Kitties

Marle will be leaving soon, and so I'm thinking about what we should do in terms of finding Lola a new friend (or if we are going to do that). Jackie's in Vancouver and most likely it will end up being her decision, since I think Lola is probably about as much as I can handle (Precious = SO high maintenance!). But it's hard to not go looking at kitties and thinking about what I'd get if I were to get another one. But. . . after clicking through PetFinder and getting stuck on all the Siamese, I go to google and eventually end up with this:

Sigh.

Dragon made of chairs!



Credits to Erin McNellis, via Facebook.

E28A: Poetic Imagination

Looks like we're on for Poetry of Death for next fall!
(I, inexplicably, decided to make "mortality" my theme for the poetry class I'm teaching, which is sure to mean that I cry my way through half the quarter and hopefully don't do it in front of the class).

Installation number one. This was read at a Memorial Service I went to in Feb (which some of you will have been to) and was terrifying, striking, and memorable.

Dirge without Music

Edna St. Vincent Millay

I am not resigned to the shutting away of loving hearts in the hard ground.
So it is, and so it will be, for so it has been, time out of mind:
Into the darkness they go, the wise and the lovely. Crowned
With lilies and with laurel they go; but I am not resigned.

Lovers and thinkers, into the earth with you.
Be one with the dull, the indiscriminate dust.
A fragment of what you felt, of what you knew,
A formula, a phrase remains, --- but the best is lost.

The answers quick & keen, the honest look, the laughter, the love,
They are gone. They have gone to feed the roses. Elegant and curled
Is the blossom. Fragrant is the blossom. I know. But I do not approve.
More precious was the light in your eyes than all the roses in the world.

Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned.

Me on a bad day. Not today, but some days.
I found a series of these online some time ago (unfortunately I can't give proper credit).

Song for Fantomina

If anyone ever makes Eliza Haywood's novel into a movie, I fully expect that this song will be somewhere in the soundtrack. Fantomina, in a little blurb from wikipedia (because I'm too lazy to write one myself):

Fantomina; or Love in a Maze (1724) is a short story about a woman who assumes the roles of a prostitute, a maid, a widow, and a Lady in order to repeatedly seduce a man named Beauplaisir. Schofield points out that, “Not only does she satisfy her own sexual inclinations, she smugly believes that ‘while he thinks to fool me, [he] is himself the only beguiled Person’” (50).

Eliza Haywood (via amazon, further showing how I use sources that I would laugh at my students for using):

Eliza Haywood (1693-1756) (born Elizabeth Fowler) was an English writer, actress and publisher. Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

I feel like this is a really obvious comparison (almost embarrassingly so), but at the same time realize that the number of people who have actually read Fantomina is pretty low. Whenever I hear it I think about the book. . . Jackie knows the book better than I do but I don't know if she knows the song.

Also, does anyone know how to simply post a song without doing it via youtube? I'm sure there's a website out there that has the same embedding capabilities but only for audio?

It's summer now?

I hope this summer can be a little like last summer:

Roommate, Furry Roommate, Xena:



Hawaiian BBQ and Paradise Lost:



All of it, oh so good. We'll have to see if this summer can live up. I have a small series of "Foods of Summer" (e.g., foods of summer 2008) that I'll have to put up at some point.

I can haz Mouse!

A Razer-Pro-Solutions-Pro-Click-Mobile-Bluetooth Mouse, that is:



Can you guess which color I got?



As usual, I disregarded most things (e.g., researching the quality, etc) and went for the pretty one. . . well, the pretty, mid-range price mouse that I could get right NOW, before I have to grade all the Rhetoric in Practice projects that for some reason I had my students submit via email. I'm hoping this is going to help with the hurting hands problem, though I don't know that it's going to help with the back problem (and the neverending search for a Chiropractor/Physical Therapy/Massage/Anything useful). Last night my back was bothering so much that it actually felt better to sleep on the floor, which I did. Which is weird.

Anyway, here's mouse at my computer:




Isn't it pretty? And I like how the fact that it's Bluetooth makes it seem like it's kind of floating in relation to my computer. I'm a little fuzzy about the details of it, like if I'm supposed to shut it off when I leave my computer, but it seems to be falling asleep on its own. It also buzzes slightly, but I think that's probably worth it to save the hands.

Target Audience FAIL

I have a student whose Rhetoric in Practice project is targeted at white male Gen-Xers. According to my student, the above group of people have short attention spans, trouble making decisions, and were born between 1960 and 1980. Unfortunately, the "defining moments of their generation" are noted as being Woodstock, protesting the Vietnam War, and the moon landing.

So, Bill, how did you feel when Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated?

Jackie bought this very pretty set of Anthropologie wine glasses on sale:



And I broke one :-(.



So I went to the Anthropologie at Fashion Island, but unfortunately they didn't have these glasses any more. They called around for me, and finally found some at the Beverley Hills store, which they said could be a send-sale, and would be shipped to me, no charge.

This is not quite what I was expecting:



Set of six?



Material for art project? I bet Libby could do something interesting with this.

vampires

On Teen Vampires (#1 of many, to be sure):

The Casts' "House of Night" novels aren't *quite* as bad as I thought they'd be, so far, but I'm still pretty doubtful that they'll reach anything near Rochelle Mead's "Vampire Academy" books. This may be a natural prejudice of mine for Seattlites vs. people from Oklahoma (am I really supposed to call them Okies?), but I mean, come on, do vampires belong in the Northwest or the Midwest (is Oklahoma even the Midwest?)? Clearly, enough said. The South is a different story.

Right so, that said, Marked isn't as bad as it could be. The plot, while predictable, begins to take it into better territory around p. 200 or so, when the story actually starts to have a plot rather than just being a confluence of embarrassing stereotypes. Still, unlike Vampire Academy which has a number of interesting characters (that is, relatively speaking), Marked is basically a list of caricatures, with some really unpleasant slut/whore judgments thrown in (I know there's a better term for this, and if someone could remind me of that, I'd be grateful).

So here's a little piece:

This time when we broke off the kiss we were both breathing hard, and we stared at each other. As my sense started to return to me I realized that I was totally smushed against him and that I'd been standing there in front of the dorm making out like a slut. I started to pull out of his arms.

"What's wrong? Why do you suddenly look so different?" he said, tightening his arms around me.

"Erik, I'm not like Aphrodite." I pulled harder and he let me go.

"I know you're not. I wouldn't like you if you were like her."

"I don't just mean my personality. I mean standing out here making out with you isn't normal behavior for me."

"Okay." He reached one hand toward me as though he wanted to pull me back into his arms, but then he seemed to change his mind and his hand fell to his side. "Zoey you make me feel different than anyone has ever made me feel before."

I felt my face getting hot and I couldn't tell if it was from anger or embarrassment. "Don't patronize me, Erik. I saw you in the hall with Aphrodite. You've clearly felt this kind of stuff before, and more."

He shook his head and I saw hurt in his eyes. "What Aphrodite made me feel was all physical. What you make me feel is about touching my heart. I know the difference, Zoey, and I thought you did, too."


1. Omigod, we're smushed together! I must be acting like a slut!
2. Sluts are horrible evil people! Just like people named after greek goddesses who are all about sex! Because sex is BAD!
3. Sex is BAD but there is lots of it in this story because it SELLS BOOKS!
4. and finally,
5. Omigod, if a man says he's "touching my heart," that MUST mean he's not a sleazebag! Why didn't i believe in him all along??
6. Extra points if you can guess what Erik and Aphrodite were *doing* in the hall. Nothing that our heroine would EVER consider, I'm sure.

Ok, I have much better reviews of Vampire academy. Seriously.

Apartment Refurbishing

I don't know that I would say our apartment needs to be "refurbished" as such--we did a lot of that last year--but Jackie and I are definitely developing certain "obsessions," you might say, that we want to continue to develop, hopefully over the summer I would think so we can be set for fall.

Right now, our obsessions look something like this:
1) Birdcages (Jackie)
2) Hourglasses (Me)
3) Hanging plants (both of us; it was my idea but has yet to be put into action; but this may happen via--
4) Hanging plants in birdcages
5) Hanging objects in general, especially more lanterns, though I think right now we're focused on the plants.
6) Rugs. I was talking to Marie who remarked that it made sense to have a kind of bohemian style household considering we're all grad students. She said something about "piles of rugs." I'm very amenable to this idea, though it does require figuring out where one gets said "piles of rugs." Rugs on sale at Anthropologie are really nice but at that price can only take you so far, and rugs at Ikea could maybe be filler but I'm not covering even our hideous carpet with Ikea rugs. Carpet surplus stores of some sort, perhaps?
7) Books. I'm not sure that this counts, but it's kind of hard to deny that a large part of our decor is books. And we keep buying them.

So, I did buy some hourglasses at Anthropologie. The ones I bought at the store aren't online, and the ones in the pictures online aren't all for sale, but aren't they pretty?







And then there are the birdcages. We already have four, mostly the black wrought-iron sort not really meant for birds (can wrought-iron be that thin?). Jackie and I were searching on etsy though and found a few good ones. I can't remember all the ones she found, but this one is really nice.

























And then this is so hilarious I really kind of want it because I think it would add to the generally bizarre and unexpected atmosphere of our apartment (it is a "birdcage" made out of a drawer, plus wire, an old key, and something vaguely French which according to the seller makes it a "French birdcage"; I assume the French do not actually keep their birds in wire-domed drawers):






















Finally, I really want this bench for downstairs from Urban Outfitters, but I've been told by various people that there's nowhere to put it. Jackie finally said I could get it if we put away the TV. Since I'm all for setting up a computer projector system instead of the TV (we definitely need to find out how much *that* would cost, however), a bench seems like a good exchange to me:



(I do need to work a little bit with an image program to cut out white space on images if I need to--actually, I really just wish I had photoshop again since it's been years, but I imagine my laptop isn't up to its latest incarnation).

Music: Emilie Simon

This is the French singer I've been obsessed with lately--I originally heard one of her songs at Anthropologie, and did the complicated thing where I scribble down a few lyrics and then google them to find some new music. The song below, obviously, isn't hers, but I'm finding it's leading me to a new personal revival of Nirvana (which would, ideally, mean more than what it sounds like). I really do believe that I have an affinity for artists and writers from Seattle, and so there's always something comforting about a song like this. And also, I have to say, Kurt Cobain is not this sexy.

New Post

New Blog Update!

With Marie's help (basically, Marie's work) Radiant Squalor has moved into a new, non-pink, unexplored territory. At this point it clearly still needs various tweaking/updates, but I'm hoping that it will soon be not only up and functioning (which it is now, hooray!) but also have some interesting links and entries up soon. In general, I'm looking forward to a blog that mostly focuses on my current interests/obsessions/fun things, as well as a new venue for the films and photography of Lady Dolores Kittytoo (who can also be found on her own blog, which will hopefully also be updated soon). One thing I definitely need to work with is putting up pictures and youtube videos. . . so have a little patience while I get things working! :-)

today, shoes.

I've not been posting for quite awhile, but Marie pointed out to me that if I don't, then she should really remove my link from HER blog page, or some such, and while that really wasn't what prompted me to get on, I figured I may as well (and who knows! maybe I will not spend as much time stalking others on facebook, and simply allow them to stalk me!). I'd like to point out, though, to whoever might read this, that I really don't like the formatting that my blog currently uses, and I have never been able to figure out how to get a better format--basically I want more text, less empty space, and a cleaner look overall. I would steal Marie's and just change the colors a bit if I could (Marie, have I asked you if I could do this before? Is it even possible?). I've tried messing with the html and such, but that programming for dummies class I took as an undergrad isn't helping much.

On another topic, here's some shoes, or rather, a sandal. Considering how much the pair costs, this is approximately $160 you are seeing below. Pretty though, isn't it?

grumpy

someone has like, kicked me off my own kitten's blog.