Baby Sister
My youngest sister Emily (I was 19 when she was born) let me take her pictures today outside to test using my new flash outdoors as fill flash, she is so beautiful. You can see the rest of the pictures on on Zenfolio.
Drama Sky
Even the sky is full of drama, but this is of the beautiful sky. I’m not afraid to play with a photo but I’m always amazed at the color that is tucked away inside a picture that a tweak pulls out.
Another semester, another pile of books…
1/7/09: New Books: These are my books so far for my two grad classes this semester. Richter’s The Critical Tradition is for my literary theory class and the others are for my 20th century lit class (top to bottom): Tillie Olsen’s Tell Me a Riddle, Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, Arnow’s The Dollmaker, DeLillo’s White Noise, and Braverman’s Labor and Monopoly Capital
Pass It On
I’ve written about Tim O’Brien’s book The Things They Carried on this blog before as I’ve used it in a book club and also presented a paper about one of the short stories in conjunction with Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. O’Brien’s ideas about truth and story telling have had a big impact on how I write and how I read. In fact, the ideas I started thinking about while reading and writing about this work, in some ways were the seeds for the ideas that have grown into my thesis about social identity formation and the question of what happens when the society that creates a person, discards that person or makes them into monsters.
Anyway, when my brother Tim was in Iraq as a soldier and we talked about war and how painful it was, we found there was this strange way that he could relate to my difficulty dealing with my son’s illness and I could relate to his difficulty dealing with combat issues. I sent him a quote that had always stayed with me from The Things They Carried:
It’s a hard thing to explain to somebody who hasn’t felt it, but the presence of death and danger has a way of bringing you fully awake. It makes things vivid. When you’re afraid, really afraid, you see things you never saw before, you pay attention to the world.
I went ahead and sent him a copy of the book and he read it and was really impacted by it so he gave it to a friend and told him to give it to someone else when he was done. My brother is home now, stationed up in Alaska, but he wrote me this the other day:
I don’t know if you remember me telling you I gave that book you sent me in Iraq to another guy to read and told him to just pass it on to the next soldier, well he did and over 30 guys read it and some how yesterday it made it back to me, just thought I’d tell you. I thought it was pretty cool.
I have to say I think it’s pretty cool as well, one book, passed from soldier to soldier, and coming around full circle. These men and women carry so many things on their shoulders that never get weighed in with their gear and their pack weights, O’Brien looks at those things unflinchingly and acknowledges the ambiguity of war–the horror and the honor–but focuses on the terrible cost to those walk into war one person and come out the other end forever changed.
NOTE: My brother told me later that he had the first guy put a nick in the cover with a knife and to tell each person after to do the same, so the cover has 30 nicks in it. He put his name and unit in the back and it made its way back from Iraq to where he is in Alaska.
New Beginnings–Happy New Year!
Today is the first day of 2010 and I love new beginnings. I know some people argue that every day should be a new beginning, and I certainly agree with that. But there is something about starting a new year that I enjoy, much like starting a new semester in school. My old calendar gets put away with its history of paper due dates, project info, and deadlines and my new calendar is fresh and empty and ready to go. There is a sense of putting the past behind me as I leaf through the pages of my old calendar reading entries on doctor’s appointments, failed surgeries, new procedures–it’s done, it’s over, it’s time to move forward and see what the new year has to bring with it. It may be overly optimistic to hope for a better year, it may be a harder year, but it’s a clean slate. I wish everyone a coming year full of new beginnings and of living a life that is true to yourself.
Fresh Face, Fresh Start
Part of my coming New Year’s resolution, really probably more like a large chunk, has to do with writing. I write a lot. I write journals and responses and papers and abstracts and am moving into writing my thesis proposal, and etc. I also am fairly regular at keeping my son’s health blog updated as so many people want to keep up with how he is doing. So it is a bit odd that I would want to add “write more” to my New Year’s resolutions! However, I do need to write more, or perhaps more specifically, I need to write more productively and consistently. I actually take my resolutions seriously and I usually do fairly well at keeping them. I try to be realistic, this year, I’m going to try to be a) realistic, and b) more specific…so instead of “write more” I want to think about what I want to accomplish and what I need to do to accomplish it. So, for instance, I need to make progress on my book, so maybe “Accomplish one chapter a month” will end up one of my goals. One chapter doesn’t sound like much, especially considering the type of book it is, but it is realistic given what I have on my plate. “Finish thesis proposal by end of Winter semester” is a doable and important deadline, and so forth. Specifics. “Revive Walking the Wall, journaling is important in the creative process, and it is okay if it becomes a semi-photographic blog.” That is certainly one goal, so I’m working on changing the look, updating the sidebars, and other maintenance things like that this week. I’ll keep thinking about those goals and will post on that in the New Year.
Reading
I’m in the process of cleaning out my desk/office space in order to reclaim my kitchen table and all the space in the office. It is amazing to me what gets accumulated that I literally haven’t looked at in years–I am throwing away years worth of obsolete computer equipment, random cords and plugs, and such. I have a huge pile for Goodwill and another pile to sell on Craig’s List. So far so good.
I’m also piling up a summer reading group of books as well in two piles, one pile has some connection to my developing master’s thesis topic, and the other just random books that I didn’t get to while in school and doing required reading:
Thesis pile (they may not be directly related, but have some bearing on my topic):
- Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, I want to re-read this with my topic in mind to make a good table with relevant passages.
- Mary Shelley: Her Life, Her Fiction, Her Monsters by Anne K. Mellor, I started this today and it is quite interesting. I’ve read a number of Mellor’s articles but this is the first book of hers I’ve read and her voice carries over from her article, I find her an excellent writer. I want to read this and another book she wrote called Romanticism and Gender.
- The Last Man by Mary Shelley
- A Vindication of the Rights of Women by Mary Wollstonecraft.
- Dracula by Bram Stoker. I might use this as one of three novels covered in my thesis, but I’m not 100% sure about it, I need to re-read this to see if it really clicks with the topic.
- The Jewel of Seven Stars by Bram Stoker
- Nights at the Circus by Angela Carter. Again, re-reading with the specific topic at the forefront of my mind. This is most definitely a book I want to include in my thesis as I feel like it is a continuation of the conversation that Shelley starts in Frankenstein. Whether I can work with just the two books remains to be seen, I’m still mulling that over and will need some input on that.
Random Pull From Pile:
- The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter (book of short stories)
- The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell
- The Foretelling by Alice Hoffman (picked this up in a book sale, I always love her novellas)
- Between the Acts and A Room of One’s Own both by Virginia Woolf
- She by H. Rider Haggard
- A Canticle for Leibowitz by Walter M. Miller Jr.
- One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn
- Mercy by Toni Morrison
- A Lion Among Men by Gregory Maguire
I have more on my “to read” shelf but I pulled these out as ones I would like to get through before going to any others.
