extra mile, type of mind set. I was kicking right along and then last July (yep, that’s actually when this all started, almost a year ago), I had an attack (which I later found out was my esophagus spasming) which the medical folk thought was heart related. My pulse rate dropped to an average of 45 beats per minutes for about 10 days. I thought I was dying. But then it started rising until it leveled itself out, and the stress test did not show a thing, so I just slowed down the exercise routine and went on my marry way. Unfortunately, slowing down the exercise routine made me gain weight. Then Jan 27 I had another attack and the trips to the doctors started. On April 28 they took the gallbladder out. I’m still losing weight. But with no gallbladder, fat is really hard on my digestive system, so I watch everything I eat now for fat content. I’m not quite a vegetarian, but at some type of massive organized meal, that is the meal I would want.
Damn, ksbel6, that sounds terrifying.
And I didn’t mean to imply that American fat intake levels are good news for internal organs. But, as you explained, fat in moderation plus paying extreme attention to what kind of fat you’re taking in does not equal dieting. I was ever so fortunate to have smart roommates back in the late 70’s commune days who taught me if I had a choice between palm kernel oil, cottonseed oil, or any hydrogenated oil (which are in most “diet” foods) vs butter, go for the butter. Despite my recent severe digestive issues and a strong history of gall bladder disease in my family (all among chronic dieters), AND being fat, my gall bladder is hunky-dory.
I can imagine that have a heart rate of 45 for 10 days would really feel like you were dying. You were much closer to that clinical diagnosis than the rest of us, eh?
Like I said, I’m feeling the best I have felt in a long time. It was a very scary, wake you up to what you are putting into your body kind of deal. I’m fish only as meat these days, and I try to only eat that if it is local. The most amazing change has actually been on the social level. I had no idea so many of my fun times with friends revolved around eating stuff that is really bad for us. My partner has also dropped about 10 pounds, which she is very happy about 🙂
Off-topic (what is the topic, anyway?)…
On the front page of the US State Dept’s website is a photo of a gay US Foreign Service officer, Danny Hall, and his spouse, Graham James, in recognition of LGBT Pride Month.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/pix/lgbt/2010/142388.htm
Quoting from the article:
—
Danny married Graham James in Westminster Town Hall in London on May 12, 2008. Graham is an actor who has just finished a year-long run in Agatha Christie’s “The Mouse Trap,” at the St. Martin’s Theatre in London. They are both looking forward to their next posting in Helsinki, Finland, where Danny will serve as Deputy Chief of Mission. Both Danny and Graham applaud the efforts of all those who have worked so hard to make recognition of our families possible.
—
Well damn… it’s not just one gay Foreign Service officer they’re touting for Pride month, it’s a whole team. I peeled back the URL to discover the LGBT celebration page with bios on nearly two dozen team members. And they use the word “married” to describe relationships too.
http://www.state.gov/r/pa/ei/pix/lgbt/2010/
#119, HoH: Wow. Haven’t we come a long way!
And, oh, peering into those variously coloured mush sandwiches. I’ve been there so many times…
I’m alternately delighted and appalled that I’m so happy about the -normalcy- of referring to same sex unions by the terms that everyone else takes for granted. It should’ve been this way all along, but it’s nice to see it in black and white.
Regarding the paste/mush sandwiches… I recall a Poirot plot that hinged on someone NOT being poisoned by a paste sandwich because after all, nobody could possibly tell the difference between vile salmon paste and vile meat paste (and one presumes, vile chicken paste). 😛
As a serially monogomous bisexual person currently in a straight marriage (jeez.. label headache!) I’ve been in the situation previously described, when people don’t know I’m bi and feel free to make idiotic/ignorant statements. I generally rock the boat and speak up in a polite way. I don’t think there’s a perfect way of dealing with the situation.
ksbel6, glad you’re still with us! 🙂
And, in basketball news, The University of Texas at Austin has rejected an offer to join the Pac-10 uberconference. Actually, UT Austin would have been a good match for the laid-back west coasters. But their decision to stay in the Big 11 midwestern conference has caused all other Big 11 conference schools in Texas to announce that they will stay, also. Hey, I did try to watch the World Cup, but the cable feed must have been malfunctioning. I kept hearing this wierd buzzing sound!
Nope, Kate, the buzzing was real. These exceedingly annoying plastic horns that all the fans seem to have.
The one match I’ve watched so far (England v. USA) was on mute with the closed captions, so that I could get the commentary. It was too annoying otherwise
ksbel6, so glad you are feeling better! It sounds as if it were perfectly awful.
Back to the food issue for a minute: lunches provided at seminars (if provided these day in social service) tend to be nasty affairs, never mind for any specific preference. If I were in HoH’s position, I’d so be packing my own food!
Also, I finally got around to watching Food, Inc. A lot of the material I’d already known, but it reinforced my preference to eat as locally and organically as possible–and I know I’m lucky to be able to have the bucks for this. What is truly frightening is how little the government protects consumers–again, not new news, but it’s ghastly.
One of Letterman’s sidekicks kept interrupting him last night by blowing on those plastic soccer horns. I can’t remember the name of them, only that I went “You could rearrange that to spell vulva, heh heh heh.”
In other news, Dave’s guests included Dame Helen Mirren talking about the rights of prostitutes and bluntly admitting that most women who wind up having to do that for work “have been damaged” (yes), and Cyndi Lauper dancing wildly with Allen Toussant at the piano. Estrogen (oestrogen) splashed everywhere on that set.
I’ll be honest: Until Marj mentioned basketball above, I thought all the Pacman 10 whatever was about football. Or maybe baseball, isn’t it time for people to be watching five hours of men in tight pants chewing tobacco and glaring at each other while considering just maybe making a move?
The Pac 10,the big 12 (or 11 or whatever it’s going to be) not only invovles men’s sports, but women’s as well, and many other sports besides the “traditional male” ones (with the exception of football, are also played by women). Many people out there are concerned what effect this is going to have on the women’s teams, as well as the many who just enjoy sports in general.
Well, I for one am happy about Nebraska joining the BigTen (which is now actually 12, but has been 11 for many years) because Nebraska’s volleyball program is traditionally the best in the country and now all the others in that conference will improve. I do love watching athletic women in tiny little uniforms jump and dive and stuff 🙂
Had to google. Vuvuzelas. They’re called vuvuzelas.
The annoying horns, that is. Not the athletic women in tiny little uniforms.
Can I blurt in and recommend the book “Health at Every Size” by Linda (gasp!) Bacon (yes, for real). All abt how it’s about health not size. Very fat positive. (Plus, Linda’s a dyke!) Great for folks trying to wade thru the mire on health, food, and (holds nose with aversion -) dieting.
OK on to AB’s new post!
ps I’m a vegetarian. Hairball, do you need some reinforcements from Boston over there in the big city?
Hairball, joyously our lunch on Monday (the one provided by the administration and usually delivered from the horrible deli/restaurant) was from a new place, and included real salads, roasted potatoes, chicken sausage, grilled chicken breasts and braised tofu! Woot!
And I was very proud of my coworkers the other night: only one vegan at a party, and yet most of us brought very tasty, very vegan food. Those who brought meat stuff made sure that it was VERY obvious, with no hidden animal ingredients.
And yes, Maggie, there was Calistoga! (also wine, but the host is in the process of moving and couldn’t find her corkscrew!!!)