Hoop Dancing

Ok, so if you've been wondering about what this whole fire/hoop/dancing thing is about, or why I'm randomly driving to Hollywood when I hate driving to LA, or why I have ridiculous bruises on my hips, I have two forms of explanation:

#1:



#2:



Right. Make sense now?

"So, what do you do exactly? You study what?"

I kind of freaked out today about exactly what the Eighteenth Century and Romanticism (my two primary periods) had to do with each other. I want to focus on aesthetics, but I was (and am) having a lot of trouble trying to put together the more Augustan ideas about art (say, Addison) and how that could possibly transition to what seems like hyper-political conceptions of art in the Romantic period (e.g., from my dubious assessment, art in the eighteenth century art is about experiencing pleasure, while for the Romantics, it's like being on LSD. I can explain that better).

Part of the problem, I realized, was that the "transitional period" seemed very vague to me--by 1790, everyone was in a big hoopla about the French Revolution, but that must have come FROM somewhere (and I don't just mean the poverty of the French peasants). I couldn't think of what had been written from say 1770-1790, and when I looked through all my books, it turns out I had SERIOUS misconceptions about who wrote what when. In part, because it's legitimately confusing--Edmund Burke, say, is hardly even contemporary with HIMSELF: Philosophical Enquiry into the Sublime and the Beautiful, 1757; Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790. What was he doing all that time? Something political, I think.

Anyway, as you can see, I ended up making a timeline. This isn't my "Lists" as such, because on those we usually list all works by one author together. But this timeline, for me at least, is quite enlightening.

Some years of interest, mostly because they amused me:

1784: Samuel Johnson dies; Diderot dies; Charlotte Smith writes like the most ridiculously sad poetry ever, the Elegiac Sonnets (you have to read them to see what I mean). Seems like a sad year all around.

1798: Lyrical Ballads, super important, etc.

1814: Who knew that this year would have so much stuff in it??

Also, the major swell in the 1790s is quite interesting. I like the graphic elements of the timeline (is this something like that thing Moretti does that gets everyone upset?)

And yes, Keats did write basically everything in 1819.


Timeline, 1750-1825

1750: Johnson, beginning of Rambler; Diderot, beginning of Encyclopedie
1751: Gray, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”
1752: Johnson, end of Rambler
1753
1754: Lennox, Female Quixote
1755: Johnson’s Dictionary
1756
1757: Burke, Sublime and Beautiful; Hume, Standard of Taste; Diderot, Entretiens; Blake born
1758: Johnson, beginning of Idler
1759: Sterne, Tristram Shandy; Johnson, Rasselas; Diderot, beginning of Salons
1760: Johnson, end of Idler
1761: Rousseau, Julie ou la nouvelle Heloise
1762
1763
1764: Walpole, Castle of Otranto
1765: Diderot, end of Encyclopedie
1766: Lessing, Laocoon
1767
1768: Sterne, Sentimental Journey; Sterne dies
1769: Reynolds, first of Discourses on Art
1770: Gilpin, Observations River Wye; Goldsmith, The Deserted Village; Wordsworth born
1771: Smollett, Humphrey Clinker
1772: Coleridge born
1773
1774: Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther
1775
1776: Hume dies
1777
1778: Burney, Evelina; Rousseau dies
1779: Johnson, Lives of the Poets (first part)
1780
1781: Johnson, Lives of the Poets (second part); Diderot, end of Salons
1782: Burney, Cecelia
1783
1784: Johnson dies; Diderot dies; Smith, Elegiac Sonnets
1785: Sade, 120 Days of Sodom; Cowper, The Task
1786: Reynolds, thirteenth of Discourses on Art; Burns, “To a Mouse”, “To a Louse”
1787
1788: Byron born
1789: Burns, “Holy Willie’s Prayer”
1790: Burke, Revolution in France; Kant, Critique of Judgment
1791: Sade, Justine; Inchbald, Simple Story; Radcliffe, Romance of the Forest; Boswell, Johnson
1792: Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman; Shelley born
1793: Blake, Marriage of Heaven and Hell, Visions of Daughters of Albion
1794: Radcliffe, Udolpho; Godwin, Caleb Williams; Blake, Songs of Innocence and Experience
1795: Sade, Philosophy in the Bedroom; Schiller, Aesthetic Education of Man, On Naïve and Sentimental Poetry: Keats born; Boswell dies
1796: Burney, Camilla; Lewis, The Monk
1797: Radcliffe, The Italian; Schlegel, Critical Fragments/Lyceum Fragments; Burke dies; Burns, “A Red, Red Rose”
1798: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads; Schlegel, beginning of Athenaeum Fragments
1799: Austen, Northanger Abbey (written);
1800: Schlegel, end of Athenaeum Fragments: Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads
1801: Edgeworth, Belinda
1802
1803
1804
1805: Wordsworth, Prelude
1806
1807: Hegel, Phenomenology of Mind
1808: Goethe, first part of Faust
1809
1810
1811: Austen, Sense and Sensibility
1812: Byron, beginning of Childe Harold
1813
1814: Burney, The Wanderer; Austen, Mansfield Park; Wordsworth, The Excursion; Scott, Waverley; Byron, The Corsair, Lara
1815
1816: Austen, Emma; Coleridge, Statesman’s Manual; Shelley, Alastor, “Mont Blanc”
1817: Coleridge, Biographia Literaria; Byron, Manfred
1818: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; Byron, end of Childe Harold; Keats, Endymion
1819: Byron, beginning of Don Juan; Keats, Basically Everything
1820: Shelley, Prometheus Unbound, “Ode to the West Wind”; Hegel, Philosophy of Fine Art
1821: De Quincey, Confessions; Shelley, Defence of Poetry (written); Keats dies
1822: Shelley dies
1823
1824: Byron, end of Don Juan; Byron dies
1825

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! :-)