Topic: Posts

One Star Reviews.

This is really amazing. I mean really. Let’s call it, Literary Criticism in the Trenches.

Thanks Jeff for the link.

Enjoy Everyone!

What do you call a Freudian Slip, if it happens when you’re reading. A Freudian Shuffle? Because I don’t have the time or the energy to do better at this point, here are two recent textual slips/shuffles that I’ve made of late. I promise I’ll be back with real content at some point.

I was writing a paper about depression, but kept writing oppression instead.

Just now, I was reading a blog that mentioned “Delay” (as in the former house majority leader) which I totally read as “_Delany,” as in Samuel R. Speaking of which, I need to add Delany material to my Amazon Wish-list (which I’m not going to link to here out of taste, but you can feel free to find it on your own.)

Cheers, Sam

Because I don’t really have time to do a pod-cast, or any kind of internet radio show (and frankly if I were going to play music I probably wouldn’t find much in a pod-safe directory). So I’m going to continue blogging as I would otherwise, and offer you a playlist, as a sort of Intellectual Radio Program. All the thought without any of the pesky listening.

We’ll call it Radio Marrakesh, because I think that’s what I’m going to call any radio show or radio-like show that I do. So here’s the playlist. It’s a sort of angry political (in my mind) bunch of songs (with a little humor), that I’ve been listening to for a while. Powerful songs, which have a coherent political statement but also have great emotional power. I don’t quite have the order worked out, so don’t blame me there.

Title - Artist - Album

• Palaces of Gold - Martin Carthy - The Collection
• Ballad of Harry T. More - Sweet Honey in the Rock - The Women Gather 30th Anniversary
• Samson and Delilah - Spencer Bohren - Carry The Word
• A Prince Among Men - Andy Irvine - Rain on the Roof
• Time to Ring Some Changes - Richard Thompson - Starting as Henry the Human Fly
• The Monument (Lest We Forget) - Andy Irvine - Rain on the Roof
• Joe Hill (Ballad of, to the Tune of John Hardy) - Phil Ochs - Montreal, Canada - 22 October 1966
• Hard Times of Old England - Steeleye Span - All Around My Hat
• Joe Hill (I Dreamt I Saw Joe Hill Last Night) - Joan Baez - The Best of Woodstock
• Wasn’t That A Time - Pete Seeger
• Viva La Quince Brigada - Pete Seeger
• Five Years - Tom Smith - Debasement Tapes
• Raggedy - Pete Seeger - American Industrial Ballads
• Another Clearing Time - Stravaig - Movin’ On
• Pharaoh - The House Band - Green Linnet 20th Anniversary Collection
• The Pit Stands Idle - Housebound - Groundwork
• Ballad of William Worthy - Phil Ochs - All the News that’s Fit to Sing
• The White Collar Holler - Stan Rogers - Between the Breaks… Live
• I Ain’t Marching Anymore - Phil Ochs - I Ain’t Marching Anymore

So There you go. Enjoy

Cheers!

So this isn’t link rot in the normal sense, I’m not going to post about how links age on the internet, because frankly I bet you could care less. No, I’m going to post about links that have been sitting around in my “you should post TealArt entries about these articles” folder (ok so it’s a mental categorization, shoot me.

We Are Not OK This one from June 17th. About gay male community issues, relating to drug usage, HIV. I really enjoyed the authors analysis that: > One of the questions I most frequently ask residents is “What is it that you wanted to do sexually that you could only do when you were high?” You might suppose that the answer would be an array of sex acts so extreme and kinky as to be unimaginable. And for some this is true. However, for most, their fantasy is no more than to get fucked and to connect with another man. Albeit in all the wrong places and all the wrong ways, these guys are basically looking for love.

Spot on. People keep saying things like that, pretty soon I’ll be out of a job. But seriously, I think the guy nailed it here. This is why projects like WWOTB are necessary, this kind of analysis makes what I’m interested in worthwhile. I need to go back over the research, but my sense is that gay men, for a multitude of reasons, are not exceptional in their problematic ability to relate to each other/other men (the leader in this little sub-group is Peter Nardi, who’s work is fascinating and really rather good. So there.) Nardi’s work is so interesting, it’s a good thing he’s at a college that doesn’t have a Ph.D. program, elsewise (my new favorite word), I’d be tempted to apply to study with him, and I’m not sure I can deal with that kind of disciplinary shift. (Though in fairness, I’m practically doing sociology at this point anyway, so it wouldn’t be too shocking, never the less, despite any griping that may go on, I’m pretty happy where I am.)

Bloggers Need Not Apply Seems, search committees for academic jobs google people as part of their process, and people’s blogging has interfered with jobs and what not. I worried about this for a while, but then it became a non issue, or something. TealArt isn’t a typical blog: I don’t complain about people or shitty institutional situations and I don’t share any information that could be potentially identifying. The most incriminating act that I commit on TealArt is blathering, and unreviewed academic work, which at this point isn’t a big deal, and frankly I think TealArt is more of an asset than a potential harm. Shrug, the article is good though. Enjoy it.

I’m feeling all bloggy, so expect a spree in the next few days/hours. Cheers… Sam

Wow.

Really, that’s all I can think to say. Last night, I went to see Serenity, the Joss Whedon movie that was made as a part of his late lamented Firefly TV series.

Wow.

I’ve known that it was going be be heart wrenching for a while, one of my friends got to see it in a sneak preview in late May. But somehow, amazing actually, she didn’t give me a spoiler. I totally would have broken.

I usually attach to characters, and am completely broken when characters I love die. When I watched it, I completely didn’t react, it wasn’t real. Until later, and then it was.

Despite the heartbreak, the movie was perfect, basically. I have a few complaints. Like, why there wasn’t more Chinese spoken. (One premise, is that humanity was united by an anglo-sino alliance, so the characters pepper their speech with chinese phrases, much like I use yiddish.) Why did you have to do it Joss, why?

Other than that… amazing. I really think that it was a pretty damn perfect job with the movie. I don’t know what more to say, so there.

Cheers, sam

This document is a general collection of all sorts of notes, created by and deemed relevant to my life, my studies and my pursuits. The intention is that this document will be much like the notebook that I have up until quite recently carried around with me damn near every where. While I realize that this is something of a foolish transition (given that my laptop is sizably larger than it’s analog equivelent.) I think that it will be good to digitize this age old kind of data concomeration, given my habit of taking my laptop with me so much of the time.

In past notebook’s (which I have, in perfect Sam form, dragged behind me every time I’ve moved, despite the fact that once finished I almost never go back and reference old notebooks.) I’ve frequently left the first few pages blank with the hope of keeping some sort of table of contents. This is almost always a useless expenditure of time, as I a) never keep such an index, and b) have a pretty good time remembering where specific notes are. Yet, that’s precisely the purpose of this kind of digital transition: to keep a more organized and relationally linked database of notes.

To be fair this isn’t the first iteration of a digital notebook that I’ve made. I used a program called Notational Velocity, which has worked quite well for me. Basically it’s digital card file with a handful of nifty features, spell check, search-ability, and an always on instant save, which make it totally worth it. Unfortunately, as I began to use the program more there were a couple of features that I really felt like I needed. The first one was the ability to edit more than one note at a time (useful when taking field notes for ethnographic methodologies. The second was a new way of organizing titles/filenames. I’m usually really good about creating descriptive file names that will lump together when listing files by title. It’s helpful for keeping groups of files organized, but slightly less helpful when trying to determine what’s in the file, because the name tends to be really long and less specifically descriptive. So at Chris’ recommendation I got VoodooPad, a program which basically uses the idea of a Wiki, to organize a note taking program. It’s sort of hard to imagine until you get used it. Then it’s wonderful.

In the tradition of leaving the first few pages of a notebook blank, and then having the problem of setting the mood for a notebook and starting a new notebook. I’ve decided to use this “page” (and the entry teal that it will become) to discuss a more basic day to day aspect of my operation and tendency at the time of my writing as of.

At this point I use the computer for almost all of my writing and data creation and collection. Because so much of the content of my classes is digital and I’d just as soon not create hard copies, I have my computer with me all the time. So I suppose that it makes a great deal of sense to avoid using a computer for note taking. At one point I thought that having a truly portable computing solution would give me the chance to write more effectively because I could write electronically (which is really what is most comfortable for me anyway), anywhere. Seems the problem was that writing isn’t the kind of vocation that one can just pick up and put down at any point. For that I needed to learn how to knit. The fact is that the computer doesn’t really let me do anything that I wasn’t already doing with a notebook, it just has the potential to not drive me crazy in the long run.

So there you have it. You may think that all this portability would actually mean that I’d post to TealArt More often. Well that would be nice wouldn’t it? But alas, that’s not how it seems to work most of the time. I guess that you have to take what you get. Cheers.

At the eery end of my summer I had obligatory feelings of guilt at the fact that I accomplished very little. I have continued a bad habit of reading very little, I didn’t really write anything of consequence. I didn’t do much work for TealArt. I didn’t give any attention to projects like “Where We Ought to Be,” and I didn’t really attend to psychology projects.

That said, I think I would like to point out a few really rather valuable accomplishments that I made. I knit a lot. Discovered that I could follow a pattern (well, at least those written by Alice Starmore), and I discovered that I actually like making socks, and that I have a great love of patterned work (even if I still don’t really care for cables. I learned a lot about myself as a teacher, both through my experience of working in the yarn store and as I helped people with computer issues. Maybe I could have made more money or published more, but really, that’s ok.

The other lesson that the summer has offered me, comes I think from the contrast of my summer with the way my life is turning out at Beloit. My classes (a normal load!) challenge me, but don’t really overwhelm me. I’m working on a number of academic related projects that inspire and engage me, without petty. And I really like my psych major, in a way that I haven’t before.

At this moment, I’m daunted not by the amount of work that seems to pile up on my plate each night, or the fear of what’s to come, but rather, the lenght of the semester. I’m left wondering: will I remain interested in all these classes, projects, and commitments in the middle of november? Will that be enough?

Time will tell. But in any case it’s good to be back

I wrote this entry a number of weeks ago, and then didn’t post it, and then I my offline weblog editor needed to be registred, and one thing lead to another. So here it is. Don’t hold it up to the usual Standards. Please. Cheers, and check back soon.

I had this little promise with myself going, where I told myself that I wouldn’t post here again about knitting stuf until I did some critque kind of post. So here it is. Critique requires an active enguagement with other work, if not dirrectly in the piece, then as a secondary effect of interaccting with other work and ideas. I’ve become woefully bad at this in the past few months, and I suppose that’s why I haven’t been writing. I’m going to make a mental note to fix this. Being a bad citizen of this owrld, I haven’t read Harry Potter, not any of them, so that might be a project to embark upon in the near future, and I have all of them with me, so now is as good a time as any.

I have been watching television a bit more than usual which I suppose doesn’t say very much given that I go months without watching even a spec. Now I’m not turnning into a mindless numb, but I’ve found, TV, is helpful in the persuit of knitting. I think I’ve gotten so used to knitting as a background feature to the rest of my life: durring meetings, while reading, while waiting, while riding in the car, while listening to lectures, etc. that I have a hard time devoting all of my concentration to a knitting project, so now, when I don’t have to concentrate on other things, if I’m just knitting I get antsy. So there I am.

I’ve been watching a lot of Farscape. Seems’ the internet connection where I reside now, has a Usenet sever that carries binaries. Which I think is mostly responsible for the fact that out of 140 gigs of storage avilable (40 from the ipod, and 100 on this powerbook) I have about 10 free at the moment. I might be able to eeke out another one or two out of the ipod, but needless to say, I need more stoarge. Firewire drives, here I come.

But about the televison. Here’s what I’ve been watching: Farscape seasons 1 and 3 (coincidence, haven’t found any season 2 yet, and wouldn’t have space for it if I could). Stargate (both series, I’m almost compleatly up to date, having seen all of Atlantis, and all but a very few SG1), and I’ve been rounding out my Babylon 5 collection, because I feel I’ve been remis.

On my list of things to get: There was a spell of really good episodes of B5 in the middle of the third season, and I’d like to have those. I also want to get Firfely, because those episodes are the kind of thing that I’d really like to have in my collection (but I have friends who have the DVDs and given my lack of hard drive space, that puts that on hold for a while. And so that’s that.

As I watch more Farscape, I find it reminds me a lot of Firefly. They both adopt a “wild” view of space, that is where governments don’t or can’t extend control over interseteller territory for the most part, and starships with a reasonable sized cast operate. Also I think there’s a definate similarity between Malcom Renolds and John Crition. They’re both spunky leaders who don’t dake themselves terribly seriously, and I find that to be an attractive characteristic in TeeVee science fiction. I’m not sure that I like it as much when it’s written, but that’s just me.

When someone asks me “how was your day/week/summer/year” I, like everyone else say, “pretty good on the whole.” I mean really now, is there anything else that someone can say?

But that makes for a really boring essay, but I when I think about the quality of my days, weeks, summers, and years, I think I tend to think about them in terms of what I’ve produced.

I’ve had a good summer on the whole, but I haven’t gotten much writing done, I’ve completely neglected a minor academic project. At the same time, I’ve grown a lot as a spinner, I’ve discovered and developed a my inner pedagogical side, and I have a basket of some pretty cool knitted objects to my credit.

I think that I’ve produced about as much this summer, as I did the summer I wrote the first 42% of the book. (That is the summer before my junior year of high school for those of you keeping track at home). But of course it’s in a much different form.

That summer, when I was done, I had an intellectual creation which, especially in retrospect isn’t that great, but seemed really promising at the time. When I was writing Circle Games, I thought that I had a half decent shot at getting it published, and I thought that one way or another that professional/freelance writing would be a large part of my career both in the long term and in the short term (during the end of high school and college). That’s something that hasn’t quite panned out, and while writing remains a large part of my future career plans, it no longer has that sort of vocational aspect that it once did. I don’t get home at night, and say, “gee, I hope I can get a few moments to write tonight.” On the other hand, in many ways, life and days at school revolve around writing, so maybe that’s a healthy reaction.

I guess ultimately the difference between my knitting and my writing, is that my essays and the book had, at least on the conceptual level, the ability to live on and beyond me. Even on the much smaller scale of this blog, I have the possibility of affecting people by these words who I don’t know and have no connection to except the words I’m putting together. The knitting is different. It’s artistic and creative all the same, but the effect is different. I affect myself, as knitting is entertaining, and I affect the people I teach knitting to, and the people I who wear things I’ve knitted. But it’s much more direct, more concrete, and finite. Especially in response to the “how was your day/week/summer/year” question.

Being who I am, with the analytical lens that I seem to have, I think I should draw attention to the gendered aspect of this comparison. I think knitting has been a women’s activity, not particularly because of the impact of the industrial revolution (but I won’t deny that that has had a huge impact on knitting), but because of the more ephemeral aspect of the craft. Since the advent of agriculture, women’s work has tended towards activities that didn’t have an enduring quality, and I think knitting is very much a product of this trend. I mean of course there are lots of factors at play here, but I think this idea should be incorporated into gender and knitting related historical analyses.

In a related tangent, I’m going to read a book called “No Idle Hands; A Social History of American Knitting.” It looks really cool. I’ll get back to you on this.

So there. And I didn’t even tell you what I’ve been knitting, so stay tuned.