Still working on the dissertation (hence the sporadic updates).
For the longest time, I couldn't learn songs on guitar. I wrote a lot of stuff, but I couldn't learn other people's stuff. I certainly couldn't play them AND sing at the same time. Lately, as a break from writing, in order to stay sane, I'm learning songs.
Songs I can now play (and sing):
"Rhiannon" Fleetwood Mac "Sunday Bloody Sunday" U2 "Plush" Stone Temple Pilots "All Along the Watchtower" by Bob Dylan (the version I play uses Dylan's chording and modifies the pace) "Barracuda" Heart
Katee Sackhoff just reposted an interview she did (with Famous Monsters TV). As you know, I'm very interested in her journey playing Starbuck on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica, and though she only says a little about it, what she does say is fascinating. So, as usual, I hope no one gets too mad that I'm re-reposting non-original material, here. Have a look:
I hope nobody involved gets mad at me, but I wanted to post some stuff here about the A M A Z I N G end credit title for Battlestar Galactica: The Plan. It's an incredible piece.
If I had a penny for every time I've typed a comment to a student or peer to read a sentence or two out loud so they can hear the awkwardness of it, I'd have filled up one of those water cooler jugs by now. I believe very strongly that an ear is ten times the editor that an eye is. So, it made me very happy when Scott Westerfeld (my all time favorite YA author) talked about how he and his wife edit each other's work in progress during this interview with Romantic Times magazine.*
He says,
-- *= I sincerely hope they won't mind the repost--it's too fantastic an interview not to.
I think that it is incredibly important that we recognize that being a gay teenager is horrific. Though things are slowly, haltingly, getting better (at least in terms of awareness of the problems if not in any other sense), life for a gay teen is horrible whether in the closet or not. They face problems not just in the heterosexist culture that surrounds them, but also from the outmoded concept that the child is tabula rasa...that a child isn't born gay but somehow becomes one through intervention of some sort (the most common thoughts of the unthinking stereotypers seem to be "bad mothering = gay child" and "contact with gay person = gay child" which is enough bad logic to make anyone scream).*
This intersection creates a special hardship for younger gays who want to come out. This rhetoric that circulates that somehow being gay is "just a phase" astounds me--I have no idea how that logic would work, either--and yet they face it every day.
I was quite happy, then, when this story was published. Though I'm not incredibly happy with the idea of asking the people you interview to out other people as part of the interview, but otherwise this article is really good. I plan on using it as part of my discussions when I get to LGBT literature later this semester.
Joy Behar did an interesting segment on this, too. I think she spends too much time talking and not enough time listening, but it's not bad. Have a look:
The bottom line? As critics of children and adolescent literature, or parents, or educators (or educators of educators), we absolutely have to try to find ways to make sure that issues of tolerance are talked about openly and explicitly in our classrooms, our homes, and our scholarly work. It is never easy, but it is absolutely necessary.
-- *=That genius scene in Bryan Singer's genius film, X-Men 2 where Bobby's mother asks him "have you ever tried not being a mutant?" sort of sums it all up.
