“As an adult, I once did the same thing to Sophia, calling her garbage in English when she acted extremely disrespectfully toward me. When I mentioned that I had done this at a dinner party, I was immediately ostracized. One guest named Marcy got so upset she broke down in tears and had to leave early.”
—the infamous Wall Street Journal article on Chinese mothers.
I have no opinion about Chinese parenting styles. All I personally have to say about this is: grow a fucking pair, Marcy. JESUS.
One of my favorite pleasure reading novels of last year was a book called The Meaning of Night by Michael Cox. It was published in 2006, but set in the mid-1800s, and its as old-fashioned and fun book as you’ll ever read -full of fancy British estates and long-lost orphans and grubby London sidestreets and of course, lots of mystery and murder. It’s explicitly inspired by nineteenth-century novelists like Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens. Cox’s closest contemporary equivalent, though, would probably be Sarah Waters - particularly her ghost-ish story The Little Stranger which I also highly recommend. Both Cox and Waters seem to basically have decided that the novel peaked in the Victorian period, but for the fact that the Victorians weren’t terribly comfortable writing explicitly about sex or violence, and so they’ve remedied that in their books. Go to Waters for the sex and Cox for the violence, and between them both you’re set with enough big thick juicy fun books to last you a year or so.
But anyway, to help me through this last stretch of winter break, I picked up Cox’s second book, a follow-up to The Meaning of Night called The Glass of Time. It is so good, better even than the first book (so far!) and so when I glanced at the author bio on the back, seeing “Michael Cox (1948-2009)” gave me a little jolt. For a second, I almost wondered if it was a prank on his part (the books purport to be based on actual manuscripts in Houghton library that Cox ‘rediscovered’ ). But I looked him up online today for the first time, and the actual story is chilling and kind of beautiful.
From Wikipedia:
Not that I’m biased towards people from Massachusetts or anything, but WHAT IS THE WORLD COMING TO when this person:
beats out this person:
for the title of Miss America?
As I’m sure you all know, the first photo is of Teresa Scanlan, winner of the 2011 Miss America pageant. Here are some highlights of her biography:
She was born in 1993 (what is this, Miss Teen USA?) and is the youngest Miss America in fifty years. She is, an advocate of Children’s Miracle Network, a Christian, a former home-schooler, from a big family and a small town. She deferred her acceptance to Patrick Henry College for a year to act as Miss Nebraska 2010.
The second photo is of Miss Massachusetts, Loren Galler Rabinowitz.
Here are some highlights of her biography:
Loren Galler Rabinowitz graduated from Harvard University in 2010. She was a winner of Le Baron Briggs Traveling Prizes for her poetry (Jorie Graham is her mentor) and for the humanitarian work she has done in Barbados and elsewhere. She has taught creative writing in a shelter for abused women and children, and she is a classically trained pianist. Oh, and she is also a PROFESSIONAL FIGURE SKATER who won the bronze medal in the 2004 U.S. Figure Skating Championship.
Ugh, it’s weird, but even though I started out this post as a joke, I am actually kind of nauseated now. If I ever make a billion dollars, I will use some segment of it to start a huge scholarship fund for women, just so that “the largest provider of academic scholarships to young women in the world” will no longer be an organization that has absolutely zero respect for the actual accomplishments of young women.
Why do you wish to come to Harvard? (The Committee will expect a careful answer to this question.)
“The reasons that I have for wishing to go to Harvard are several. I feel that Harvard can give me a better background and a better liberal education than any other university. I have always wanted to go there, and I have felt that it is not just another college, but a university with something definite to offer. Then too, I would like to go to the same college as my father. To be a ‘Harvard Man’ is a considerable distinction, and one that I sincerely hope that I shall attain.”
Oh really, Committee? You expect a careful answer to this question, as opposed to a half-assed, sloppily written paragraph composed of equal parts shoddy grammar, flattery, vague inanities and self satisfied presumptions of nepotism? Well then, perhaps you shouldn’t admit JOHN F. KENNEDY!
Ingredients ostensibly contained in the shampoos in my bathroom:
Pomegranate
Maringa seed
Soy
Orange
Grapefruit
Lemon
Vitamin A
Vitamin B-5
Vitamin C
Chamomile
Ginseng
Ginger
Echinacea
Comfrey
Lemongrass
Sage
UV filters
Cranberry
Ceramide
Orchid
Coconut milk
Water lily nectar
Passionfruit
Seaweed
Spirulina
Kelp
Acai berries
Satin
-When future generations study our culture, they will probably say, “No wonder their empire declined. They were so busy washing their hair with satin, kelp and water lily nectar that they forgot to secure their borders against the Visigoths and other invading barbarian hordes.”
“Companies also use codewords and terms, as Rose said, to describe the kinds of candidates they want without explicitly doing so.
“[A company] will say, ‘We want somebody with small hands’ for this administrative position, meaning they want an attractive woman,” he said.”
-from “How Employers Weed Out Unemployed Job Applicants, Others, From Behind the Scenes” on huffingtonpost.com
This is terrible and all, but there is something charmingly 19th century about using “small hands” as a euphemism for female beauty.
Gia danced around a little, shaking her peaches for show. She shook it hard. Too hard. In the middle of a shimmy, her stomach cramped. A fart slipped out. A loud one. And stinky.
The DJ said, “Whoa, girl, what’d you eat?”
Oh, Jeez. Another one threatened to escape. The devil had possessed her guts! Had the microphone picked up her fart? Gia was hit by another major gut twist. She glanced at Bella. Her eyes must have been desperate.
…
“Linda and Janey spiked your Jell-O shots with laxatives.” [Rocky said]
Gia froze mid-shimmy. “What?”
“They wanted to embarrass you. Don’t ask me why. It’s jealousy, or revenge, girl bullshit. Two guys would just pound each other bloody and be done with it.”
“I can’t believe it,” said Gia, her party bubble instantly deflating. “I thought they were my friends.”
“I’m only telling you because, once, when I was in junior high, during a football game, I got hit so hard by a linebacker, I shit myself. I swore on that day that if I could help anyone in the future not poop themselves, I would.”
“Bronte fans can rejoice in a new, unabridged recording of Wuthering Heights read by British actress Patricia Routledge. Where do audiobook publishers find all these British actors and actresses to read the classics, anyway? They give uniformly remarkable performances and Routledge is no exception. Nelly Dean, the servant who spins the tale of Cathy Earnshaw and her soul mate Heathcliff, is perhaps Routledge’s strongest voice, but Hareton and Linton and the rest of the strange inmates of Wuthering Heights also come alive in her narration.” — Sunday News, February 21, 1999
Where do audiobook publishers find all these British actors and actresses to read the classics, anyway?
Um, Britain?
Ludwig Wittgenstein.
Do you think he was talking about grad school?
If you want to have sex, you’ll have to come down from the ceiling.
It takes a long time to finish a dissertation. Even if you disregard the time lost to teaching and the other non-dissertation-writing pursuits that fill up your days in graduate school, we’re still looking at several years devoted to writing 300 pages that will only be read by four people, and which will then have to be revised for several more years before they can be turned into a book…a book that it’s unlikely more than a few hundred people will ever check out from the library, never mind read from cover to cover.
So why does dissertation writing take so long? In the past (by which I mean the 80s), it maybe made sense. Consider this: in the past, if you wanted to read an article in an obscure journal, you had to physically go to the library, dig it out from the stacks, photocopy it, and take it home. Okay, yes, sometimes we still do that. But think about this: how did you know that obscure article existed in the first place? You couldn’t just search MLA. I suppose you started out by looking in the card catalogue, finding some books that maybe looked relevant, going to get them, and reading them to see if they actually were. If they weren’t, you’d just wasted several hours; if they were you went into their bibliographies, looked up some sources, trudged down to the stacks to get them, read them, and discovered whether those sources, in turn, were relevant or not, and the whole cycle started over. If, in the middle, you forgot some minor detail or some important date, you couldn’t just google it; you had to head back over the the library and look it up all over again. Instead of using ILL once every six months, you had to use it for every single article and book that your library didn’t have a physical copy of, and you had to submit your requests in person, during business hours. Oh, and you had to take all your notes by hand, and you had to write your entire book-length dissertation ON A FREAKING TYPEWRITER. There was no such thing as cut and paste - if you wanted to cut a paragraph and move it onto another page, you either had to rewrite several pages or bust out some actual scissors.
I’m getting exhausted just thinking about it. No wonder dissertation-writing takes a decade! Except that now we don’t have to do any of that! Now everything happens super quickly, as if by magic. Anyone using any common sense should realize that we should be writing our dissertations in half as much time as our advisors did. But it still takes as long as it ever! Why? Because now we waste several years procrastinating on the internet, and nobody bothers to yell at us. Academia is weird, when you think about it.
Bones must spend at least 10% of its budget on “slime.”
