Reading Report: Feb 2011

March 6th it is, and I'm just now posting the reading report.  It's been that kind of week.  I've been buried in academic reading, so you may not get any good recommendations, but here 'tis.

Jane Austen-- Lady Susan, Northanger Abbey, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice.  It's like Nirvana, yes?  Oh, damn, I have to read Sense and Sensibility this weekend.  Poor me.  Lady Susan, which I'd never even heard of before this semester, is an early novel, written in epistolary style (i.e., the whole thing is letters that the characters write back and forth to each other).  It has an extremely rushed ending, but other than that, it is surprisingly good for an Austen novel you've never heard of, and in some ways funnier than her later stuff.  And it's short.  Worth picking up if they have it at your library and you need a quick snarky read.  Northanger Abbey is a parody of the popular romances of the time.  I found it the most tedious read of the ones we've done so far, but it still had some great moments.  I suspect it would be funnier if I had read Castle of Otranto or Mysteries of Udolpho (which were the popular romances of Austen's time), but I haven't, and I didn't have time.  I already wrote about S&S, and P&P... well.  It's brilliant.  There was a thread on Facebook recently between a friend of mine and a bunch of her other friends about how they'd never been able to get through it and they couldn't understand why everyone loves it so much.  I don't understand how you couldn't.  It's not exactly a quick read, especially not at first while you're getting used to her slower pace.  And unfortunately, she has a habit of leaving out the scenes that turn into the best scenes in the movies  (In the movie of S&S, when Emma Thompson totally loses it when Hugh Grant comes back?  (which has to be one of the most brilliantly acted scenes ever) Not in the book.  Not kidding.  the Emma Thompson character is so overcome with emotion that she runs out of the room before she can break down.)  So I suppose if you saw the movie first and then tried to read the book, you'd be disappointed. But I'm not.  I adore these books.

OK.  I think I've gushed enough over Austen.

Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood.  I read this when it came out twenty-ish years ago and thought it was way too depressing and didn't particularly care for it.  But I had to read it for my FemLitCrit class this semester and loved it this time.  It's definitely not a feel-good, cheerful novel-- it's about a young woman who has been convicted of a grisly murder, and the psychiatrist who tries to cure her of her amnesia so she can remember what happened.  But it's far from the dark, despairing novel that I remembered.  I'm not sure why I read it that way twenty years ago.  In fact, probably my main objection to it this time is that it ends a little too neatly.  I can't say anything more than that without spoilers.  Highly recommended.

Ulysses update.  Yes, I'm still reading it.  It goes on and on and on.  It's basically the story of one day in the lives of two men, Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus.  During the day, Stephen has various deep conversations with different people and ends up drinking with medical student friends at a maternity hospital.  Bloom, who has spent the day going to a funeral, eating lunch, and masturbating on the beach as he watches a beautiful young woman, has also been avoiding going home to his wife, whose lover has been to the house during the afternoon.  Bloom goes to the maternity hospital to check on a woman he knows who is delivering there and ends up sitting with Stephen and his friends as they get progressively more drunk--although Bloom himself imbibes very little.  Bloom, feeling protective of Stephen, follows him to the red light district of Dublin, where there is a long, astonishingly inventive dream sequence that takes place in a brothel.  Now Bloom and Stephen are sitting in a cheap coffee house.  Bloom is hoping Stephen will sober up a little, and he is still avoiding going home and avoiding even thinking about what happened during the afternoon.  It's brilliantly done, but it isn't easy to read, and I can't possibly recommend it.  You'd kill me.  But if you're determined to read it, let me know and I'll let you know my strategy (for what it's worth, which may not be much).  It involves two commentaries, a paraphrase, a dictionary, and the book itself.

And on a more fun note:  (sorry, this is getting long).

Dream a Little Dream, Susan Elizabeth Phillips.  I've read enough SEP novels to know that I almost never like the way they begin and the way they end, but the in-betweens are good enough that I keep reading them.  This time, I figured I could get the setup off the back cover, so I started reading on about page 75, which worked really well.  The story is about Rachel Stone, who is the widow of a corrupt televangelist. She returns with her young son to the small town where they lived, where almost everyone hates her for the way her husband (and by implication, her) fleeced them out of all kinds of money.  She is so broke that she and her son are living in her car.  She has to find the last bit of her husband's fortune, which she's convinced is hidden in the house where they lived.  Their house has been sold, and Gabe Bonner, a widower who has unwillingly hired her to help him renovate an old drive-in movie theater, just happens to be the caretaker of the house.

There is also a secondary romance between Gabe's brother, a local pastor, and his church secretary. As with most of Phillips' novels, the secondary romance is almost more interesting than the primary one, although in this case it may have meant more to me because of my background.  The brother-pastor is questioning his faith, and has an ongoing conversation in his head with God, in the persons of Clint Eastwood, Oprah, and somebody else whom I'm forgetting.  It's a little weird, but I thought it worked pretty well, and his moment of resolving his faith--although hardly an in-depth analysis of faith issues-- worked well enough that I could buy it.  It will remind you of The Shack, if you've read that, except that it is about a gazillion times more believable than The Shack was, partly because rather than stretching the metaphor till it breaks, Phillips lets it be a low-key, not-too-serious sideline to the main story.

But where the story really got me is the relationship between Gabe and Rachel's son.  I was sobbing by the time they got it resolved.  I thought it was beautifully done, and believable.  And that's where I should have stopped reading.  Because once again Phillips managed to write an ending that all but ruined the book for me.  I could go on and on about what bugged me about it-- tantalizing details that are thrown out and then dumped without resolution, a tacked-on crisis that serves no purpose, big moments that fizzle (after a long, tense night, Gabe's brother volunteers to keep the kid so Rachel and Gabe can go home and talk things out. So what do they do?  in the next scene, Rachel is TAKING A NAP and Gabe is out working in the yard).  When they finally do have their big talk, Rachel insists that Gabe talk about how much better she is than his dead first wife.  Not kidding.  Suffice it to say, yuck.  Now that it's been a couple of weeks since I read it, I will say that the middle 300 pages is good enough that I'd still say it's worth reading, especially if little niggling details don't bother you as much as they bother me.  But if you talked to me the day after I read it, I would have told you to burn it.  Next time I may not only skip the first 75 pages, but also stop reading 50 pages before the end.

case in point

Rant ahead.  you've been warned.

See, this is exactly what I'm talking about.  I'm involved in a project right now in which I am the new person on the team.  For some silly reason, I assumed that we're all equals (we're all volunteers, no one is getting paid), so when it came time to decide what direction we're going, I stated my opinion.  I made it clear I was willing to do whatever the team decided, but I said what I thought we should do.  They decided to go with another guy's idea, which is fine.  I've been in this situation at work before, and I know from experience that I will be fine with this, and I will work just as hard for his idea as I would have for mine.

But it turns out that I managed to offend this guy, the one who's idea we're using.  I guess I didn't pussyfoot enough.  I didn't add in enough groveling qualifiers when I stated my opinion.  I thought we were adults here, I thought I could state my opinion, which was clearly labeled as my opinion, without having to add a bunch of bogus crap like "This is probably a dumb idea, but I think we should..." or "You all know way more about this than I do, but maybe we should consider..." 

That kind of stuff just doesn't occur to me.  We're having a team discussion, why can't I just say what I think?  But somehow, entirely without meaning to do it, I come across as domineering.  I really don't get this, because that is not AT ALL what my intent was.  I thought I was saying what I thought.

One of my favorite moments in all of the genre fiction I've ever read is in Mr. Impossible.  The heroine is a total brainiac, but it's Victorian England, so she has to pretend to be dumb and get her brother to present all her ideas so that people won't think she's smart.  The hero finally figures this out, and also figures out that all these years, she's had to squash herself in order to be socially acceptable.  So there's this moment where he tells her something to the effect of, "You're not too strong for me.  I'm not intimidated by you."  It completely melted me.  That's how I feel-- not that I'm such a genius (she spoke something like six languages and was a scholar in Ancient Egyptian what-have-you)(I'm proving my intelligence here by using technical terms like "what-have-you")-- but I feel like I have to sit on myself all the time just so that I can be acceptable.

Ha.  You wondered where the dilemma I've been discussing recently came from.  Actually, I was, too. :-)  I guess now we know.  There's got to be a happy medium here somewhere, but it appears that I haven't found it yet.

blog thoughts

You may have noticed that I haven't been posting regularly lately.  I think I finally figured it out tonight.  I have certain blogs of friends (many of whom I've never met) that I read regularly, and those blogs have enriched my life immeasurably.  But after I joined twitter a few months ago, I started reading the blogs of many writers and agents and editors.  They're thought-provoking, and I learned plenty.  But they are full of advice about what your blog "should" be like--have a regular posting schedule, keep your paragraphs short, etc. And they are aimed at people who are trying to market themselves and their work.

Which is not what this blog is about.  This blog is about me needing to type things out so that I can figure them out.  It's how I deal with things.  I put it out here in the hopes that someone else will want to read it (and I am eternally grateful to those of you that do), but even if no one reads it, it is still worth doing for me.  For the three of you who have been here since the start way back when, you know I've been intermittently ambivalent about having a blog from the getgo, but this most recent bout of not posting was different-- it was more about feeling anxious that my blog didn't match up to some other arbitrary set of expectations of what a blog "should" be.

So... all that to say, I think I will stop reading the blog advice blogs and go back to just doing my own thing.  Which means, for one thing, I have long paragraphs that are hard to read on a computer monitor, and for that I apologize, but it just seems to be the way things come out of my brain.  I will try to remember to break them up a little.  (This one is short, yes?)  And I am going to stop looking at the stats page, which has occasionally caused me heartburn trying to figure out what people want.  (OK, paragraph not so short anymore.)

And since I'm sitting here meandering anyway, I will tell you about Sense and Sensibility, which is the novel we just finished in my Austen seminar.  Tony Tanner, who is one of my favorite critics-- I used his stuff in my Shakespeare class last semester, too-- wrote a really terrific introduction to an earlier edition of S&S that is re-printed in the back of the current Penguin edition.  He talks about how S&S, like all Austen's novels, is about how the individual rubs up against society's expectations.  Unlike some of the more idealistic criticism written about Austen, he is a realist, or maybe it's pragmatism.  Rather than lambasting society of the time for its stifling pressures, he recognizes that functional adulthood requires being able to meet your own needs while you navigate what society expects of you.  You can't just do whatever you want to do all the time.  It would lead to anarchy, chaos.  You have to find the balance point between what you want to do and what is socially acceptable, and that is-- for Austen and maybe for all of us--what it means to grow up.  (is this sounding familiar?  I guess I've been thinking about this for several weeks without realizing it.)

Depending on your personality, that balance point can be all over the place, but it's there somewhere. So of course I've been thinking about the way this works for me, too.  I don't have a very socially acceptable personality if I just act on impulse.  In Meyers-Briggs terms, I'm an INTP, and that "T" means that I tend to act from thinking rather than from feeling.  I can be quite mean or heartless or dismissive without even realizing that I'm doing it-- I say something that makes logical sense, or is "true," and then don't understand why other people are put off by it.  So when someone tells me to just be myself, it's advice I  take with a grain of salt.  It requires "constant vigilance" on my part to not be someone who is just unlikable.  Because if I wait a minute, even just a split second, and let the first impulse pass, I can react out of compassion and kindness, rather than that hard-edged intellect.  But then sometimes I need that first impulse, because it's my snarky self, my skeptic self.  Balance.  It always seems to come back to balance.

wow, this has really been all over the place.  I wonder if it makes a lick of sense.  I think I will wait to publish it until tomorrow morning so I can read it again.  I was going to talk about my theory about why Tony Tanner has been relegated to the back of the book, but I think I will hold off on that till another time since it would be yet another entirely different direction, and we've already covered plenty of ground here.

in other news:  I'm putting the posts from Introverts Week back up-- those were some of the ones that got axed from too much time spent looking at the stats page.

I'm thinking about getting one of those timers for our modem, the kind that turn your lights off and on when you're on vacation.  Because I sit down to type a post, but then I get distracted reading e-mail, other people's blogs, checking twitter and facebook, and by the time I'm done with that a) an hour (or more) has gone by, and b) I've forgotten what I was going to say.  And it was important today, dammit.  If I could just remember what it was........  oh, well, if it was really important it will come back.  But if I had one of those timers, the internet could be turned off in the morning (when I'm home alone and can think about things) without my actually having to exert any self-control.  Then it could magically turn back on in the afternoon when MadMax gets home and desperately must play Runescape at exactly this second.

that's all.  oh, well, here is one more thing.  I think I am going to stop asking the questions at the end of the post.  I only started doing it about a month ago, because I was trying to get y'all to say something (*cough*).  But it isn't working (except for a few of you, thank you, Julie and the others). I don't know why you're such a quiet bunch, but it's OK.  I can tell by the stats page that you're out there, and I guess that's all that matters.

Opinions, Opinions

(this was written last week but I didn't publish it until today-- I am, thank God, finally over the cold that is mentioned.)

Prejudice is a great time saver. You can form opinions without having to get the facts. E. B. White said that, but although I couldn't find the date he said it, it must have been before 1985 when he died.  I think 25 years ago that maybe it was easier to believe that you could get the facts, that you could base your opinions on something solid, real.  That it was possible to be Right about something, and that your opponents were Wrong.  I find it a lot harder to think that way today. I don't think I have any opinions that I'm 100% sure are Correct. 

There was a great brouhaha in a certain section of the blogosphere this past week because an author--and since I'd never heard of her before this week, I'm not going to link to her blog or name her--wrote a blog post in which she objected to a negative review of her book by another blogger, a review which she (the author) had apparently requested by sending them a review copy.  It was written as a warning to other authors to be careful where you send review copies of your book, because you may not like the results.  If she had left it at that, it would have been fine-- in fact, it is undoubtedly good advice.  but she named names and went on and on until she sounded, honestly, like a whiner.  So your book gets a bad review.  Suck it up, honey.

At one point during the day I read it, which I believe was the day after she posted it, she had dozens and dozens of angry bloggers taking her to task for suggesting that they should not be able state their opinions about her book.

I didn't follow all the links, and I didn't read the original review that caused the whole thing, so I can't comment on it much.  but since I so recently posted about blogging book reviews, it has made me think quite a bit about opinions.  About how heated up we get over our own opinions and the opinions of others.  I drove by a house today with a six-foot hand-painted sign out in front that said "Impeach Obama." I knew someone who seriously considered moving to Canada when Bush Jr. was elected.  I know people who believe their children will be permanently warped if one of their teachers is gay.  I know people who think that you are frivolous and uneducated if you use plastic grocery bags.

Sometimes it just makes me want to toss the whole thing and have no opinions at all. (which is an opinion. I know, I know.)  Maybe because I was raised to have such strong opinions about so many things, and I did.  I believed.  But by the time I was 30, I didn't.  And now that I'm nearly 50, I believe differently than I did at 30.  I understand something about the mutability of beliefs and opinions.  It's hard for me to take my opinions very seriously.

I do have them.  I've got this nasty cold, and I indulged myself by letting myself sit on the couch all afternoon and read a novel.  It was a really intriguing novel, and it was going so well, until it had a truly terrible ending.  It ruined my day.  I spent half an hour after I finished it composing a blog review in my head in which I described in detail all the reasons why it was such a terrible ending.  It was satisfying.  It felt almost like revenge, because I felt betrayed by that author.  To write a book that was so good, so emotionally true that she had me in tears at page 300, but then by page 385 to have botched it so badly that I just wanted to throw it away.  I wished I hadn't read it. 

But even as I wrote that post in my head, I knew I wouldn't publish it.  It's just my opinion.  Is it worth it?  If that author has a Google flag turned on that sends her a link when a blogger mentions her name or one of her books, do I really want her to read all the reasons I hated that ending?  Part of me thinks, Well, yeah, I kind of do.  But part of me thinks of that other poor author this week, who unwittingly stepped into a minefield.  People she'd never heard of before wrote long, scathing comments.  Her friends came to defend her.  I'm sure she was horrified.

I had something slightly similar happen to me.  I wrote a negative book review last summer in a different blog, back when I had two blogs.  I started the second blog as a lark, a place where I could anonymously write snarky reviews of books that had disappointed me.  It had never occurred to me that people would actually read it.  I seem to only have a couple dozen readers of this blog, and that one got even less traffic.  But somehow that one review, the one in which I was particularly negative, must have gotten picked up somehow by someone.  I don't know who, because no one ever commented on it.  but months after I quit posting to that blog, that one post was still getting half a dozen hits per week (sometimes more).  I finally just deleted the entire blog, because it bothered me that I didn't know what was going on. (me? control freak?  noooo.)  Maybe someone was using it as an example of how not to review a book.  Or to make someone else feel bad.  Or whatever.  I don't know because no one ever said anything to me.

I wrote this post last week, but never published it because of the complete irony of writing an opinionated post about the dangers of opinions.  But that says it right there-- you can't not have them.  Just promise not to take me too seriously.

short takes

Dh read in a magazine this week that there is a woman who has been sitting in front of the White House every day for the past thirty years to protest nuclear proliferation.  We were both stunned.  Thirty years!  She is missing her life.  Life is meant to be lived.  Is there any idea, any opinion that is worth giving that up?

Kindess, a topic that keeps cropping up on several of the blogs I follow.  It is important to be kind-- a friend of mine told me once that is the sum total of her moral code.  It's not a bad one.  I've been learning recently, though, that there is a difference between being kind and being a doormat.  Being kind is an intentional act, a decision to respond in a certain way because of who you are, or who you want to be.  Being a doormat is letting other people do what they want because it's easier than arguing.  Someone creases the fender of your car and you decide to let it go and not make them pay.  You're being a doormat if you're doing it because you just don't have the energy to argue with them.  You're being kind if you do it out of generosity, out of compassion.  What do you think?  does that make sense?  that is a relatively new thought for me, so I haven't figured it all the way out yet.

I'm getting better.  I'm still sick, but the cough is much improved, and as long as I keep taking advil, I seem to do OK.  But I'm not doing well enough to sit here for 45 minutes today, so I think that is all.

cough cough, some *cough* updates, cough, and the big reveal

Sickness reigns at our house.  Dh has had a truly nasty Cough for well over a week.  Bad enough that I've slept in the guest room several nights, which always makes me feel a bit like I'm deserting him, but one of us should be getting some sleep.  Then yesterday, I could feel it coming on, and by this afternoon, The Cough had taken up residence.  I've always been of the belief that the more you cough, the more you cough-- you irritate your throat, and it gets worse and worse.  So I try really hard not to cough.  To the point where tears are starting to stream down my cheeks.

But this one is well beyond that-- it doesn't even begin to be controllable.  The only thing that helps is continuous sucking on a cough drop.  I've been through more than a dozen of them since it started this afternoon.  I went to Target after dinner and bought four different kinds so I can do my own personal test.  If there's a clear winner, I'll let you know. Also stocked up on NyQuil.  The only good thing about being sick is you get to take NyQuil, which makes you sleep like the dead.  That's my plan as soon as I'm done typing here:  take a NyQuil and go to bed. 

But the good news:  no headache since Whinesday.  Yay!  So no more whining in this post.

School update:
I'm still reading Ulysses.  I got behind on the chapter summaries (I'm up to chapter 11 now, but I think the last chapter summary I posted was 4), and it feels a little overwhelming to catch up.  But it continues to be interesting, in a maddeningly difficult, brilliant, occasionally mind-blowing kind of way.  I'm meeting with my professor next week and will perhaps have more to say after that.

The Jane Austen class is better than expected.  I really didn't want to take it, because I adore Jane Austen, and if there's anything that will turn you off of a favorite author, it's reading everything she's written right in a row and studying it intensely. But so far, it has been surprisingly interesting.  I'm not surprised at all that I love her work, but because the professor, who has a somewhat dry delivery, shall we say, has come up with some really interesting perspectives.  Plus, there are only four of us in the class, and now that we're three weeks in and relaxing a little, the discussions are quite good.

Feminist Theory is also interesting.  I'm trying not to post about it continually, because if you were reading along last year, you know I'm completely capable of that.  Dead horse doesn't even begin to cover it.  But there are some interesting things to say, and at least one blog post is half written.  Maybe next week.

You know how neurotic I am about privacy.  But it's getting better.  I'm on Twitter with my real name, because I figure what the heck, everyone else is.  And it has been fine, which has loosened me up a little.  I've even been a little embarrassed recently to post comments on blogs where I'm logged into my gmail account, because it shows up as Aunt BeaN, and out of context, that looks beyond odd.  So I figured out tonight how to change it so even when I'm logged in to my gmail account, it shows up with my name.  I've been using it on non-blogger blogs for awhile now, so I think you all know this, but for those of you who don't know, it's Barb.  So if you see BarbN as a commenter on your blog, it's just me, finally figuring out how to change my username. :-)

Have a great weekend.

Whinesday

I'm whining today.  If you're not in the mood, you're excused, because Lord knows I don't like to listen to people whine.

My head.  My damn head.  Maybe I should just stop right there and click publish. 

I am so damn tired of the unending headache.  I was doing pretty well last fall-- only two or three headaches a month until mid-December.  But ever since, I've pretty much had a headache.  at first, I was treating them as migraines and taking the migraine meds.  And that works. But when it gets to be three weeks in a row with a daily headache, and then three or four days of feeling good, and then another three weeks.... well, first of all, it sucks.  But secondly, I run out of drugs, and Maxalt is dang expensive.  My insurance will cover 12 a month with a manageable co-pay, but after that, they're about $30 each. 

I only take half of a percocet (2.5 mg) with the maxalt, so my supply of 30 which I got last November is still OK.  but that's another problem.  I do worry, you know.  About taking percocet.  On the positive side, it makes the Maxalt work faster and better, and I've been taking it long enough that there are practically no side effects-- about half an hour after I take it, I start feeling warm and fuzzy inside and think, Oh! the percocet's kicking in.  But it doesn't make me sleepy or affect my judgment or make it so I can't drive.

but you know, it's an addictive drug.  The state where I live is 3rd in the nation for prescription drug abuse, so the pharmacists are suspicious.  and they should be.  It's a huge problem around here.  And the poor physicians who have to deal with it-- as one told me, a big part of the legitimate good they can do in the world is pain relief.  But they can also be sitting ducks for unscrupulous people who put on a good act and then go sell it for $5 or $10 a pill at a bar somewhere. 

When I talk to a doctor and tell them what I take, they practically laugh at me.  2.5 mg per headache (I rarely take more because too much makes me nauseated) is such small change compared to what people with true chronic pain take that it is amusing to them.  but on the other hand, it is an addictive drug.  When I'm feeling good, I have no desire to take it.  It never crosses my mind.  So I think I'm OK.  But when it's been two weeks in a row of daily migraines, it's a little scary.  Do I just want the drugs?  Am I making up the headaches so I can get the warm fuzzy? 

So then I think, maybe I should just tough it out.   Which is where I am right now.  Four days out of the last five, I've had a bad headache.  Migraine? just a headache?  probably just a bad headache, because I haven't thrown up.  One day I took the drugs and they did their usual magic, but the other days, I've just chomped down advil and tylenol and magnesium and lived with it.  Usually by late afternoon it starts backing off. 

(My three guy readers should tune out now).  I'm pretty sure it will get better when I get done with you-know-what.  Last year I had two cycles (Feb and Oct), and so far none this year.  I think I'm getting close.  And when I've gone long enough without a cycle, I start to feel great.  But it sure isn't happening right now.  Right now I just want to slam my head against a brick wall because I think it would feel better than this.  Maybe I should take the drugs.

disappearing act

(The third of three posts devoted to Introverts' Week, always a fan favorite)

I've noticed for the past couple of months that I always have my jaw clenched tightly.  I catch myself doing it, and "make myself relax" (which seems like a bit of an oxymoron-- forced relaxation), but ten minutes later I'll find I'm doing it again.  Now that I've been working on this for awhile, I'm realizing that it's not just my jaw.  It's my neck and shoulders, maybe even my entire upper body.  I seem to always be tense.

What am I so tense about?  I was thinking about that this morning while I was stretching out, trying to just let go of all my tension, and see what was causing it.  what's underneath all that?  Some of it seems to be generalized control-freak middle-aged woman, trying to force life to be what I want it to be instead of what I've got.  But another, perhaps bigger part of it, is a deep-seated fear that if I let go, I'll disappear.  I'll fade out of view, and no one will even notice that I'm gone.  It's mostly irrational, because if I disappeared, there are quite a few people who would notice, and at least a few of them would genuinely miss me-- dh and my kids, at least; my sisters, a number of my friends. 

It goes back to a real cause, though.  I was a quiet kid, and I lived in a high-stress household-- one narcissistic parent and one codependent parent.  Neither one of them had the time or energy to distinguish between their three kids.  We were just "the girls," and since I didn't have much personality (or at least not much of the kind that gets you noticed), I tended to just fade into the background.  It was so much easier for everybody if I did, and since I'm pretty introverted by nature and I spent a lot of time reading anyway, it worked pretty well.

I say all that, by the way, as statement of how it was, but without much heat or rancor, which makes me very happy.  Ten or fifteen years ago, if I made those statements, they would have been accompanied by a great deal of angst and outrage that my parents treated me so badly.  but at this late date, it just is what it is.  I lived through it.  I certainly know many, many people who had worse childhoods than I did.  My parents aren't bad people.  I love my mom very much, and my dad and I have made a truce so that we can appreciate each other (although it works best from a distance).  And time has passed.  It was all so long ago, and my mom has been there for me time and time again as an adult, no matter what her limitations were when we were young.

So I don't mean that to sound like a big pity party.  It's just something I find I need to deal with, even at this late date.  My mom wanted three polished little socialites who would help her maintain her standing in the slippery social minefield of the small town where we lived, but instead she got an athlete (my older sister), a nerdy geek who was more interested in science fiction than clothes (me), and a friendly extrovert who could care less about social standing (my younger sister).  My dad can't see anything beyond the end of his nose, so he never noticed us, period, as individuals--unless we made him look good, or unless he was blistering us with his icy wrath (intentional mixed metaphor there).  It's no wonder this is a problem for me. 

and it still happens.  People forget about me fairly often.  Sometimes I like it.  In fact, a lot of the time I like it.  I'm not good at complicated social interactions, and keeping my life simple and narrowed down to a a few friends and loved ones suits me just fine.  But it rankles sometimes, and sometimes it's painful.  I sat next to a woman at a baby shower for two hours one time and thought that we connected pretty well, but when I ran into her at the athletic club a few days later, she didn't remember me.  I sat across the table from a woman at a small dinner party one New Year's Eve (there were six of us all together), and ran into her two weeks later and she didn't remember me at all.  We sat across from each other for three hours.

Of course, things like that aren't just about me.  I know more about those women now, and neither of them is particularly observant of the people around her, or particularly interested in friendships that don't further her social goals.  So I don't consider either of them to be a loss.  but still it is a strange thing how often I disappear even in situations where I'm trying to engage. 

so what would happen if I just let go?  If I just assumed that I matter, without having to worry about it?  I'm working on finding that out.

just shy of tomorrow

Years ago I read an article about shyness.  This seems to be my theme for this week.  Oh, the excitement-- it's Introverts' Week at AB3!  In which we will all sit around, read our books, and have nothing to say!

Anyway.  The article.  It was about shyness in children, and it pointed out that there are two different kinds of shy kids.  One is quiet and enjoys spending time alone, but is also peaceful and calm, and will look you in the eye when she talks to you.  The other is anxious, nervous, and afraid.  She may duck her head in embarrassment if you try to talk to her, or stare fixedly at the ground.

There's no question in my mind that I'm honestly an introvert.  I took one of those Meyers-Briggs tests in my twenties, and I was over the 90th percentile for introversion.  I took another one about a month ago, and was in the upper 80th percentile.  But I'm afraid I have more in common with that second shy kid than with the first.  I forgot about that article for years, but since I started working on this "erasing myself" thing, it has come to mind.  A few years ago, I had this vision of myself, with my secret blog (because literally only about two people knew about the first blog) and my fear that I would get hurt if I revealed myself to anyone-- I was like a little mole, scurrying around in the background, occasionally coming above ground but mostly staying underground, trying so hard not to be noticed. 

But you know, that's more than a little unfair:  doing my level best to make it hard to know me, and then expecting people to push through that to find me.  Bad strategy.  So I've been working on changing the way I handle myself.  Yes, I'm shy and I'm introverted, and I thrive on lots of time by myself, and I'd rather communicate with you through e-mail than in person.  But too much alone time and I start to go flat, like a balloon losing its helium.  I'm letting go of fear (or trying to), and pushing myself to connect more often with people I care about.

One of the changes I made was telling people about this blog. It used to make me so nervous, but finally last year I started just mentioning it casually now and then, and you know what?  Nobody cares.  Or, rather, almost nobody cares.  For some reason I thought if I told people about it, they would rush right home, pull it up on the screen, and read every post forever after.  But in all the times that I've mentioned it to someone, only one or two people have actually followed up and read it.  The big scary one was telling my family about it, but that turned out to be a non-issue.  One of my sisters checked it a few times, but other than that, I don't think they really care.  Which is such a huge relief for me-- now they know about it, I'm not keeping it a secret, but none of them ever reads it, so I don't have to worry about it.  Cool.  My philosophy now is that the people who might be interested will find it without me worrying about it.

I think there was a point to this but I can't remember what it was.  Introverts week may have one more post tomorrow.

P.S.  (added the next day)  It occurs to me that I may be giving the wrong impression for those who don't know me irl. I am shy and somewhat reserved, but I have friends, I go out and do things, I'm fairly active in our community and volunteer many places-- or at least, I did before I went back to school and ran out of time. My son has his friends over and I joke with them. I have a group of four or five women I meet with regularly for coffee. But at the same time, all the stuff in the last few posts is true. They're both sides of me.  Just didn't want you to think that I sit at home in a closet being weirdly withdrawn.

coping strategies

I saw a therapist for a couple of years not long after we moved here-- so probably 14 or 15 years ago or so-- who thought so differently than me that she was highly effective.  One of the best things I learned from her was the idea of coping strategies.  We talked about the ways I had learned to handle the difficulties of growing up in my childhood home (which was not horrible, just garden variety stuff), and how those skills, those coping strategies, could be used to my benefit now.

For example.  I am not a big fan of confrontation.  I have a hard time thinking quickly in an emotionally intense situation, so I become tongue-tied.  Plus, as I've said before, I'm pretty hyper-sensitive, and the heightened emotions around confrontations were scary to me as a child (and sometimes still are).  So I learned the skill of avoidance.  If dad was mad, avoid him.  If mom disapproved of something I was doing, avoid her and do it anyway, although never to the point where I would then have to have a confrontation about it.

Before this therapist--we'll call her June--I thought of that as a bad thing.  Common wisdom says that you should always meet your challenges head on, right?  But June said, you're good at avoidance.  It's worked for you in the past.  Play to your strengths.  How can we make it into a conscious strategy, something that works for you instead of against you?  Rather than seeing it as a bad thing, see it as one of several tools that you have to handle a confrontation.

What works about avoidance?  For one thing, if you let something go for a few hours or days without confrontation, it often clears up with the passage of time anyway.  For another, if I avoid confrontation right in the thick of my emotions, I have time to think about what I want to say so I don't become tongue-tied.  The bad part about avoidance?  if you carry it too far, it gets out of hand.  If you avoid too long, people don't realize you're upset or mad about something when you are.  There is a point where it becomes lying by omission.

Another example.  Over the past couple of years, I've become aware of how the habit of effacing myself -- which I mentioned on Wednesday-- has become self-destructive.  For a long time, it didn't seem that way to me.  I'm pretty introverted anyway, and it just makes life flow along so much more easily when you try not to bother people.  But there comes a point where no one knows who you are because you've so thoroughly erased yourself.  I think I had reached that point a few years ago.  I've been working on it.

Today I've been trying to re-cast it as June would have.  In my childhood home and with my personality, erasing myself, disappearing, was an excellent coping strategy.  There was a lot of very complex emotional stuff floating around in our house.  With my hyper-sensitivity and also being pretty dang bad at handling complex interactions with other people, disappearing worked really well.  Being able to fly under the radar, to ghost myself and disappear, made all the crap a lot easier to handle.

So what still works about disappearing?  it gives me a break, for one thing.  All those exhausting complicated social interactions overwhelm me sometimes, and the ability to disappear--for a few minutes or a few days-- gives me a chance to revive, refresh.  But other than that, I think it mostly works against me now.  It's not honest.  And it's lonely.  Recognizing that I'm an introvert is one thing, but shutting myself off is another.  Ha-- that's another post that's floating around in my head, so maybe I'll stop there and finish this up next week.  Have a great weekend.

January reading report: just one book, and endings

The only book I'm reporting on that I read in January is The Grand Sophy, by Georgette Heyer.  (Not because it's the only one I read, but because I haven't finished any of the other ones yet.)  Georgette Heyer is the grande-dame of romantic fiction.  Her books were published in the 40s and 50s, and I've heard about her for years, but I'd never read one.  She's old school-- no explicit sex here.  But she has a reputation for writing funny dialogue and engaging characters.

So I picked this one up somewhere, and loved it.  Slight qualification:  I ended up loving it.  About halfway through, I was ready to throw it out the window, because the heroine grated on me.  There is a type of heroine who is utterly determined to do what she wants no matter what impact it has one anyone around her.  "Headstrong," they used to call it.  Opinionated, bossy, self-confident, even narcissistic at times.  But also interesting, intelligent, and large-hearted.  I thought it was a recent development, because there are a number of examples from books that have been published in the last five years, and I chalked it up to all those young women who were raised in the 70s and 80s in the height of the second wave of feminism and who are now adults.  But Sophy is exactly that kind of heroine, and this novel was published in 1950.  So I was wrong.  But it just seems so silly to me, and selfish, to think that you should be able to do whatever you want without considering the people around you.

Granted, I was raised the other way, by a sweet mom who was well coached in the art of effacing herself and who was only too happy to pass her knowledge on to me.  It's something I'm working on, and I'm getting pretty damn good at figuring out what I want to do and making sure my needs get met.  But it's silly and selfish to think that has no impact on the people around me.  It's a balancing act-- my needs and my loved ones' needs, and sometimes it's difficult to figure out.  And sometimes it's easy.

Am I rambling? So.  When Sophy insists on her right to do whatever the heck she wants to do regardless of the effect on the people around her, it just seems immature and pig-headed to me.  Not to mention historically inaccurate, because at that time (I have no idea what the actual time period of the novel is, but it seems to be a Regency romance, so let's say early nineteenth century) some of the things that Sophy does would have had profound social repercussions for herself and her family.  She was really irritating that way.  But there are two things that redeem The Grand Sophy:  one is that Sophy is often right, and the one time that she is egregiously not right, she does apologize.  And two: this book has a nearly perfect ending.  And that is so rare. For that alone I would give it both thumbs and all my fingers and toes way up.  I can't tell you how many books I've read that fascinated me, only to be spoiled by a rotten ending.  (Smilla's Sense of Snow, anyone?)  It must be enormously difficult to write a really satisfying ending.

but this one has it.  Sophy sets up the most ridiculous and meddlesome of all her schemes (fittingly enough, since it's the climax), and Charles, the hero, completely gets it.  He understands exactly what she's doing and why.  The way it's set up is pretty subtle, but enormously satisfying.  Highly recommended.

Riffday: cleaning, unplugged week, and frigidity

Yesterday my mind was teeming with ideas for blog posts.  I dutifully jotted them down so I would have ideas in the future when it was MWF.  But of course now none of them appeals to me.  So I will just riff and see where this goes.  Maybe Mondays will be Riffday.

We're cleaning here.  We don't clean well together.  We have different ideas of what clean means.  If we each cleaned the bathroom, Dh would leave it with the counters clear of clutter, no dirty clothes on the floor, and each towel hung or folded up in its correct place.  But he wouldn't notice that there was still toothpaste in the sink, or that that yucky orange-y slime was accumulating under the shampoo bottle in the shower.  I would leave the sink and the chrome fixtures sparkling, the tile in the shower gleaming, the grout scrubbed down, but there would still be eight different kinds of hair product, three face lotions and two types of toner ranged around the sink, and I might not notice that my pajamas were still on the floor next to the shower.  (and to be entirely honest, it would probably only happen about once a month.)  You see the problem.

After twenty-six years, we've learned to appreciate each other, but we haven't learned to clean well together.  (I used the bathroom as an example, but in 26 years I don't think we've ever cleaned a bathroom together.  It was just a theoretical example.)  What works best, in my opinion, is for him to do his thing first, and then I come along after him and do mine.  Minimum of fuss, end result=whatever we cleaned is the kind of clean that works for both of us.  You'll have to ask him what works best in his opinion.  This is not something we discuss well.

So maybe you can predict that tensions have been a little high the last few days.  But-- that 26 years again-- we've kind of figured out how to manage this.  He lets me gripe at him for getting all snooty about how much neater he is than I am, and I acknowledge that he really is neater than I am and don't add under my breath "eventhoughitsreallyjustadifferentkindofneat."  And we're still married, so it must work OK.

Key change.  (we're riffing here, remember?)  We tried out "unplugged" week around here last week.  We borrowed the idea from our neighbors.  One week out of the month, no XBox.  Computer time is limited (for the kiddo) to fifteen minutes so that he can check his e-mail and Facebook.  No TV shows--although we do allow movies.  Since he's seen all the movies we own, he doesn't get sucked into them that much, and also there are no commercials, which drive me crazy.  So MadMax spent the week learning how to tie knots while working his way through the Harry Potter movies, also did a little reading, ran errands with me, etc.  He and his dad went skiing on Saturday.  I liked it.  He didn't seem to mind it as much as we thought he would.  Success.

Bridge.  After a couple of weeks of what amounts to "mild" winter weather (for us), we're back in the deep freeze again.  It was -4 when we got up this morning, and it's supposed to get down to -12 tonight.  The payoff is that we finally get blue sky and sunshine.  That's always the way around here-- it's reasonable winter temps and cloudy/overcast, or it's bitterly cold and perfectly clear.  It was nice to see the sun, but I hate those below zero temps.

What do you call the recap after the bridge?  Third verse?  we haven't had a chorus yet.  I don't know.  I borrowed the language without really knowing what I was talking about.  Oh, gee, really?  Well, on that note (ark), here's something you didn't know about me (well, unless you're one of the half dozen readers that I know irl):  I play the flute.  I love it.  I don't do it often enough.  There are few things as soothing to me as pulling out my flute and playing through some of my old pieces.

So what about you?  any musicians out there?  what do you play?  do you sing?

new semester, new classes, and audiobooks

Classes started this week.  They were surprisingly good.  As has been true every semester since I started driving down to UTown, my choices were dictated less by what I wanted to take than by my driving schedule, so I wasn't really looking forward to them.  But, as has also been true the other semesters, I think they will end up being interesting anyway.  But ohmygod do I have a lot of reading to do.  *AB quails before the thought*

Starting The Drive again reminded me about audiobooks.  I neglected audiobooks when I did my post about the books I enjoyed reading last year because I completely forgot about them.  It doesn't feel like reading when you're listening, or at least not to me.  But I depend (heavily) on audiobooks to keep me sane during my interminable time in the car, so I almost always have one in progress.

My requirements for audiobooks are a little different than for regular reading, though, so take these with a grain of salt.  I spend a lot of time in the car on the days I'm headed to UTown, but not so much on the other days. So I don't want an audiobook that I'm so sucked into that I end up listening to it around the house after I get home.  In other words, I want something entertaining, but not too entertaining.  Also, I've found that a good narrator makes a mediocre book interesting.  All three of the ones that come to mind from last year are books that I'm sure I would not have liked if I'd read them in print.  But with a good narrator doing voices and inflection and bringing the story to life, I'm hooked, even though the book itself isn't all that great.  So the three I remember are David Rosenfelt's Open and Shut, the first in a series of books about a nutty lawyer in New York City who solves impossible crimes; Julia Quinn's It's In His Kiss; and ...oh, I'm really embarrassed to admit this... Robyn Carr's Whispering Rock.  

I'm a so-so fan of Quinn's.  I've read half a dozen of her books in print, and only one or two of them are ones that I thoroughly enjoyed--but they were good enough that I keep trying others of hers just in case.  Her heroes often have a subtly condescending, isn't-she-cute attitude toward the heroine that just grates on me.  But either the hero of It's in His Kiss isn't that bad, or the narrator (Simon Prebble, who is terrific) more than made up for it, because I really did enjoy this one.  The plot kind of wanders around in a way that would have made me crazy if I'd read it in print, but while driving, stopping for gas, getting something to eat, not listening for a couple of days, etc, I lost track of that and just went along for the ride.  It was great.  And Robyn Carr...honestly, it's like listening to a soap opera.  Everybody in her little town is perfect, even their flaws are perfect.  but you know, soap operas can be addictive, and it was just what I needed for the drive last fall.  I'd be utterly hooked while I was listening, and then forget all about it when I was out of the car.  Perfect.  apparently there are 8 or 9 in that series (Virgin River, I think it's called), so if I ever am in the mood for another one, they're just out there waiting.

The only one I can recommend unequivocably is House of Mirth by Edith Wharton, narrated by Eleanor Bron.  It's a great book and a great narrator (make sure you get the right narrator, because there are several different versions on audible).  Bron's delivery is crisp and elegant, but subdued in a way that reflects all the stuff that's going on under the surface of that repressive New York society.  Although as I've said before, it's a great book because it so accurately describes a particular time and place, not because you'll like it or any of the characters. 

So what audiobooks and/or narrators have you enjoyed? any recommendations for me?

um, the act in romance novels

I just realized that it's Wednesday!  I'm supposed to blog today!  (still not used to this)  Since I still have a couple of hours of reading to do for class tomorrow, I'm pulling this one out, which I wrote a couple of weeks ago but never posted. Let me know what you think. I didn't post it before because I was worried it would be controversial and I hate controversy, but I'm up against the wall here, so here it is.

So you already know Agnes and the Hitman is one of my all-time favorite books.  Usually with genre fiction I feel the need to say it is "one of my favorite plane reads" or "perfect for the beach," but I'll just go ahead and crawl right out on a limb here and say that Agnes is one of my favorite books.  Period.  So I have handed it to friends occasionally, friends who don't usually read genre fiction, thinking it would convert them.

(**warning: spoilers ahead** but only from the first hundred pages-- there are no spoilers about the ending.  But if you like to go into books completely blind, you should stop now.) 

So, I hand Agnes to them and assure them that this is a really good book, even if it is a mass market paperback.  And so far, none of them (except my spouse) has agreed with me, and I think I know why:  because they find the angry sex scene to be offensive.  About a hundred pages in, Agnes--who has problems with controlling her temper anyway-- is deservedly furious with her jerky fiance' Taylor when she finds out he is already married.  Not only that, he lied to her about his marital status in order to swindle her out of the house they own together.  She's so furious that she has a hard time controlling herself, and she ends up exorcising her anger by having really, um, vigorous sex with Shane, the hero (and he's a really good hero, one of my all-time favorites), whom she has known for about 24 hours.

If you're a regular reader of contemporary romance novels or chick lit, this is nothing too far out of the ordinary.  Well, maybe a little out of the ordinary, since I have yet to read another book with a similarly angry scene, but the idea of sleeping with a guy soon after you meet him is certainly nothing new, especially when it is accompanied (as it is here) with post-sex confusion ("I can't believe I just slept with a guy I barely know"). 

But if you don't read these kinds of books very often, it's a little shocking.  Obviously, I don't think that-- I love this book, remember?  so don't mix me up with them.  (Oddly, the one thing that bugged me about that book (she slings boiling fruit in the face of a guy attempting to break in to her house and then whacks him with a frying pan) doesn't seem to bother anybody else.)  I'm just trying to explain how people who don't read romance novels think, because I think it has a lot to do with why romance novels are looked down on by literary types.  Crusie and Mayer aren't even close to the most explicit writers out there-- in fact, their lovemaking scenes are pretty classy.  I've read some where a single act can go on for ten or twelve pages.  I start to get bored.

I've only been reading romance novels for a couple of years.  Before that, although I read sci-fi and mysteries, I completely disdained romances, with the same kind of attitude these friends of mine have.  When I started reading them a couple of years ago, I can remember practically dropping one of the first ones and looking at it in shock:  "You can buy this at Target?" because it felt like I was reading pornography.  There's a reason people call it "female porn," as much as that offends romance writers.

In fact, several months ago, the phrase "female porn" was mentioned in connection with romance novels on a romance writer's blog I frequent and it caused a mini-firestorm among the other romance writers there.  The writers were outraged that someone considered their carefully plotted and choreographed sex scenes to be porn, since they are often the most difficult scenes to write. 

But I think they were missing the point.  Yes, the scenes can be beautifully written.  Yes, they can reveal a great deal about the characters.  But the fact remains, if you don't normally read romance novels, and then you pick one up, the detailed, fantasized sex is astonishing.  Jaw-dropping.  Book-dropping.  I thought:  You mean you can just walk into a store a buy this stuff?  Wow.

So, what about you?  Did you find the sex scenes surprising when you first read a romance novel? (if you have, and if you haven't try Agnes.  Seriously.)  And on a slightly different note, what romance novels do you hand to friends if you're trying to convert them to reading romances?

this and that, in other words: catching up

We went to see The King's Speech last night while MadMax was at a sleepover-- they don't have school today for the second Monday in a row because of some kind of teacher training thing.  Great movie.  Like all good anglophile chick-flick devotees, I love Colin Firth, and if Geoffrey Rush's wife looks oh-so-familiar but you can't quite place her, it's because she's Jennifer Ehle, HELLO, Elizabeth from the Colin Firth version of Pride and Prejudice.  (I said that like it was obvious, but I had to go home and look it up on imdb because I knew I recognized her from somewhere.)  We both enjoyed it thoroughly and I blubbered through at least 14 minutes of it.

Next up:  We repainted our playroom last weekend.  We've lived in this house for 12 years now, and have re-painted almost all of it except our bedroom, the laundry room, and the playroom, so now the playroom is done.  Nothing spectacular, just a medium tan sort of thing, but since before the paint job there were approximate three thousand thumbtack holes and dart holes, not to mention the usual playroom scuffs and smears, it looks considerably better.  It took dh an entire afternoon to spackle all the holes in.  Perhaps the dart board while our daughter was in junior high was a mistake.

So anyway, now the former playroom is an office, with desks for all three of us in it, and we're pretty happy with it.  That meant that the two huge bins of nerf dartguns and the laundry basket of legos had to go somewhere, so MadMax is turning the basement into a Man Cave.  He's very excited about it, I swear it sounds like he's nesting.  The XBox is going down there, too.  It's about 50 degrees down there most of the time, so we'll see how it works out. 

And finally:  There's a Buddhist teaching called "detachment from outcome" that has been coming to mind a lot.  It's been a long time since I've read any Buddhist stuff, or even thought about it, honestly.  But for several weeks now, it keeps popping up in the oddest places.  It's a pretty simple concept, really.  You do things because you're doing them, because you're choosing to do them (because at some level we always choose to do everything we do), not because of anything that will happen, not because you want a particular outcome.

You live in the moment, applying yourself fully to whatever it is you're doing (even if it's relaxing in front of the television.  Relax fully, dammit.)  And you do this regardless of how it will turn out, without having to imagine that someone will love you or approve of you, or that you'll be the best at it, or that if you don't do it the world will end, or whatever outcome it is you're hoping for (or dreading).  You come up with the most interesting, engaging presentation you can, regardless of whether or not you get the sale. You write the paper for the learning experience of writing the paper, not because of the grade you'll get.  You eat healthy food because it provides nourishment for your body, not because you want to lose weight.  You help a friend in need out of compassion, not because she'll like you better.  You react out of an open, compassionate heart without worrying about whether you'll get something back. 

It's a giving up of control, and for control freaks like me, that's always a challenge.  My usual motivation for doing things is because I want a particular result. Letting go of that need for a result of my own choosing is a giving up of control.  It should be easy, because the result is rarely under my control anyway, but it's remarkably difficult for me to do.  It's also a reminder to stay in the moment, to do things because they are in front of you, not because of something off in the future.  It's the old thing of being mindful, present, focused.  Which is an elusive goal for me at the moment, especially the focused part, but it's what I'm working on right now.

thanks, I needed that

Hi, y'all.  Hope everyone had a good week.  Mine wasn't particularly pleasant, but restful and just what I needed.  It is the bane of my existence to be both an utter blockhead about social skills and also hyper-sensitive.  So I get my feelings hurt and have no one to blame but myself because I've caused my own problems.  Sometimes I just have to go off and lick my wounds.  By Saturday, a lot of rest and the passage of time had worked their usual magic and things are pretty much back to normal.  This didn't involve any of you, of course, just one of those things. 

I didn't spend a lot of time on Ulysses, but I did get through chapter 8.  Which means I need to summarize 5-8 sometime soon.  I don't know if any of the rest of you are doing this, but it's helping me to type out summaries so I'm going to keep doing it.  I thought I would start putting them in separate posts, clearly marked, so you can easily avoid if not interested.

I met with the professor for my independent study on Thursday and got a little bit better idea of what we're doing.  It looks like I'm going to spend the next couple of weeks doing a crash course on Javascript and maybe a little Flash, which makes me more happy than I can tell you.  It just feels so much more manageable than theory at the moment.  Only a few of you have been around for more than a year, so you missed the two semesters of Java programming I took at our community college right before I got the crazy idea to finish my master's, and I've worked with HTML, XHTML and CSS before.  So this feels like homecoming, like picking up something familiar. Unfortunately Java is only marginally related to Javascript, but still the language of coding is not entirely foreign to me.

There are a few other things knocking around in my head, but I'll save them for tomorrow.

I'm taking an internet vacation this week.  I'm going to try to keep up with posting on MWF, just not this week.  Have a good one.

the zyrtec clouded mind

I finished Ulysses chapter five yesterday and made it through about half of chapter six today.  Will finish six and summarize both tomorrow (I hope).  Six seems to be considerably longer than the others have been, or maybe it is just that I'm starting to get bogged down.  You can't ever pick up any speed while reading Ulysses because you have to pay attention to the actual words as you read.  Or at least I do.  So it goes pretty slowly-- it takes me about two hours to get through a twenty page chapter, which would take twenty minutes in a more "normal" novel.  It hasn't helped any that I'm a zyrtec zombie today.  I've still had lingering headaches this week (not nearly as bad as last week), which I don't think are  from caffeine withdrawal, so I thought it might be allergies and took a zyrtec this morning.  It helped with the headache, but I've been so sleepy all day I'm not sure I'll take another one.  I just want to go to bed and sleep for ten hours.  Since dh is working and MadMax is at a sleepover, maybe I will. 

A few more thoughts on eReaders (which I found out is the generic term for all of the digital reading devices.  The Sony I have is just a Sony Reader).  Or maybe this is just about digital books in general.  I'm wondering as the shift to e-publishing becomes more widespread, how will I know what to read?  I sure as heck haven't liked every published book I've ever read, so the fact that a book has been traditionally published is no guarantee.  But a book that has gone through the usual process has a) been edited and b) presumably been selected in preference to many others that are similar, giving it some stamp of quality.  Whereas the books that I've read that were self-published, or e-published without going through a traditional publisher, were (with some major exceptions) lower in quality.  They had grammatical errors, typesetting errors, or were just poorly written.

But you know, that's where we're going, so there's no point in whining about it.  I know too many writers, good writers, who are having a near impossible time getting their work published, and they're all thinking about e-publishing (my mom, for example).  Why shouldn't they?  Sure, the holy grail is to get an agent and a 3-book contract, but it's not happening for many of them.

So what does this mean for me as a reader?  It means it's going to be a lot harder to find the books I want to read.  Even if traditional publishing was a guarantee of quality, you can't immediately tell if a book has gone through the traditional publishing channels anymore.  Already--even several years ago-- I've ordered books from Amazon and had no idea until I sat down and started reading that they were self-published--some of them are so poorly edited and badly written that it is quite evident practically from the first page. But as non-traditionally published books become more common, better writers, writers who write very high quality stuff, are going to start publishing that way.  Which will mean that the number of books to choose from is going to skyrocket.

Thankfully since I'm not a writer, I don't have to worry about the opposite end of the problem, which is how are they going to compete with the big publishing houses to get the word out about their books.  I just have to worry about how I'm going to find good books, however they have been published.  In the long run, I suppose my methods won't be all that different than what I do now.  I read reviews on Amazon, I've found the blogs of readers with similar tastes.  I don't think there's ever going to be anyone who has exactly the same taste as me, but I've found people who match up enough that I get good recommendations. 

if this makes no sense, blame it on the zyrtec.  writing it bored me to death, but let's blame that on the zyrtec, too. Did you even notice that I changed the typeface?  I was editing the other day, and even with my cheaters on I couldn't make out the i's and the l's in "responsibilities" when it was in Arial.  I decided I need serifs.  Let me know if you have any trouble viewing it.

blog-a-MWF

Several of my favorite bloggers try to blog every day.  I can't do it.  But I said in an intemperate moment that I would try to blog Monday, Wednesday and Friday for awhile.  But here's the problem, and it's exactly the reason why I've never tried to blog on a schedule-- because on any given day, or series of days, I can be in a real bitch of a mood and I hate to spread that around.  Especially not to anyone who is kind enough to stop by to read my blog.  So you're forewarned.  Let's see what happens if I just sit down and riff.

It's snowing here.  And snowing and snowing.  Oddly, the weatherman predicted that a big wave of snow would hit and we would get dumped on from 5 to 7 p.m.  All kinds of things were cancelled.  But although it snowed all day, sometimes pretty heavily, it had slowed way down by late afternoon and by about 6:30 it had stopped altogether.  My son is still hoping for a big dump overnight so that school will get cancelled tomorrow, but I think chances are slim.  We probably got about 3" today, and that is plenty for me.  I just checked NOAA and according to them, we got less than an inch, but the layer of snow on our deck begs to differ.

Dear daughter is spending spring quarter in Prague.  I am thrilled for her, and she is so excited she's having a hard time remembering that she still has to get through winter quarter before she goes.  The extra good news, though, is that we may get to go visit her.  Dh has agreed, but we still have to figure out if the finances will work.  How often do you have a good excuse to go, though?  and a guide?  she will have been there almost three months by the time we get there.  I think this is one of those times where you just make it work.

We are having the usual midwinter problems getting MadMax away from the Xbox once his allowed two hours are up.  It's always difficult, but when the weather is this bad, there's really not much else for him to do.  If it were a little warmer, he could work on projects in the garage shop, or they could go sledding or whatever.  But it has been in the single digits for several days now.  This dump of snow is supposedly coming from a "warm" front which will bring the temps up into the low 30s, thus making other activities possible again.  Phew.

I've read a surfeit of genre fiction in the last three weeks (I am still working on Ulysses, but it's my break, after all.  It can't be all work and no play, right?)  Some of it was truly awful and shall be unnamed.  I bought a couple of romance novel "bundles" for my eReader-- because they were cheap --for the beach.  Out of the six or seven novels I read that week, one was worth the time.  You get what you pay for, I guess.  But it was all my brain could handle, so I'm not apologizing.  and it was kind of fun, in a rebellious sort of way, to read complete trash after a semester of academic reading.  Then read Garden Spells on the plane on the way back, and although I thought it was going to be a little too-too sweet during the first chapter, I ended up loving it.  Once we were home, I read Crusie's slightly updated Trust Me on This, which was even more fun than the first time I read it, and another one of Lani Diane Rich's, Wish You Were Here, which was also excellent.  Restored my faith in the genre--both of them are fun and intelligently written, as you would expect from those two.  Then read a few more that shall not be named.  Then yesterday read Goodnight, Tweetheart by Theresa Medeiros and How To Marry a Marquis by Julia Quinn, both well above average.

OK, finally, there's something I can write about.  BFBetty wrote a post a couple of months ago about whether or not to blog book reviews (rather than me summarizing what she said, you should just go read it if you're interested).  It had never occurred to me that it wasn't a good idea to review books in your blog.  In fact, about 90% of the entries in my first blog were book reviews.  That was the reason I originally started a blog, because no one I know around here wanted to listen to me yammer on and on about the books I was reading.  So her post caught me by surprise.  Whaddya mean we shouldn't blog book reviews?

But the more I've thought about it, the more I've seen her point.  Not that I'm trying to get published, because I'm not, but just in general.  Now that I follow the blogs of so many writers, both published and pre-published, I'm coming to realize how enormously disheartening it is for them to read anything critical of their work.  It seems entirely presumptuous to think that any of the authors of the books I read will ever stumble across my blog way out here in the internet hinterlands.  I average less than 50 pageviews a week--which is perfect for me, but it's not like I'm generating a lot of buzz here.  But on the other hand, now that I'm getting to know some of these people (not that they know me, but I'm getting to know them a little from reading their blogs), I just can't stomach the idea of writing negative reviews, or even reviews that are less than positive, even if they'll never see it.  It takes so much courage to write a book.  And the amount of work that goes into it is staggering.  I had no idea.  I'm in awe of anyone that does it, now that I know, and I don't want to throw any negativity in the way of that.  I think that brief mentions of books that I liked and can heartily recommend, like in the previous paragraph, are as much as I'm going to do now.

There.  In spite of an enormous aversion to sitting down and blogging today, I did it.  Let me know what you think about the book review question.

GS: for those who are interested

Stanford has re-vamped its English major in interesting ways.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2011/january/english-major-restructure-011011.html

Kindles, eReaders, and electronic books

Quite a lot has been written recently about the future of electronic publishing.  It sounds to me like the publishing world thought that they could comfortably put off worrying about a major transition to ebooks for several more years.  But the Kindle has been wildly popular, more popular one suspects than even Amazon thought it would be, and the future of ebooks seems to be right now.

I know very little about publishing other than what I've read in the past few weeks, so I can't really comment on that.  But I can talk about it from the reader's point of view, because I'm making the transition myself.  Last Christmas, my sweet spouse wanted to get me a digital reading device of some kind, but he doesn't really feel comfortable ordering things online.  So he went down to Borders and got a Sony Reader. Then this Christmas, after my mom had a bit of a financial windfall, she got all three of us (my sisters and me) a Kindle.  So this is based on a year of using the Reader and two weeks of using a Kindle. 

Like many booklovers, I love the physical object that is a book.  I love the feel of them.  I love having shelves of them in the house and stacks of them on my bedside table.  I love the way they smell.  I love opening up a new read and getting swept away in it.  And you lose that with these devices.  So I wasn't sure i wanted one at all.  In general terms, the two devices have the same pros and cons.  The pro, the big one, is that you can take the entire stack of books that you need to get through a week of vacation in one small little device that will fit in your purse.  It's amazing how much you can get on these things.  My Reader, after a year of use, has the complete works of Shakespeare, all three volumes of the Lord of the Rings and the Hobbit, the Narnian Chronicles, the Bible, a couple of Jane Austens, and probably a dozen other books on it, and it's about a quarter full.  The cons, from my perspective:  You lose the book experience.  You can't spend twenty minutes rearranging the books on your shelf.  You can't flip back ten pages to remember exactly what the hero said as he gazed into the heroine's eyes.  You can't turn the book over and re-read the back cover when halfway through the novel it turns out to be entirely different than you expected.

And pricing.  good Lord, what a mess.  Sometimes it's a bargain to buy an ebook, but often it's not.  and since I'm a pretty big cheapskate when it comes to buying books, this is a pretty big obstacle to me.  I'm just not going to pay $9.99 for a new version of a Georgette Heyer ebook when I can order a used paperback for $4 (including postage-- in fact, most of that is postage since the used books on Amazon are often one cent, plus 3.99 for postage).  And some publishers clearly just don't get it at all.  Tana French's books keep showing up on the year end "best of" lists, so I thought I'd try them. Since the first one (In the Woods) has been out for several years, I thought it would be cheap and a good one to get in Kindle format. ha. The paperback from amazon is $9.  The Kindle edition is $14.99.  go figure.  Maybe somebody is so addicted to their Kindle that they'd be willing to pay extra, but I'm definitely not one of them.  

So.  on to details.  to compare the two of them.  The Kindle has the better screen, hands down.  It's much easier to read-- brighter and clearer with a better type face.  If you set them next to each other, the Kindle looks bright white and the Reader looks gray.  And the page-to-page navigation buttons are slightly easier on the Kindle-- there is a page forward and a page backward button on each of the two sides of the Kindle, large enough to easily hit with your thumb as you hold it, whereas on the Reader, there are two thin metallic buttons at the bottom of the screen, that aren't really placed at a place where your fingers would naturally be while holding the device.

But other than that, the Reader is better.  (That isn't to say that the Reader wins, because having the better screen is huge.  It makes it much, much more pleasant to sit and read on the Kindle).  The Reader has a touch screen, which so simplifies navigation through the menus that I keep touching the screen on the Kindle and being surprised when it doesn't react.  Jumping around to different locations in the book is easier on the Reader, too.  You touch the page number at the bottom of the screen and a slider pops up.  You can drag the slider forward or backward to jump to a few pages--or a lot-- forward or back.

There is no similar way to move around a book on the Kindle, or at least not that I've found.  In fact, the Kindle has done away with "pages" altogether, in favor of "locations" which seem to be about a paragraph or so.  So if you want to jump back ten pages to check what somebody said or some other detail, on the Reader you would just drag the slider back a half-inch and there you are.  but on the Kindle, you have guess how many "locations" back it would be and type in the number, which can be something like 10980.  And there are no numbers on the Kindle's "keyboard" so you press "Sym" to pop up a submenu of Symbols and Numbers, then use the arrow keys to move around the numbers and press Enter on the one you want, or the five you want in the case of a number like 10980.  You can, I've read, press Alt plus a letter to get to the numbers, but since the numbers aren't anywhere on the keys, you'd have to memorize which numbers match to which letter.  To summarize:  other than page-forward and page-backward, navigation on the Kindle is a pain.

Also, the Sony Reader store is specifically designed for the Reader (obviously), whereas on Amazon, it can be confusing to know if you're looking at the paperback, hardback, audio, or Kindle version of a book.  The reviews are also all lumped together on Amazon-- the dozen or so versions of Ulysses that are available for the Kindle all have exactly the same reader reviews, making it difficult to figure out what is the difference between them.

So.  Honestly, I have to say that even with my gripes about the Kindle, I still prefer it.  The screen is that much better.  But I still use the Reader, and I have to say that in many ways it is much more thoughtfully designed.

I'm obviously not a professional reviewer as this has been all over the place.  Sorry for the lack of organization.  but just in case you wanted to know.

Ulysses, chapters three and four

In the third chapter, Stephen is walking along the beach.  That's pretty much all the action, but he thinks about all kinds of things, and you get to try and figure out from one sentence to the next, sometimes from one word to the next, what he's thinking about.  The opening words of the chapter:  "Ineluctable modality of the visible."  They're never really precisely explained, although you begin to get some idea of what he's talking about because in the next paragraph he moves on the ineluctable modality of the audible.  He's thinking about perception, how we perceive things, and the unknowable contrast between appearance and reality.  Sometimes it's interesting, sometimes it's not.  He sees two midwives walking along the beach, carrying a sack, which he thinks must contain a stillbirth.  He thinks about his own birth, and his mother, and conception-- the moment of his own conception, and the immaculate conception. There's a long bit about his time in Paris. He sees a dog and its owners.  The dog sniffs a dog carcass that is lying in the surf.  Then he takes a piss and picks his nose.  Honestly, I missed the piss until it was mentioned in the commentaries.  I had to go back through the chapter to find it, and I'm still not entirely sure I've got the right spot.  Here's my best guess:  "In long lassoes from the Cock lake the water flowed full, covering greengoldenly lagoons of sand, rising, flowing."  Could be piss, if you ask me.  The whole thing is like that, and sometimes you can follow it, and sometimes you can't.  But picking his nose is obvious:  "He laid the dry snot picked from his nostril on a ledge of rock, carefully.  For the rest let look who will." 

It's quite lovely sometimes, although you're not entirely sure what he means.  Try this, his thoughts either while he's scribbling poetry on the back of Mr. Deasy's letter, or right after he's finished, I'm not sure which:  "His shadow lay over the rocks as he bent, ending.  Why not endless till the farthest star?  Darkly they are there behind this light, darkness shining in the brightness, delta of Cassiopeia, worlds.  Me sits there with his augur's rod of ash, in borrowed sandals, by day beside a livid sea, unbeheld, in violet night walking beneath a reign of uncouth stars.  I throw this ended shadow from me, manshape ineluctable, call it back.  Endless, would it be mine, form of my form?  Who watches me here?  Who ever anywhere will read these written words?"

Chapter Three ends the part where Stephen is the point-of-view character.  And by the way, Joyce didn't call them chapters, or number them-- that's all been added by commentators.  The only division Joyce made was to divide the whole thing into three parts, and what the commentators call "chapter three" or "episode three" ends the first part.  Chapter four starts part II, and we move on to Leopold Bloom.

While the style continues to be stream-of-consciousness, it's (so far) much easier to follow.  Bloom is fixing breakfast for his wife Molly and his cat.  He's quite sweet about the cat, which (at least for me) makes him an immediately sympathetic character.  When he realizes there is nothing for his own breakfast, he decides to go to the butcher's.  He realizes he doesn't have his key, but he would have to go back into the bedroom and wake up Molly to get it, so he pulls the door mostly shut and goes on to the butcher's.  (a key again!)  He enjoys the warmth of the sun.  He's wearing black for a funeral later in the day, and he notices how much the sun's warmth is magnified by the black clothes.  At the butcher shop, he stands in line behind a woman neighbor, and notices her hips.  He hopes he can walk home behind her and watch her walk.  At home, he fixes his breakfast, takes the mail up to his wife (which includes a letter from Blazes, who--according to the commentary--will become her lover), and brings his own letter from his daughter Milly back down to read while he eats his breakfast.  Then-- there's no way to say this politely, sorry-- he goes out to the outhouse and takes a dump.  The, um, product isn't described in detail, but the process is.  He is happy with his regularity, shall we say.  He reads the paper while he's there, then tears off half of a prize-winning story to wipe.  He checks to make sure that his pants are still clean, since he still has to go to the funeral.

the style in this chapter is quite different.  Bloom thinks in much shorter phrases, that come at you more abruptly.  he thinks about his daughter's ripening sexuality:  "O well: she knows how to mind herself.  But if not?  No, nothing has happened.  Of course it might.  Wait in any case till it does.  A wild piece of goods.  Her slim legs running up the staircase.  Destiny.  Ripening now.  Vain:  very."  Quite a change from Stephen's long abstract thoughts, that twine around from one subject to the next.  with both of them, though, the reading experience is the same.  You understand five or six lines, and then there's five or six (or twenty) lines that are incomprehensible, and then suddenly you pick up the thread again and there's another five or six lines you understand.  I can see why you have to read this several times before you start to get it.

To back up a bit:  this next semester, I'm taking a seminar on Jane Austen and ... wait for it... the History of Feminist Theory.  Sorry about that, because if you follow along here you know you're going to have to live through it with me.  As if I haven't already typed enough about that.  But it's a very small department, and there weren't very many graduate classes being offered next semester.  And given my driving schedule, there really were only those two classes that would work.  But we're supposed to take three courses per semester, which left me in a bit of a dilemma.  So I started poking around looking for something interesting to do for an independent study, and came upon one of the professors I had last year who is working on Ulysses.  I e-mailed him, he agreed, and voila.  But I need to get Ulysses read for the first time before the semester starts so I can be of some use to him.  I'm sure I'll have to read it at least once more before I can even begin to comprehend it, and who knows what else he'll assign me to read.  I'm looking forward to that more than either of the regular classes.

GS: then and now, part 2

So I'm not sure why I'm sitting down to type this out right now, because it knocked around in my head for the last six weeks of the semester, but here it is anyway.  I was trying to come up with a way to explain the difference between the way the study of literature worked back in the 80s and how it works now, and why I'm not all that happy with the new way, and the best i can come up with is to describe something that happened in my theory class this fall.

We were studying New Historicism, which is--roughly speaking-- going back and studying original historical documents like maps and advertisements and newspaper copy to see how they shed light on a particular work of literature.  Usually the idea is to show how the author misrepresented what was really happening, or distorted it, and then you examine why they might have done that.  The classic example is Wordsworth's famous poem, "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey."  The poem is about a walk that Wordsworth takes in the woods, where he sits at some elevated point and looks out over the River Wye and describes the beauty of the scene.  He talks about how he is trying to store up the beauty in his memory so that when he's back in the city, he'll have something to sustain him through the soul-draining dreariness of urban life.  It is noteworthy that although the title says that he is "above tintern Abbey," the Abbey doesn't appear in the poem at all.  So he is having this transcendent spiritual moment in the natural world that is unrelated to church and religion, which would be a pretty significant break for the time period.

It reminded me of a poem by Philip Larkin, "Church Going," in which the narrator, out on a bike ride, stops by a deserted church and meditates on the state of religious belief.  He wonders "When churches fall completely out of use / what we shall turn them into...shall we avoid them as unlucky places?"  But even though he thinks the churches no longer serve a purpose, he finds himself drawn to them:

It pleases me to stand in silence here;
A serious house on serious earth it is,
In whose blent air all our compulsions meet,
Are recognised, and robed as destinies.
And that much can never be obsolete
Since someone will forever be surprising
A hunger in himself to be more serious.....

so there you have Wordsworth, or his narrator, sitting a few miles above Tintern Abbey, aware enough that it is there to put it in the title of his poem, but not feeling that he needs to be in a church to meditate on what transcendence means.  And you have Larkin's narrator, pulling off his cycle clips as he walks into the empty, echoing chamber of a church, and trying to sift out what is still important about the religious experience the church represents, even though the church itself has become obsolete.  And then you have me, asking many of the same questions about my own experience-- which of the beliefs I was raised with have validity outside the narrow interpretations of my youth?

And that's what I love about the study of literature.  That feeling of connection, that you and somebody who was writing two hundred years ago, or fifty years ago, or in a blog ten minutes ago, have something in common, in spite of all the things that make you different. 

but the theory perspective, the new way of doing the study of literature, is to take the opposite tack.  To take Wordsworth's poem and show how what it really is, is a facile, self-serving homily that reinforces his position as a white male who takes advantage of the capitalist system to operate from a position of power, while consciously or unconsciously relegating women, minorities, and the working classes to marginalized, voiceless positions.  a New Historicist will go back into whatever historical records they can find about the place and see if they can reconstruct what Wordsworth actually saw as he sat looking out over the River Wye.  And according to at least one critic, what he would have seen was industrial waste and pollution, because the town where Tintern Abbey was located was the site of a coal factory that spewed smoke and pollution into the air.  Also the town had a number of poverty stricken homeless people or beggars.  So the fact that Wordsworth described the beauty of the scene without discussing the pollution and the poverty of the workers makes a statement about what Wordsworth thought was important and what he chose to say and not to say. 

It's just a choice about how you want to look at it.  You can choose to find the ways that Wordsworth or Larkin are similar to you, and have something to say that's relevant to you.  Or you can choose to pick away at what they say and show how it doesn't really have a universal meaning after all, because it ignores so much of the rest of what human experience was like.  The New Historicist is trying to prove that what Wordsworth and Larkin were saying is not universal, and certainly not Universal, that there is no transcendent human idea or experience that we can all relate to in literature.  But you don't have to think that their ideas are universal in order to find them relevant to your own experience.  I'm not claiming that their ideas are universal, I'm just saying that they mean something to me.  Not in some remote, detached academic way, but as one human being speaking to another through the medium of the printed page. 

I see the point of the New Historicist.  It's interesting to know what Wordsworth chose not to say, and it does tell us a lot about the state of mind of an educated white male who lived at the time.  But I don't see the point of getting up on a moral high horse and judging him for having the mindset that he had, for having cultural blinders on, like we all do (who knows what they will find interesting about our era two hundred years from now that we don't even notice).  We can't go back and change it.  It's something that's worth noting and then moving on.  It's not the place to stop and set up camp.  That hyper-critical, righteous indignation is not a place I want to live. 

So that's it.  I think.  It's why I don't fit in very well in grad school, and although I'm trying to approach the experience as an opportunity to learn a different way of thinking and to stretch my brain to work in a different direction, it's not really a direction I want to go.

Nothing to be said

I just dove into the wreck and pulled out this post from my first blog, which was about the British poet Philip Larkin.  Because I need it as background for the next post.  Originally posted 11/30/2004.

You have to imagine me, little miss southern small town evangelical, graduating from high school and heading north for my excellent college adventure. It was a huge adventure in a way-- I went so far, and all alone. After my mom dropped me off the weekend before freshman orientation, I didn't see anyone I had ever seen before for a very long time. But on the other hand, I went to an evangelical christian college (to start, I transferred later), so it wasn't as huge as it might have been. I was innocent in just about every way there is to be innocent. For one thing, although I read voraciously, I had read nothing other than the standard high school stuff-- Hard Times, MacBeth, A Separate Peace-- and loads and loads of science fiction.

So I spent my freshman year taking all the required courses. Then my sophomore year, I took a class on British Lit from the Romantics to the present. At the end of the course, the professor assigned each of us a modern poet-- not in the literary sense of "Modern" but a poet that was still living. I got Philip Larkin, who was still living then, but died shortly thereafter. I had never heard of him. I didn't think much of poetry at the time and I never did particularly like that professor, whose name I can no longer remember (Rollins? Rolle? Raleigh?) but somehow or another I took a shine to Philip Larkin. Various lines from his poems still surface in my mind even though its been 25 years.   "he chucked everything and just cleared off" ('Poetry of Departures'); "they fuck you up, your mum and dad," ('This Be the Verse'); "saying so to some means nothing; to others it leaves nothing to be said" ('Nothing to be Said') and so on. I had no idea until about a month ago that he and Ted Hughes represented two entirely different directions for English poetry, and are each thought to be the best representative of their "school." Well, I should re-word that. Maybe I Professor R. told us those precise words in that long-ago class, but I have no memory of it.

In case you've never run into him before, here is a bit of 'Poetry of Departures.'  I can't print the whole thing because it's still copyrighted, but you can probably google it if you want the rest.

We all hate home
And having to be there:
I detest my room,
Its specially-chosen junk,
The good books, the good bed,
And my life, in perfect order:
So to hear it said

He walked out on the whole crowd
Leaves me flushed and stirred,
Like Then she undid her dress
Or Take that you bastard;
Surely I can, if he did?
....

Ulysses, chapter two

This will be quick because I didn't get much sleep last night and I want to go to bed.  So Chapter Two starts off with no transition-- we are in a classroom, and Stephen is teaching spoiled, wealthy boys about Pyrrhus, the Greek king who won battles while sustaining such heavy losses that the term Pyrrhic victory comes from his name.  Stephen isn't exactly paying attention, and neither are the boys.  In between his questions and theirs, his mind wanders on all kinds of topics, sometimes coming back to his mother's death.  One boy starts to recite Milton's poem Lycidas, but instead of doing it from memory, he is cheating so blatantly that Stephen calls him on it, but he doesn't seem very mad.  The boys leave to play hockey.  Before they go Stephen asks them a riddle, which no one (including the reader) really understands.

Stephen stays behind with one of them who needs help on his math homework.  He isn't a particularly appealing kid, but Stephen helps himself be patient by imagining the kid's mom and the positive quality of mother love.  Then Stephen goes to Mr. Deasy's office, who is him employer.  Mr. Deasy pays him and Stephen must sit and listen as he lectures him on how to live within his means, how the jews are responsible for the downfall of england, how women are responsible for original sin, etc.  Then Mr. Deasy makes him sit and wait while he finishes a letter to the editor about cattle diseases that he wants published in newspapers-- Stephen knows some of the editors.  So Stephen says he will see what he can do.

after Chapter Two

OK, go ahead and laugh. :-)  I just finished chapter two, and I think chapter one must be the free space in Ulysses bingo.  It is going to be just as obscure and difficult as I had heard.  But maybe more fun along the way than I expected.  More tomorrow after I have a chance to read the commentaries.