In defense of the sanctimonious women's studies set || First feminist blog on the internet

Month: January 2005

Journals, K-Logs, Filters, and Hubs

Krista writes:

In Bridging the Gap: A Genre Analysis of Weblogs, Susan Herring and her group seem to have developed a working schema that classifies blogs as k-logs (knowledge-logs), journals, and filters. Most people seem to work along these lines, and some (like Van Dijck) differentiate between diaries and journals. The thing is, I don’t see my blog in any of those categories. Mine shifts from week to week. This past week, it’s looked more like an k-log than anything else. Last week when I was complaining about my car for days on end, it looked more like a journal. And none of that accounts for the pinups.

The difference between k-logs and journals, the third category that Krista cited, “digital commonplace book,” and other categorizations, are what is at the heart of the WATFB discussion that is due to crop up again any time now.

If a blog researcher came by my site today he or she would find a mish-mash of information filtering and navel-gazing, completely masking the archives of political and theoretical writing exercises I have performed here. Further, I imagine that some time in the future this place will be full of more k-log and political blogging, moving away again from the quiz-taking and picture-posting.

I have always considered blogs to be more like community hubs, information-gathering and -sharing for the like-minded, among whom discussions arise. Though the cateogrizations are needed, they seem awfully confining for such a broad array of topics self-published by complex individuals.

Cat Blogging

I didn’t cheat on this quiz, really. It has everything to do with me being a talker and never able to shut up or notice myself interrupting a speaker. I also have the habit of completely switching topics and derailing a completely viable consersation into something else entirely.

Maine Coon
You are a Maine Coon! You are larger than life, a
gentle giant. You are independent, but very
affectionate with your friends and family.

What breed of cat are you?
brought to you by Quizilla

Pablo, my dear Maine Coon cat, is developing a greater vocabulary. Ethan and I have figured out the difference between an “I want water” meow and an “ignore me, I’m just talking” meow. He has also developed the kitty version of a disgruntled “Humph” and a half-purr meow.

The most imporant news is that I actually caught Pablo purring the other day after months of nothing. He usually snorts like a pig.

[Quiz via Trish]

To Read: “Will in the World”

Is it summer yet?

The Shakespeare class is going well enough — or would be if the prof hadn’t agreed to the 7:30am class time, or didn’t turn out the lights and play quiet, wordy movies of Shakespearean plays, or if that person behind me didn’t lay a stank morning fart every day as though his or her classmates wouldn’t notice. I’ve kept up with the reading and been to all of the classes but one when I was sick last week.

I still don’t care about Shakespeare. I have managed to rebel against most canonical literature since the earliest days of my schooling, sticking with minority authors and my fascination with autobiographical theory and the creation of identity. Shakespeare was unfortunately ruined for me in the early days of middle school when a teacher forced me to read Hamlet and memorize a soliloquy that I promptly forgot about until the night before the exam. I failed that test and moved along, thankful that there are a bazillion movies of Shakespeare’s plays.

This time it isn’t so easy. Despite the use of film in the class, I must do the reading. Yet my prof isn’t so big on the historical or linguistic context in which the plays were written, something I could latch onto and run with, but more with the performative aspects of the plays. I’m already floundering and disengaged.

(I fear I picked the wrong major.)

I was pleased when my sister called last week and said she had the perfect book to ease my malaise. It arrived in the mail this weekend. According to Amazon, Will In the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare is “not just the life story of the world’s most revered writer. It is the story, too, of 16th- and 17th-century England writ large, the story of religious upheaval and political intrigue, of country festivals and brutal public executions, of the court and the theater, of Stratford and London, of martyrdom and recusancy, of witchcraft and magic, of love and death: in short, of the private but engaged William Shakespeare in his remarkable world.”

Being the lay history buff that I am, I hope this will be my key to undoing the disenchantment with this particular course, especially easing my sense of inadequacy with this material with the Shakespeare-based state teaching licensure tests ahead of me this semester.

After all the necessary phone calls are made and other reading assignments done for the day, I’ll be reading this book. Updates if anyone is interested.

Fin: Skully Bag

I finally finished the Skully bag tonight after fighting with it for at least two months, a project undertaken to use up the masses of super-thick wool I had from a previous failed project. This is a picture of the final blocking process – very precise, as you can see.

I basically made a massive Booga bag with an attached strap that can be lengthened or shortened as needed, knitted a large pocket in red for the front, and then made an intarsia pocket using a skull pattern I found on the internet. I felted them all seperately, sewed them together, then very, very lightly felted them as a whole piece.

It’s kind of raggedy-looking, but big enough to carry around books or knitting projects. And it’s done. Done. One more thing to check off on the to-do list.

In other news, I cleaned the hell out of my kitchen tonight after making more chili and a large spinach and mushroom lasagna. Ethan topped it off by making blueberry and banana nut muffins. I don’t want to cook a stitch this week. In my quest for cheap, healthy living I’ve decided to try and cook ahead, using good but inexpensive foods that are easy to reheat throughout the week. I’m freezing the chilis and soups that I make for later. In addition, I found that at the grocery store I can have large, single-serve custom salads made for about three dollars a pop. It sounds expensive, but I never eat the salad stuff I buy separately and it beats paying five to ten dollars for a salad in a campus restaurant.

The most important thing is that this method saves me a whole lot of time. Time is something that is repeatedly brought up with Half Changed World’s government Thrifty Food Plan experiment (Week 3 of the experiment has been posted). If I had more time, things around here would look and feel much different. If anything, I’d occasionally catch a few winks that have nothing to do with the flu.

Iraqi Woman On the Iraq Elections

She says, “women are the new victims of Islamic groups intent on restoring a medieval barbarity.”

I am an Iraqi woman, and I am boycotting Sunday’s elections. Women who do vote will be voting for an enslaved future. Surely, say those who support these elections, after decades of tyranny, here at last is a form of democracy, imperfect, but democracy nevertheless?

In reality, these elections are, for Iraq’s women, little more than a cruel joke. Amid the suicide attacks, kidnappings and US-led military assaults of the 20-odd months since Saddam’s fall, the little-reported phenomenon is the sharp increase in the persecution of Iraqi women. Women are the new victims of Islamic groups intent on restoring a medieval barbarity and of a political establishment that cares little for women’s empowerment.

Having for years enjoyed greater rights than other women in the Middle East, women in Iraq are now losing even their basic freedoms. The right to choose their clothes, the right to love or marry whom they want. Of course women suffered under Saddam. I fled his cruel regime. I personally witnessed much brutality, but the subjugation of women was never a goal of the Baath party. What we are seeing now is deeply worrying: a reviled occupation and an openly reactionary Islamic armed insurrection combining to take Iraq into a new dark age.

Read the rest.

via Third Wave Agenda

Splash!

I finally completed the splash page for Krista, thereby ending a long web project I undertook for her but was too tired to finish. Luckily Krista has awesome taste in graphics – funnily enough, she hadn’t noticed her penchant for bird pictures until I pointed it out to her.

A few more tweaks at her request and that makes one more thing I can cross off the to-do list.

The Human Body is a Strange Thing

I went to my friend Lori’s house yesterday to sit around and watch crap TV. We watched a bunch of reality shows and shows about reality shows, drank a couple of glasses of wine and ate some homemade chili. Some other people stopped by and we all watched “Bullworth” together, lamenting the lack of honesty in contemporary politics. None of us felt very well, but it being a free night for me with the little one at his dad’s, I had big plans for the evening – go home, clean up the house, take a proper shower, and call some friends for a nice, chill night of board games.

And then I woke up. It was dark and I thought for a moment that I was in my own bed. Then I realized I was laying flat on Lori’s futon. What time is it? I checked my phone and it was 4am. What the hell had happened? When I called Lori to try and figure things out, she answered her phone upstairs in bed. She too had passed out before midnight.

I got my stuff together and drove the two blocks home, feeling progressively more ill the whole way home, pissed off that I had wasted a perfectly good Friday night sleeping on someone’s crappy futon. My head pounded and my stomach churned. Once I got inside I ran for the bathroom and threw up for the next two hours.

I finally crawled into bed at seven, fell asleep at eight, and woke up at eleven feeling ab-so-lutely fantastic!

My eyes don’t hurt, my knee feels better, the headaches are gone, and I’ve accomplished more today than I have all week. If all I have to do to feel like a healthy human being is sleep on that stupid futon and have a two-hour vomit session, bring it on.

I haven’t felt this well in weeks.

Two Must-Reads

Tired of your musings on parenthood being dismissed as so much fluff? Clancy writes in response to a NYTimes article on parenting blogs for which she was interviewed.

I was interviewed for this story because part of my dissertation research focuses on women’s weblogs, many of whom are mothers. When David Hochman was talking to me about the story, he used the words “narcissistic” and “confessional” to describe parents’ weblogs, albeit in a questioning way (“Aren’t they just kind of narcissistic and confessional?” that kind of thing). As I told him about my dissertation, I tried so hard to explain to and persuade him that “baby blogs” are often — almost always — so much more than “the new baby book,” that they’re a way for parents to express what’s on their minds, but children figure in prominently, obviously.

The Well-Timed Period’s “A Government Guide to Reducing Abortion” dissects the language of President Bush’s recent phone call from Camp David to the anti-abortion protesters gathered at the White House near the anniversary of Roe v. Wade:

according to our most benevolent leaders the way to reduce abortion is to: 1) enact some more laws that don’t work; and 2) lie to women, and offer to increase their intraop risks. [If some of the anesthesiologists out there could blog a little about the difference between administering anesthesia to a pregnant patient vs. a nonpregnant one, the inherent difficulties and risks, drug delivery to the fetus, and what anesthetizing a fetus during an abortion procedure would entail, that would be most instructive.]

To reduce the number of abortions, instead of misguided politics and dreamy religion, how about some science? Emergency contraception (estimated to prevent 800,000 abortions per year). Education [one based on facts, not wishful thinking]. Increasing the availability of existing birth control methods to American women. Encouraging R&D of new methods.

Her look at the president’s speech itself is invaluable. Please read the rest.