not in kansas anymore

awkward etiquette question

Mon, 28 Oct 2019 20:26:39 GMT

okay, so, if I write someone a letter, and I'd kind of like them to write back -- is it totally gauche to include a self-addressed and stamped envelope?? Maybe with a card or sheet of stationery paper in it??

I think it might be nice to include such a thing because I'm sure most people don't already have envelopes/stationery/stamps etc on hand, and it might make writing back more fun (and more possible) if all they have to do is literally write a message and then send it.

But it also seems possibly rude because it's a lot more demanding?? Usually I send letters/cards not really expecting a reply at all, or at least not a reply in letter form (I understand that letters are very anachronistic, so most people reply to a letter by... texting me.) A self-addressed and stamped envelope seems like I'm burdening my friend with the expectation of a reply, and if they don't write back soonish, what if it sits on their desk mocking them for months?? I would be totally fine not hearing back, or hearing back months and months later, so I don't want to make it seem otherwise.

Basically -- would such a thing reduce stress, or add stress??

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In case you've been feeling bad about procrastination lately...

Sat, 28 Sep 2019 04:41:12 GMT

I just did a tiny bit more work on a personal craft project involving postcards, which I began.. three years ago, now, maybe? two? four? LAST time I worked on it, it had been so long that my friend had moved, and I had to tape a piece of paper with a new mailing address onto the three postcards I'd originally written.

THIS time, it's been so long that the cost of postage has increased! I've squeezed in some of those five-cent "helper" stamps, fingers crossed that it doesn't go up again by more than 3 cents between now and when I send them or I'll have to go buy more custom postage.

BUT, it will ALL HAVE BEEN WORTH IT, when my friend receives a series of perfectly-timed postcards from "Switzerland" purporting to detail Mary Godwin's travels in August 1814!!!

( whisperspace )

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Tue, 10 Sep 2019 03:25:22 GMT

I picked up Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England and encountered an anecdote that fascinated me:

One of adolescent Emily Shore's several intimates, Elizabeth, gave her a "chain made of her beautiful rich brown hair" before leaving England, which Shore considered a token of her friend's affection and looked forward to displaying as a sign of social distinction: "I have generally worn a pretty little chain of bought hair, and when people have asked me 'whose hair is that?' have have been mortified at being obliged to answer 'Nobody's.' Now, when asked the same question, I shall be able to say it is the hair of my best and dearest friend." (Marcus 57)

It didn't surprise me that friends might exchange hair jewelry (and Marcus has firmly established that these girls were "just" friends; this section is about the actual friendships that get overlooked when scholars are too eager to dwell on the "friends" who were lovers or partners) -- but it does surprise me somewhat that "bought hair" was a phenomenon!

I suppose, when hair jewelry is a common sentimental accessory, someone might wish to look like the other fashionable, interesting girls regardless of whether one has a beloved to memorialize. I would have thought that one might ask for hair from a less-interesting relative -- maybe a mother, if she doesn't have (or care much for) a sister? But it seems not!

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I finally finished a book!

Sat, 13 Jul 2019 20:29:50 GMT

I've been reading a lot, but not finishing a lot -- usually it doesn't bother me too much to have a bunch of things on the go at once, but 26 at a time is... high, even for me. Today I finished a really good edited volume about Charlotte Smith (and finished writing my lit review about her!), and I was so excited to update my reading challenge but it doesn't even count for even one of my prompts! Alas.

The book was super good though. Here are some of the quotes I typed up that might be interesting in a broader context:

"In 1913, Saintsbury believed Smith was ‘something of a person in herself, but less of a figure in history, because she neither innovates nor does old things consummately.’ Even the first extensive study of Smith by Florence Hilbish [in 1941], whilst highlighting many areas of innovation, arrived at the conclusion that she produced ‘little strikingly original’ material … the twentieth century was not yet ready to truly appreciate Charlotte Smith. This is evident in Ernest Bernbaum’s indifferent review of Hilbish’s work, which concluded that ‘much time and care have been devoted to it; whether deservedly, is perhaps questionable.’” (Duckling 216-7)

“To hear Charlotte Smith talk about her writing, you would think she was a drudge or even a hack, ‘compelled,’ as she now famously put it, ‘to live only to write & write only to live’ … Except that she is continually ordering or borrowing books… she seems to have her nose to a grindstone and her eyes shut to all literary value. … one suddenly discovers someone who is reading every principal piece of literature available and commenting sharply on the success or lack thereof of many contemporary productions.” (Curran 175)

“In English she returns again and again to Shakespeare, Milton, Pope, Thomson, Gray, Collins, Goldsmith, Sterne, and, her favourite contemporary poet, William Cowper. Among French writers her taste is highly eclectic, though she returns often to La Rouchefoucauld, Rousseau, and, especially, Voltaire… Her Italian favourites are Petrarch’s sonnets and Mestasio’s operatic arias… She knows no German, but is keenly aware of the distinctive place occupied by Goethe’s Werther in the literature of sensibility. There is one other literature in which she is not only proficient but, for a woman author, surprisingly forthcoming: Latin. She certainly admires Cicero, Horace, and Ovid, but she reserves a special place for Virgil.” (Curran 176)

“Very few Smith scholars work actively on both the novels and the poetry, and consequently we have been learning about two separate Smiths, each closely linked to the genre she writes in, neither closely linked to the other. Because the novel during the Romantic period is undergoing an extraordinary amount of change and innovation, as it moves closer to its modern form, editors of the novels (myself included) tend to focus on Smith’s techniques and innovations, her use of tropes and themes, her facility with genres and description. Conversely, because Romantic poetry in the Smithian tradition is so closely tied up with explorations of selfhood and subjectivity, memory and a personalized past, editors of the poetry tend to present it as reflective of a personalized state of mind, of ‘woman’s’ experience, treating its manifold themes and narratives as, finally, reducible to and manifested from Smith’s life. Is it all to do with inherent qualities of genre, or is it more to do with the expectations we as readers bring to different genres? Genre, it seems, carries a greater force in constructing our preconceptions of identity than has been recognized, and Smith is a case in point, a case we can crack by studying closely Smith’s style and techniques across genres.” (Labbe 5)

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Finally started reading Sharon Marcus's Between Women

Mon, 17 Jun 2019 03:52:18 GMT

I am REALLY enjoying it so far, but a fuller report of the good bits will have to wait until another time. For now, I simply couldn't let it go unrecorded that one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's granddaughters was named Christabel! Yes, like his very lesbian poem!!

I thought it was bonkers enough that anybody would name their child Christabel Coleridge in the 1840s, but for it to have been one of Coleridge's relatives just makes it even more wild, to me. Alas, she does not appear to have any siblings named Kubla Khan or Ozymandias.

EDIT: omg, for more great names, she was part of a fascinating-sounding ladies' literary society called The Goslings, in which her pen name was CHELSEA CHINA! (Because she was born in Chelsea, presumably, and because ???). These names are fantastic: QUEEN BEE. ALBATROSS. BLUEBELL. FROG.

I'm especially charmed by MAVIS, for Mary Avice Butler, because it's so clearly formed from the sound of her actual name, in exactly the way that nicknames sometimes happen. I'm also charmed by POTATOE.

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Female characters meme

Fri, 24 May 2019 05:15:14 GMT

Taking this from doctornerdington because it seemed like low-hanging fruit to re-establish a presence here on DW now that I am done travelling for a little while -- my ten favourite female characters, limiting myself to one character per source, in order of how rapidly I was able to think of them:

Is is Elinor Dashwood? It must be somebody from Austen, and it's not Emma or Fanny, and surely not Marianne (poor thing), and I think not Elizabeth... is there enough to Jane or to Georgiana for me to claim them as a favourite? Oh! Anne Eliot. I love her the best.
Cordelia Naismith, by Lois McMaster Bujold (Ekaterin Vorsoisson is also obviously dear to me but Cordelia saved my life)
Oh, obviously, if we're talking precious life-saving literary talismans from one's youth, Hermione Granger
Pepper Potts, actually, an under-explored personage of intense interest to me
Too much children's literature is springing to mind; Sarah Crewe from A Little Princess, Ella from Ella Enchanted... let's give it to Emily Starr, who encompasses all of them for me.
Emily Fox-Seton, by Frances Hodgson Burnett in The Making of a Marchioness (though Hester mesmerizes me more with each passing year) - technically not children's lit!
Rosalind, in As You Like It (This is where I started to scroll through my "read" list on Goodreads and remember all the grown-up literature I actually do read)
Cecilia, by Frances Burney (Evelina is a better novel than Cecelia I think, but I find Cecilia herself more interesting)
Aquilina, in Venice Preserv'd (it was gonna be Belvidera but then I remembered the Nicky-Nacky scene)
Lady Bracknell, in The Importance of Being Earnest (it turns out she's actually right most of the time?)
Lucy Honeychurch, in A Room with a View
Lavinia, in Ursula K. LeGuin's Lavinia and in the Aeneid
... oops, I'm well past 10 now, but what the heck, Hild in Hild and Katherine in Katherine are both magnificently dense characters, and now that I've made this list I don't want to cut people from it.

There. A stream-of-consciousness post which revealed to me that, actually, a lot of the really character-focused stuff I consume is about men. Or perhaps, a lot of the 18thC heroines I adore are all the same single character with different names, so it's hard to become attached to them individually?

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Reading challenge update

Fri, 03 May 2019 22:13:52 GMT

I've once again added a few more of my recently-completed books to my halfhearted bespoke reading challenge... Although I've felt like I've been 'mixing up' my reading a fair bit this year, in terms of books completed it's mostly Dorothy Sayers with a big of PG Wodehouse for colour. But I have no fewer than twelve books in progress (and six more in Libby that I intend to begin soon!) which are all something a bit interesting, with some potential to liven up reading statistics.

In the interest of following the spirit of this "challenge" a little more (rather than just jotting down my completed books every now and then and dispiritedly noting that they apply to almost none of my prompts): any recs for a book whose titles contain the words "Last," "Call," "Nightshade," or "Lounge"?

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Reading update

Sun, 24 Mar 2019 21:14:45 GMT

I'm not entirely sure if I'm actually intending to follow my self-created reading challenge or not, but I did update that list with the things I've happened to have read so far.

It's interesting how unusual it feels to me to have 'so many' 20thC titles on my "read" list. By that I mean, I've been putting through PG Wodehouse and Dorothy Sayers, which is really not a wide range of 20thC literature. Though it is fascinating, looking at their publication dates, to see that they're within just a few years of each other, and the Jeeves stories are closer to WWI chronologically. It hadn't occurred to me until just this moment to see them as sharing a core structure of "wealthy, dandyish gentleman and his butler live a life of unattached adventure", probably because they do extremely different things with that core structure.

Does this mean that there are more "dandy and his butler" stories from the 1920s? Was this a subgenre?? If so I would LOVE to read the ones that didn't famous!

whisperspace: Wednesday is my Very Long Work Day this term so Reading Wednesday will have to be a Wednesday-independent phenomenon for me, for a while.

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Mon, 11 Mar 2019 07:36:51 GMT

I have been reading The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought, and I'm currently dragging myself through a painfully dense and jargonistic chapter on religious debates that mean very little to me, and I was startled and alarmed by what seemed to be a colloquial sense of humour suddenly stuck into the middle of the following paragraph:

However close these doctrinal and devotional similarities, the two reli- gious phenomena diverged in precisely those areas most pregnant with polit- ical possibilities. To be sure, Pietists, like Jansenists, frequently appealed to the individual conscience or Gewissen and later evolved into ‘patriots’, but in Pietism’s case neither of these translated into adversarial politics. Unlike eighteenth-century Jansenism, which persisted in arguing Augustinian grace against Unigenitus, Pietism’s quarrel with Lutheran ‘orthodoxy’ was not really doctrinal. While Pietists may have wanted less emphasis on doctrine, they did not call for a different doctrine. Their de-emphasis of reason in favour of the heart gave Pietism the political consistency of pudding. That absence of polemical edge extended even to the domain of ecclesiology where, despite Spener’s inaugural condemnation of caesaropapism and a marked impatience with rigid hierarchicalism, Pietism did not really call for structural reform. Nothing in Pietism corresponds to Richerism or conciliarism.

I share basically so you can all sympathize with me that I am trying to make my way through this writing. Why is that the only sentence in 35 pages that seems like it was written by a human??

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True friendship is...

Sun, 10 Mar 2019 19:56:25 GMT

... both turning to the same part of a novel, to reveal simultaneously that you both wrote in the margins "no ethical consumption under capitalism."

Relatedly, I am falling completely in love with Ursula K LeGuin's The Dispossessed!

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Reading Wednesday

Wed, 06 Mar 2019 17:28:38 GMT

Cecilia, by France Burney: This has been my primary reading occupation since I began it mid-February, as sometimes happens when I sink into a long 18thC work: they move so slowly that I need to spend all my time on them to get anywhere. I've been gradually falling in love with Burney as an author who I can't believe isn't more widely read: Cecilia, as a character, is completely unlike Evelina, the protagonist of the other Burney novel I've read (titled Evelina), but Cecilia is equally fascinating and endearing to me.

(Incidentally -- I really like how the convention of naming books after their heroines imbues the book itself with something like personhood: one can talk about 'spending a nice afternoon with Cecilia' and it really does feel like, by picking up such a large book focused on just one person, one is spending time with the narrative person of Cecilia.)

The premise of Cecilia is unusual: Cecilia is an independently wealthy heiress (whose virtue is, naturally, matched only by her beauty) whose only problem on the marriage market is that her husband must take her last name or her wealthy estate will pass to the next person in line for it. The first half of the book takes us through a range of interesting suitors, but actually settles on a clear favourite roughly halfway through, and from there the plot is concerned with the difficulties of getting their marriage sorted out to everyone's satisfaction.

I'd highly recommend this novel to someone with the patience for a long 18thC work -- I think it demonstrates the satisfactions and strengths of this literary tradition really well! Also, I'd love to be able to talk about it with someone; maybe I can write a more spoilery post in the future.

Puttering along: I always have a few books that I'm making my way through a page or two at a time; these are The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Political Thought (up to p 133) and La Nouvelle Heloise, vol 1, which I am reading in French a few sentences at a time (up to p 49).

On the horizon: The downside of having a Good 18thC Novel on the go is that I make it through fewer distinct titles than when I'm reading more voraciously; I have a long backlog of things that I want to get to. For pleasure I'd like to do the next Lord Peter Wimsey or the next Jeeves & Wooster, but I think actually I will try to dive into some books I've hastily checked out on Japan. After spending the last several years agreeing with a friend of mine (who used to teach English in Japan) that we should go visit together some time when there was a deal on plane tickets, I have surprised myself by actually buying some extremely cheap tickets to Osaka, and we will be in Japan in April! So I don't have much time to orient myself to the country before we are there -- I'd like to have more knowledge than a teenage fondness for manga has provided me.

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IT IS FINISHED!

Fri, 01 Mar 2019 22:51:31 GMT

I have submitted chapter 1 of my dissertation to the department! It is "competent"!! I can stop writing now!!!

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#overlyhonestmethods

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 20:09:34 GMT

#overlyhonestmethods: The touchstone authors of this dissertation are Ann Radcliffe, Charlotte Turner Smith, Hannah More, and Mary Robinson, because I didn't feel like writing about men.

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oh yeah, I'm supposed to be writing a dissertation

Thu, 28 Feb 2019 02:59:44 GMT

This is an accountability post! I will update it until I have submitted my draft!

MY MISSION: produce a 9,000 word "competent draft" of a dissertation chapter by "March 1" (which I interpret to be, 'before noon on March 1').

10pm Feb 27: 5,069 words written; 93 todos remaining

I have, as of this moment, 5,069 words and a to-do list that is 93 items long. I have thirty-six hours with nothing else on my calendar. I can do this!!!

11:30pm Feb 27: 5,230 words written; 88 todos remaining

I'm already kinda fidgety and bored and Don't Wanna! Which is probably a symptom of the fact that, at this pace, I maybe Can't... I'm gonna worry less about the structure I originally thought this chapter was going to have, and focus on just generating words from the ideas I have lying around close to hand. Those are probably things that belong in the introduction anyway.

3am Feb 28: 5,626 words written; 81 todos remaining

Where has the time gone???

3:30am Feb 28: 5,711 words written; 77 todos remaining.

If I maintain this pace, I have 20 hours of work remaining -- impressively, both the words/hr and the todos/hr work out to a total of 20 to go! With 30 hours left on the clock, that is....... theoretically possible, but still very alarming.

3:45pm Feb 28: 7,303 words written; 77 todos remaining

I got a full night's sleep and took a slow morning, and then in the last hour I powered through nearly 1,600 words!!!! YES!!!!! This was mostly me remembering that I could just use my thesis proposal for the entire "describe what each chapter will do" part, but that TOTALLY COUNTS (and I had to edit the proposal so it sounded less proposal-y). I can probably eliminate some of those todos without actually doing them just because I don't need the words any more...!

9pm Feb 28: 7,564 words written; 75 todos remaining

It's going in fits and starts... mostly I'm discovering that I really like my research, so much so that I'd like to do it more slowly and thoroughly.

11pm Feb 28: 8,482 words written; 47 todos remaining

The word count is nearly within my grasp!! Basically all of my new words are in sections that I had not actually put into the to-do list (I am detecting some limitations in this highly-experimental to-do list methodology...) but I still have hopes and dreams that I can just........ cut a bunch of that stuff completely, if the new stuff can substitute for it.

It does seem like completion in the next 12 hours is very possible, but I am also very tired.

11:30am March 1: 8,482 words written; 47 todos remaining

I got a full night's sleep again, so it looks like I will be stretching the definition of "March 1" a little further than I'd originally intended... but all I have to do now is smooth out all the seams between the stuff I already have (a process which will surely bring me another 600 words naturally). Away I go!!

1:30pm March 1: 8,930 words written; 33 todos remaining

My new target is to submit by 4pm today; ideally, this means I will begin the formatting/post-processing of this draft by 2:30pm. This..... MAY be possible?? I've plowed through an impressive amount of polishing in the last two hours!

3:45pm March 1: 8,305 words written; 23 todos remaining

As this draft gets more and more competent, it also gets shorter and shorter and shorter....!!!! If I weren't hemorrhaging words in the polishing process I think I could put something together that was, overall, competent. But as things stand, I am, alas, forced to admit that it is not possible for me to meet this deadline.

Siiiiiigh.

I've contacted the relevant people in the dept to ask if they'd prefer to receive a draft that is on time but much too short, or something that is the correct length but a few days late. My advisor is pushing for the 'more time' option. We'll see!

4:30pm March 1: 8,305 words written; 23 todos remaining

Verdict from the department: "Word count is not of the essence. Wrap up with what you have and send it along." So I'm just gonna... flag the fragments as fragments, format all my headings and footnotes and citations, and call it a day. This is less useful dissertation-wise than extending the deadline would have been, but on the plus side I can play video games with my little brother tonight. Off I go!

5:45pm March 1: 8,713 words written; 22 todos left undone

IT IS FINISHED. I have sent it off to the department!! Right now I am more keenly aware of all the things that are not done, but it is, overall, "competent", and I honestly think I've done a lot of work on a very cool project!

I am also really looking forward to enjoying my weekend now, totally free of this task! Thanks for cheering me on during the last.... three straight days of flat-out writing, friends!

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Thinking about the performance of identity

Tue, 19 Feb 2019 08:43:21 GMT

I’ve been wanting, for a while, to “look more queer,” and the more I contemplate this as a direct goal, the more annoyed/fascinated I become at the disconnect between the signal I’m trying to send (“gay femme here!!”) and the actual actions I have to spend my time on in order to SEND that signal. Every time I see someone and love the way they look, I think to myself, "I wanna look like that! But without having to take any of the actions which lead someone to have that appearance."

By that I mean— if I want an eclectic and fabulous wardrobe with lots of accessories, I have to spend a lot of time SHOPPING. But I don’t particularly like shopping! It’s not a love of shopping that makes me gay! Or if I want a hip, queer haircut (rather than looking I belong in the movie for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire), I need to schedule regular haircuts. But making, and then showing up on time to, recurring boring appointments isn't gay! The things which would help me look queer actually have nothing to do with being queer. Taking clothes to a tailor isn't gay! Waking up early to have time to put on makeup isn't gay!

Maybe if I was already investing more time and errand-power in my appearance, it would be simpler, to just buy gayer things when I go shopping, ask for a gayer haircut when I go for my regular haircut, add a bit of sparkle when I do my morning skincare routine, etc. But as much as I like feeling cute, I just... think of myself as a low-maintenance person. I actually might be a shabby side character in a Dickens novel, I'm maybe-too-little-maintenance.[1] But right now I can go from unconscious to walking out the door in 10 minutes.[2] This pleases me! This should be reconcilable with people being able to detect that I am gay??

So far I've taken the strategy of, when I am no longer able to avoid purchasing new clothes, I make sure to pick something as queer-looking as possible, so that my low-maintenance no-thinking routine is at least drawing from a more fabulous base pool of options. Also I wear a trans flag on my lapel and a rainbow stud earring in one ear. This is working, slowly but surely, but even its effectiveness feels perverse somehow: I am no gayer than I was before, but I look gayer over time through semi-begrudging investment of effort in unrelated tasks.[3]

ALL OF WHICH IS TO SAY, I have been getting kinda into painting my nails, and I think I like it in part because the actual underlying work of producing the fabulous femme appearance actually suits who I am as a person. Once a week or so I can take an hour or two at 4am, with an audiobook on, to do something that feels like "crafting" (i.e., painting something fussy), all of which is already stuff I like to do. And then I have something very cute about my appearance to be proud of!! (See: my first complete manicure, left, of which I was VERY proud!!!) So I guess this is a problem I've "solved."

Nonetheless, it still feels odd, somehow, that "self-expression" clearly seems to require supporting labour that may or may nor be at all harmonious with a natural "self."

[1] At any point in time I only have one pair of shoes that don't have holes in the soles (my special shoes for when the ground is wet!). I routinely wear clothes that are missing buttons, because I never quite get around to sewing them back on. I would fix these things if I minded them! (I fix things in my apartment every day! I polish the bathroom fixtures several times a week so they are always shiny! I straighten all of my doilies before bed at night!) But I don't mind, particularly!

[2] I get food and coffee on the way -- if I place a mobile order while walking down my hallway before my phone is out of range of the apartment wifi, it will be ready for me exactly as I walk through the Starbucks on my corner, so I literally don't even have to break my stride.

[3] There's a comparison to be made to home decoration, actually, in the "restore a castle" vein -- beautifying slowly over time... that's the approach I've taken with my apartment, which has been accumulating bits of ribbon and lace and doilies to encuten its generic IKEA furniture. I still don't love shopping for home goods but they feel easier to acquire, and I definitely enjoy putting them around the house and looking after them.

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Shitpost February: false novels

Sat, 16 Feb 2019 13:01:00 GMT

I was reminded, the other day, of one of the most exhilirating and surprising stories I've ever read, Margaret Cavendish's Assaulted and Pursued Chastity (1656).

I'm attaching it to the "false novels" shitpost prompt because it has an incredibly misleading title and introduction. Well, ok, the heroine's chastity is occasionally pursued, but it is not successfully assaulted (so no trigger warning for assault, though do expect..... seventeenth century cultural norms).

It begins with, as I recall, an incredibly boring discourse on how women should never travel anywhere, especially not alone, and probably shouldn't even want to travel anywhere, and the moral lesson of this book is definitely to stay at home. My friends....... that is not what the rest of the story is about.

I don't want to spoil it here, because it's very short and the surprise is half the fun, but if you happen to know it or check it out, we can discuss in the comments! (Or you can ask for a 'good bits' version and maybe I'll finally get around to making a wikipedia page for it...)

You can download a PDF here: www.public-library.uk/ebooks/74/50.pdf -- it's only 40 pages!

~~today's whisperspace comment is a complaint that I can't set my mood to "assaulted and pursued" because for SOME reason the dropdown hasn't predicted that I will want this option...~~

[inspiration from Shitpost February]

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Shitpost February: eigenvectors

Fri, 15 Feb 2019 12:28:55 GMT

If I do two of these, does that make it more awkwardly apparent that I'm not actually doing it, or less? Really, I don't think I am ever going to make Dreamwidth my casually-post-stuff place, though I will probably keep trying for the next several years to make it a place I live.

Anyway, I picked the prompt "eigenvectors" because I've actually co-authored research that prominently uses eigenvector centrality, but then I realised that I can't explain what an eigenvector is because I don't really know.

Instead here is some interesting research (in blog form!) from someone who is willing to explain eigenvectors, and even apply them to eighteenth century literature.

Whenever I hear people in the digital humanities beginning to murmur about the hot new thing, word vectors, though, I almost feel despair at how little anybody talks to anybody else -- my mother did her dissertation on word vectors. This is a longstanding field! But that's in computer science, and nobody in literature wants to read a computer science paper.

~~This post brought to you by: My Career Strategy Of Reading Computer Science Papers Sometimes, To Incredible Acclaim~~

[inspiration from Shitpost February]

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Shitpost February: "my love of shocking the reader"

Tue, 05 Feb 2019 07:52:12 GMT

... will be really hindered by the exciting title page of my book.

(Though maybe it's fine, because the parts of this book that are the most bonkers don't actually make the title page!)

[inspiration from Shitpost February]

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I miss y'all, fandom friends!

Sun, 03 Feb 2019 04:32:53 GMT

I've been spending a LOT OF TIME messing around with future federated fandom, which is very exciting and all, but it's all happening in Discord and Hubzilla even though I'm supposed to be, like, co-moderating a dreamwidth community for post_tumblr_fandom. There's a LOT I'd love to say about my experiences starting up My Very Own federated social network instance, but I can't say it over THERE yet because it doesn't actually work well enough for me to invite other people to come play in it. (I still intend to ruin and/or delete it in the near future as part of my learning process.)

So Shiposting February is basically perfectly timed! I hereby pledge to deliver, as penance for my absence, a due quantity of shitposts.

Also currently helpful to me -- learning from jesse_the_k's helpful post here that I can write DW posts in Markdown! AND, changing the setup of my browser-redirect service (which I use so that when I try to go on facebook my browser just loads my to-do list instead) so that twitter and facebook redirect to DW instead.

So hopefully I'll see you around more over here!

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2017 Reading Review

Tue, 01 Jan 2019 05:40:15 GMT

Yes, that says 2017 in the title: I never actually got around to looking at my data from last year's reading, and now that this year is basically over and I want to see how my reading challenge affecting things, I figured it's now or never!

A Tale of Two Tests

( graphs! )

Not-Reading

( another graph! )

The Actual Books

( even more graphs! )

Conclusions

My primary reading goal for 2018, after a cursory skim of my 2017 reading, was to increase the racial diversity of what I read. Like, maybe I could read one book by a non-white author? I also wanted to build up habits of reading for pleasure.

Having seen this data now, I'm also curious to see if I was more female-focused with my 18thC reading after I was done with my fields exam.

How did those go? Tune in next time to find out!

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Oulfis' Bespoke 2019 Reading Challenge

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 10:18:25 GMT

Because life is meaningless without rules and spreadsheets, I've set myself a challenge to fulfill the following 50 prompts with my reading this year! Books can count for as many prompts as they fit.

Current Status: Reading lots of things, finishing very few of them.

Prompts( prompts! )

Books Read( books! )My goal with this challenge is partly to read things that I wouldn't otherwise have picked up, but mostly to push myself to think frequently about reading.

Wish me luck! And give me reading recs filling these prompts (or prompts for next year!) in the comments!!

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I want reading prompts!

Sun, 30 Dec 2018 09:51:11 GMT

This year was my first year since perhaps elementary school that I didn't have a school-mandated list of books to shape my reading habits. Obviously I couldn't live without rules, so I've been doing the Popsugar Reading Challenge! I've finished most of the 50 prompts and have really enjoyed figuring out creative ways to fulfill the prompts[1] (especially finding obscure 18thC titles for them![2])

However, I am not really as excited for the 2019 prompts. Several of them look really similar to this year's.[3] And in general, I think I might have gotten what I wanted out of the Popsugar experience. I didn't really spend time chatting in the forums, so it didn't matter to me that other people had the same list; all I really wanted was something to make a spreadsheet about, and something to search Eighteenth Century Collections Online for.

THEREFORE, I am thinking of making my own list, and seek wacky prompts from you, yes, you! What kinds of books should I try to find?

I particularly enjoy prompts like "a book with X word in the title": what are some words I should go on a scavenger hunt for this year?

[1] My proudest prompt-fill is The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making for "A book that involves a bookstore or library," for which the library in question is a dragon.

[2] The best 18thC find is "The Effects of Tyranny & Disobedience!" by Lawrence Lovesense, for "A book by an author with the same first or last name as you." (Yes, it's true, my last name is Lovesense. Please don't doxx me.)

[3] "Nordic Noir" this year and "a book set in Scandinavia" next year; "a book set on a different planet" this year and "a book set in space" next year...

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The end of grading is in sight??

Sat, 22 Dec 2018 12:41:59 GMT

I have just finished grading all my final exams!! Now I just have 12 more final essays to grade: I THINK I might not have to grade on Christmas Eve??? I stayed up all night and now I have to clean the house I was catsitting in, clean my apartment, pack for a three week trip, and fly to America! In six hours!!! BUT I can drop off the exams on campus with a clear conscience!

( whisperspace )

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Ch 51 of the Adventures of Roderick Random: Suddenly, A Bunch of 18thC Gay Stuff

Wed, 12 Dec 2018 07:55:39 GMT

I've been reading Tobias Smollett's 1748 book The Adventures of Roderick Random, and was really surprised to find, buried in chapter 51 as yet another mildly amusing mishap as the protagonist Rory fails repeatedly to make his fortune, an explicitly gay Earl whose attempts to seduce Rory are presented as annoying but not disgusting.

( a slightly abridged ch 51 under the cut, with the extra-gay bits bolded )

The whole thing is kind of a wild ride! There are two aspects that particularly interest me:

1. Rory and Banter both seem to be much more upset about Earl Strutwell's false claims to wealth and influence than they are about his queerness. Gay sex seems both a known phenomenon and relatively unthreatening. Even when Rory thinks that Strutwell is worried that Rory has gone gay due to exposure to the continent, I get the feeling that Rory gives his anti-gay tirade mostly in order to please his patron, rather than due to sincere feeling. After all, we hear much more of Earl Strutwell's defense of gay sex than we do Rory's rejection of it! And Rory doesn't reject it in his own words, but rather recites a stock satire.

2. In the middle of all this, Rory flies home to his childhood friend Hugh Strap, with whom he shares lodging, finances, life schemes, and often a bed, and feels absolutely no need to reflect on or justify the love that the two of them frequently confess for each other. In retrospect he's able to see something kind of gay about Earl Strutwell's hand-squeezing, but this doesn't make him suspicious of physical or emotional intimacy with men in general.

I don't have any conclusions yet, except that this is way more chill about gay sex than anything I expected to read from 1748!

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Practical advice from the French Revolution

Sat, 08 Dec 2018 06:14:19 GMT

Preface

In classic 18thC style, this post now has two prefaces. This was my second-most-popular tumblr post, inspired by the following set of posts to which I responded in the tags:

I remain less than completely comfortable with the current Guillotine Discourse, and my own contribution to it. (It's hilarious! but if you joke about wanting to do something often enough, sometimes you then go do it, as the French Revolution itself tells us???)

Original Post

I got two separate requests for this after my tags on this reblog, and if I’ve learned anything from vaguely gossiping about the revolution with 18thC scholars, it’s to Give The People What They Want! Therefore, I am pleased and alarmed to present to you now:

~ * DOs and DON’Ts of GUILLOTINING the RICH * ~

by Monsieur Laurence Racine-de-la-Liberté

DO place blame on the people who directly benefit from your exploitation. It’s not hard to find them. They will try to convince you that it is hard to find them, but you can literally just look at how much money they have (way too much). A really quick method of wealth redistribution is to move in to a rich person’s house.

DON’T leave the rich with no “out”. Your goal is a better world, not a gigantic pile of heads. When cornered, the rich get volatile and dangerous. There needs to be a level of reform which is sufficient for a formerly-rich person to be accepted back into society, and NOT as a second-class citizen. Like, if they stop being rich and start doing chores, you don’t have to also give them the shittiest chores.

DO take meaningful action against those with the power to create change. Sassy tweets accomplish basically nothing. Well-organized voting accomplishes some things. Credible threats to your opponents’ power base (whether that’s throwing roof tiles at them or claiming their houses as your own) accomplish… mostly a shift in the Overton window which makes your opponents suddenly eager to concede to the demands of the “nice” activists, but that’s not nothing.

DON’T guillotine too many people at once. Just because you guillotined five people yesterday, that doesn’t mean guillotining ten today will make you twice as successful. Meaningful action can only be targeted against individuals or systems, not against nebulous social groups; avoid mass guillotining at all costs! Periodically consider whether you may have reached the limit of the number of people who need to be guillotined. Again, your goal is a better society, not an infinite supply of heads.

DO get excited making up cool new names. This is a new world! There’s a lot to be excited about! Rename yourself “Strive with a Will for the Republic” or “Radish”! Be the rad moniker you want to see in the world! Invent new holidays while you’re at it! A new calendar! Declare today Day One Of Year One! A society becomes real through people living its values: embrace your vision enthusiastically.

DON’T get excited about cool new conspiracies. The real causes of the world’s problems are not going to be one lady’s diamond necklace. They’re going to be way weirder and more complicated than something you can rant about at a party. This very list of advice, for example, is full of pithy quips which are too brief and simplistic to be remotely useful. Spend five minutes fact-checking any headline that gives you a strong burst of feeling before you tell someone else about it.

DO acknowledge the validity of your complaints. This rule operates on two levels: first, the aristocrats’ shit is bad. They’re going to pretend it’s not, but don’t buy it. Second, sometimes your shit might be bad. If you’ve been trying out something new for a while, but people still can’t afford to wear pants, you have to be able to say that the new system isn’t working either, and leave room to change your mind about what to do. (See also: leave the rich with an “out”; don’t guillotine too many people at once.) If honesty is not the best policy, only liars and scoundrels will have heads.

And the number one rule from the French Revolution:

DON’T make decisions while hangry!
I know, I know: there’s no fucking bread and air conditioning hasn’t been invented yet, and you’ve been drinking a lot of coffee at the revolutionary clubs. But it is totally impossible to judge whether your response in a conflict is “proportional” or “helpful” when you’re hot, caffeinated, and hangry. Have some ice cream. Take a cool shower. (Remind the rich that it is in their best interest to provide you with ice cream and a cool shower, in the short and long term, since you are the one with the guillotine.) Maybe try describing your course of action out loud to a neutral party before you do it. If someone starts asking logistical questions about mass graves, take a step back and have a snickers.

#I am kind of serious here #and also kind of no #please do not get me arrested for inciting murder-via-guillotine #but good luck with the revolution #also #the contemporary interest in the guillotine #as a shorthand symbol for political fed-upped-ness #is genuinely fascinating to me #so please do send me any guillotine tidbits you might encounter on the wilds of this internet #I would be interested in compiling them #the french revolution #the guillotine #dos and donts of guillotining the rich

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