The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes
No, it's ok, I didn't really expect anyone to read that long blather. I think my own eyes would have glazed over about halfway through or something.

Anyway, it is very yellow outside at the moment. It's been cloudy/rainy all day, and now just as the sun is stretching and getting ready to set, a little more light is getting through, so the overall effect is yellow. Personally, I associate such a celestial color with tornado warnings.

In other news, I am debating whether to blog about Suze Orman coming out (see also here), but the more I think about it, the less remarkable it is, except that it's nice that it's unremarkable. Her reason for wanting to be able to marry her partner is so in-character it's hilarious.
- posted by k @ 9:13 AM

 
Time to get started on my paper

So of course I am here telling you about the book I just finished, The Devil Wears Prada. I had seen the movie and been intrigued about the book, and then when I was at the Uxbridge public library a few weeks ago it was out there on display, so I picked it up.

I have to say, this is one of the rare cases when I like the movie better than the book. I am going to assume anyone who is reading this or cares has seen the movie and/or knows the premise, so I'm not going to summarize.

• Writing Style: The writing style was not great. A bit amateurish. Not awful, did generally get the point across, but a lot of extraneous chattiness, and I did find a dangling clause. Ick.

• Job Role: The main problem, as I saw it, was the narrator's attitude and naive snarkiness. If you take a job as someone's personal assistant/receptionist, you should a) have a good customer service persona and b)expect to be doing some personal tasks. I think both the narrator and I and Princeton from Avenue Q and everyone who finally gets a job out of college (who wasn't recruited into a training scheme)--I think we all probably did have the feeling of "Hey, I am so above this job and could be doing more etc etc" but you know what? If you actually express that publicly you are being very unprofessional. And although much of the narrator's snark is only directed to the reader, a fair amount of it is directed to her co-workers and sometimes even at her boss-- a fact her boss comments on late in the book. Of course many (but not all!) of the demands/conditions of the boss in TDWP were unreasonable, if you hate your job so much you can't be professional and it violates your boundaries, then you should quit. You can always temp, and in the narrator's case she claims to type 60 words a minute, so she'd be fine.

• Job Sector: Along the same lines, not only did she feel undervalued and put-upon in her role, but in fact she had deep-seated objections to the sector she was working in. If you take a job in a sector you can't see the use of...you shouldn't take the job. For this reason I feel very lucky that my job of this sort (that I spent almost a year at) was in a sector I believed in/wasn't opposed to, even if my role was boring and useless. I would be hard put to defend the existence of the fashion industry myself, and perhaps I have dreams in which the money spent on a fashion shoot at Vogue could go to low-emission public transportation, but that’s why I don’t work in the fashion industry. Short of becoming a (potentially violent) radical and undermining capitalism, there is nothing I can do but live and let live and not work in fashion. I will say in the narrator’s defense she thought the was entering the publishing sector rather than the fashion sector, but as soon as she figured it out she should have sat herself down and had a good think (and taken herself to a temp agency). No one wants a co-worker who thinks their product is useless and damaging! It’s rude, arrogant, and demoralizing (also unprofessional, see above). And unless you’re supporting dependents, why would you work to produce a product you think is useless and/or damaging? The scene in the movie where Nigel says “You’re not really trying” is much better in this regard.

• Values: Basically, I think what it comes down to is that she wasn't clear on her values. I do realize that this is part of the conflict of the story, but I think it was made much clearer in the movie than in the book. In the book, her boyfriend is Teaching for America, but in the movie he is working to become a chef. I think this is an important difference because what the moviemakers understood that the narrator/author didn’t understand was that the problem wasn’t with the fashion industry—it was with her. Haute cuisine could arguably be understood as just as frivolous as haute couture, but her boyfriend was doing something he enjoyed and believed in and that is what made the difference. Andy’s scorn of the industry and her boss and co-workers comes from a rigid “x is right, y is wrong” understanding of the world that is blind to the humanity of those around her whom she sees as shallow, even as it seeks to prioritize relationships over career (I mean the story could have been told as a Marxist fable, but that’s not what she sets out to do—probably for the best). However, the movie makes perfectly clear that the argument is not about the utility of a certain sector (like I said, if you don’t like it do something else) but about the choices we make and how we prioritize and why. This much is clear to the narrator/author and is made very clear in the movie.

Why does Andy stay in her job that she hates in an industry she doesn’t believe? This is the real question about values that the book doesn’t answer well but that the movie does answer well. We keep hearing that “a million girls would die for [that] job”—but Andy doesn’t think she would. She’s not attracted to the glamour, she’s not interested in clothes, the money’s not great, but she does take advantage of the perks. The place where it gets tricky is that she is partly sucked in by the glamour and the perks, and the argument that she makes in the book is that for this one year of sacrifice she will be able to get ahead in her career as a writer—to skip 3 years of drudgery as an assistant in publishing or a related field. The movie adds resonance to the title in the scene with Andy and Miranda in the car together when it is made clear that Andy is put in a Faustian position—I am not sure the narrator/author understood it as clearly. But if that were really the reason, she would have quit sooner and realized that she would rather spend 3 years in a sane job to advance in her field than give up her entire life for this one year. So that’s not really the reason she stays, even though she thinks it is. Andy stays because is hooked on the external validation that Miranda dangles before her, plain and simple—her own as well as that of other influential people like Christian or publishers, celebrities, etc. When Miranda berates her personally, Andy does question her own worth, and that is what makes her work harder to impress Miranda instead of realizing that what she’s being asked to do grates against her own priorities. She confuses being competent (or supercompetent as Miranda demands of her) with having an internal worth. By the end of the book and movie Andy aligns herself with her priorities, putting her friends and family above the temptations of glamour, celebrity and influence, but it is still not clear that she understands the difference between performance/ability and worth. Paul Simon put it this way “You want to be a leader?You want to change the game? Turn your back on money/Walk away from fame./You want to be a missionary?Got that missionary zeal? Let a stranger change your life/ How’s it make you feel? You want to be a writer/ But you don’t know how or when? Find a quiet place, use a humble pen.”

• Roman a clef aspect: So another reason I thought the movie was better was because it could tell a clean story. As you may know, TDWP is largely understood as a Roman a Clef of author Lauren Weisberger’s experience as Anna Wintour’s personal assistant. I think this fact, while it probably gave the book the attention that it got and accounts for a large part of its success, is actually a detriment to the book as a work of literature. For one thing, because it is a person writing about her own life, it has too many irrelevant details and subplots; because she is trying to be faithful to her own real experience, she can’t trim these things out. This is simplified in the movie. Furthermore, I have mixed feelings about the ethics of revaling personal details about someone you worked for, especially when part of your job was to protect your boss’s public image. As Anna Wintour is quoted as saying (in response to reports that Ms. Weisberger is having trouble with her third novel) “Maybe she should get a job as someone else’s assistant.” Because of course she can’t—she betrayed trust in that position. So in other words, I found it unprofessional. If she had distilled the truths she learned that year into a story with more universal appeal and only passing resemblance to real people and events, it would have more lasting value as literature (though perhaps it may have been less marketable). I think that perhaps Ms. Weisberger has not yet (or at least not at the time of writing TDWP) seen the universal aspects of her experience. However, I think the trouble she’s having with her current book will probably lead to a lot of growth and make her a better writer. I wish her all the best and hope it’s not too painful.

Here is Roger Ebert’s review, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060629/REVIEWS/60620007/1023 which I thought was very good. By the way, please notice that he agrees with me in noticing Meryl Streep plays the character as “part dominatrix.” It’s all in how she wields the carrot/stick of her approval.

(I know this is long and rambling and repetitive and pseudo-deep, but I just wrote it to let off some steam. Maybe if I am even more bored and procrastinating another day I will edit it into tidiness.)

Anyway, what I have learned about myself from reading this book (and also Running With Scissors, Dry, and Reading Lolita in Tehran) is that while I can find memoirs/autobiographical fiction very interesting, it probably doesn’t suit my needs at this time because a) the writing style is usually not as appealing to me as fiction/literature b) if someone writes a story about his/her life, usually something dramatic and often terrible has happened to him/her c)it’s non-fiction, so whatever bad thing happened really happened, and the ending isn’t in the book, but the person is out there living it somewhere. I’m finding that because of b) and c) above I will no longer checking this type of book out from the library because because my main reading time is before going to bed. I find I tend to stay up to finish the books because I want to see what happens/how it ends and the sentence structures* are simple enough not to get in my way, and then something awful happens, and then it’s not really resolved at the end, and I am up way past my bed time.

*This is not a problem with Jane Austen because sometimes the real pleasure in reading her work is admiring the sentence structures, and I find if I’m too sleepy to appreciate them, I’ll stop and go to sleep.

Labels: book review, jobs, movie

- posted by k @ 9:41 AM

 
I know this will seem strange to you
But it makes me sad that Jane Austen is dead. Or maybe that she died so young. Sad in a personal way. Isn't that strange?

And then today I was reading in The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen that while she was fairly shrewd and pragmatic regarding the business end of getting her books published, she died before seeing most of the profit. That's sad!

I mean, as a reader I am sorry that when I finish all 6 of her novels, the fragment of a 7th novel and the short fiction that there will not be anything else, but this isn't really about that. I'm sad for her. Was she happy? Why didn't she get married? If she was gay, did she have a partner? What more might she have achieved if she had lived longer? She was so insightful. I hope she had at least a friend (maybe her sister Fanny or nephew Henry?) who really got her. I can't say that I would put her on my list of "5 people who ever lived who I would want to have dinner with," because I'm not sure we'd get a long and she'd probably be shy in a way that came across as aloof, but I just hope she was happy or satisfied or content or something.

This is weird.


Goodbye Jane Austen
Though I never knew you at all
You had the grace to hold yourself
While those around you crawled
They crawled out of the woodwork
And they whispered into your brain
They set you on the treadmill
And they made you change your name

And it seems to me you lived your life
Like a candle in the wind
Never knowing who to cling to
When the rain set in, though you generally kept your wits about you, to your credit.
And I would have liked to have known you
But I was not going to be born for a couple of centuries
Your candle burned out long before
Your legend ever did

Loneliness and penury were tough
The toughest role you ever played
The socio-economic strata at the time created a real binding situation
And pain was the price you paid
Even when you died
No one cared enough
All your nephew had to say
Was that Jane wrote for fun and not as a professional, because that would have reflected badly on the family

Goodbye Jane Austen
From the young man in the 22nd row
Who sees you as something as more than sexual
More than just the anonymous authoress of the best-selling novel Pride & Prejudice



- posted by k @ 1:55 PM

 
Unitarians...

...on Lent

"I like the idea of a season when we approach tasks with the goal of getting our house back in order, of a period, however brief, where everything is clean. Spring cleaning the Spirit along with the closets. Forget the idea that things will only get dirty again so why bother - that just means they'll keep getting grimier and more smudged until we can't see out the windows any more. That's why the calendar is useful. There it is - Spring or Lent or Ramadan or the Days of Atonement - ready or not, time to clean the interiors of our lives."

Rev. Georgette Wonders, Bradford Community Church (UUA)

You have to admit, sometimes they explain it better than anyone else. This is something I can understand. Of course, you're on your own as to how to clean the interior of your life, but I have some ideas. (Windex! It's good for everything! or maybe kale...just kidding)

- posted by k @ 9:57 AM

 
Orthodox Unitarian Universalist Church
I can't take credit for it; I found it on Facebook. Maybe there is hope for America's teenagers, since some of them seem to have come up with it.


Information
Group Name: Orthodox Unitarian Universalist Church
Type: Common Interest - Beliefs & Causes
Description:
We postulate the following articles of faith:

1 - You don't know.
2 - I don't know.
3 - No one knows.
4 - Let's get coffee.
- posted by k @ 11:33 AM

 
It's official: I do not have an accent
So if you say I do I'll know you're either racist (see also a certain teacher of logic at Sauk Valley Community College) or British, which are not really the same thing. Oh, and I have no questions about the validity of this finding, of course, because I found it on teh internets, so it must be true!

What American accent do you have? Your Result: The Midland   "You have a Midland accent" is just another way of saying "you don't have an accent." You probably are from the Midland (Pennsylvania, southern Ohio, southern Indiana, southern Illinois, and Missouri) but then for all we know you could be from Florida or Charleston or one of those big southern cities like Atlanta or Dallas. You have a good voice for TV and radio.
The West
Boston
North Central
The Inland North
Philadelphia
The South
The Northeast
What American accent do you have? Quiz Created on GoToQuiz

- posted by k @ 5:12 PM

 
I feel better now.

It stopped raining, the sun came out, I went to the gym, and then I checked my mail.


Yay! And we talked on the phone. Yay!
- posted by k @ 8:59 AM

 
Valentine's Day Round-up


1. An archeological loooove story : Scientists said they are determined to remove and preserve together the remains of a couple buried 5,000 to 6,000 years ago, their arms still wrapped around each other in an enduring embrace...The plot will then be transported for study before being put on display in an Italian museum, thereby preserving the world's longest known hug for posterity....More importantly, it will give scientists a chance to figure out what was has become one of Italian archaeology's greatest mysteries: the first known Neolithic couple to be buried together, hugging...Was it a sudden death? A ritual sacrifice? Or maybe they were prehistoric, star-crossed lovers who took their own lives.

Awww, isn't that sweet. Unless it was some kind of human sacrifce/post-mortem posing. Or, as one reader wrote, "Maybe it is eternal hatred that had them locked together in a death grip."


2. Writing about romance can be a disaster.


3. A sliver of light on an overcast day: County clerks across Northern California plan to express their support for same-sex marriage Wednesday, when same-sex couples appear at marriage license counters -- as they have in a nearly decade-old annual Valentine's Day protest -- to request a license and be denied.

In Yolo County, clerk Freddie Oakley will give the couples a "Certificate of Inequality."

"I issue this Certificate of Inequality to you," the document reads, in part, "Because your choice of marriage partner displeases some people whose displeasure is, apparently, more important than principles of equality."

"This is my fifth year as county clerk and the fifth year in which I will be refusing marriage licenses to people of the same gender," Oakley said. "It gets harder every year."

Full story here .

3.5 Since when are you supposed to get Valentine's cards/gifts for daughters, sisters, grandmothers, mothers, etc? No, that's just wrong. And retarded, and lame and gay. The bad kind of gay.

3.75 Oh, here. Mark Morford has written 2,000 words about his pubic hair . Hey, no one is forcing you to click the link. Click at your own risk, dude.

4. I'm trying not to be grumpy, I really am. Why should a "Hallmark holiday" make any difference? Pink cardboard hearts don't have anything to do with how I feel, and I made an attempt to look at cards, but none of them really said anything I want to say. There are just as many miles between us today as there were yesterday and the day before that. The only problem is that it sucked yesterday and the day before that and it still sucks today. It sucks big hairy goat balls. Her birthday, our anniversary, Valentine's Day, and my birthday. What was I thinking? Donkey balls.



I'm not sitting home and moping. Really. I went to the library and tried to study a little, and I'm going to the gym now, and then I'm going into Central London and this evening I got a couple of tickets to some kind of possibly gay comedy show which is being presented in the science museum, so that should be diverting. I invited my gay boyfriend as my date.


I think we have to work on looking up and smiling at the same time. [note: blogger picture server being lame. will update later].
- posted by k @ 8:09 AM

 
Wensleydale: a surprisingly cheesy cheese



So, Saturday at Sainsbury I saw they had cheese in the deli section, so I asked the woman there to cut me a small piece of Wensleydale with cranberries (I didn't see any plain Wensleydale, and I generally like cranberries, so it wasn't too risky). It is both soft and a little crumbly, sort of like very cold butter. The flavor is mild, too, somewhat like butter, but sour, since it's cheese. The mild flavor does make a good cheese to pair with fruits, and indeed this seems to be how it is often found (e.g. the embedded cranberries).

One thing I am noticing so far is that all the British cheeses I've tried so far (mild Cheddar, mature Cheddar, Red Leicester, Double Gloucester, and now Wensleydale) taste like, well....cheese! There's a definite family resemblance among the cheeses; they all taste a little familiar, like Cheddar, Jack or Colby. Now stop laughing at me for a minute. Think of a Swiss cheese (e.g. Gruyere or Emmentaler)--they taste really different, even though they're also hard cheeses! Similarly, Gouda. But Swiss cheese and Gouda and Brie (and I think Edam, though I need to confirm this) are all continental cheeses, not British cheeses, though there are now British versions of Brie and Camembert. I am sure, of course, that Stilton will be distinctively different, but aside from that, do all British cheeses taste cheesy? Maybe it's just that I've been picking hard cheeses that will melt and that, of course, I'm frightened of frightening cheeses. I thought Wensleydale would be different, though, since the texture is different. Hmm. Not sure what is next on my list to explore.

Labels: British cheese, cheese, food

- posted by k @ 8:29 AM

 
Charisma, Popularity and Cynicism OR More signs I am getting old
1. There is a credible self-propelled pop star (as opposed to a manufactured pop star like Britney or boy bands) several years younger than me! But the funny thing is, for possibly the first time ever in my life I am totally in puppy love with a [current] pop star! I literally want to hang his picture on my wall and moon over it! Look at him! ooo, those eyes! Listen to him sing! ooo, that ironic yet uplifting falsetto! Watch him dance! He's so freaky and yet he has that certain something...stage presence? charisma? To be fair, it started when I just liked the way his big hit song sounded (I mean, by definition a Big Hit song is going to appeal to a lot of people, implying that at certain level it's appealing--and there's some lowest common denominator business going on there. How many Big Hit pop songs feature a lot of dissonance, lack of music cheerfulness, lack a beat that you can dance to (or at least find), etc. etc.? Sure, a few, but not very many. In this particular case it's interesting that it works on a couple of levels: the inherent musical cheeriness, unavoidable hook, etc. but also if you want to be one of those serious pop music people, you can also appreciate his winking use and combination of sounds from previous pop eras.) and then they couldn't decide whether to compare him to Jack White or the Scissor Sisters, and then I saw the video and it was all over. I was in pop star puppy love.

2. I'm not so sure about this democracy business. Even stadia of fans screaming for Barack Obama make me at best uneasy, at worst nervous. On the one hand there's the fear that something could go horribly wrong (since part of me is audacious enough to hope)--a scandal, he turns out to be a fake, or gets overconfident, or the voters get overconfident and forget to actually go out and vote in sufficient numbers--something happens and we're all disappointed again. Did we ever recover from Nixon? But anyway, even if everything goes well and Barack Obama does become the next president and is actually able to implement much of the platform he ran on and act with integrity--those stadia of screaming fans still make me nervous. How much can they really know or understand about his platform? about the political landscape and process? I think part of the problem with democracy is that you need someone who is basically like a big hit pop song to win: someone with charisma and broad appeal. I don't think a person with broad appeal would necessarily be a bad president, but the traits that make one a good candidate are not the same as the traits make a good president, so if a good president does get elected it's almost epiphenomenal to the process. Why are we screaming like a fans at a rock concert instead of saying things like "Yes, I do think his position on healthcare is X, but he should be wary of YZ." And then of course there's his whole gay marriage waffle, but to honest I think it's pragmatically sound.

I guess the reason this actually bothers me is that I'm not at a point of cynicism where I think none of it matters or could affect anything (I'll say it again: I explicitly reject nihilism on pragmatic grounds). With pop music, sometimes there's no accounting for taste, and even if faceless multinational corporations are using some form of payola to control the charts you can still find smaller-named artists in smaller venues, or online now, etc. etc. In other words, I don't really care what happens with the charts, but I still do care what happens with the election. Unless it turns out that the elections don't really matter because it's all controlled by a cabal of the unelected. I haven't ruled this out.

Labels: aging, charisma, cynicism, democracy, pop music

- posted by k @ 4:16 AM

 
Commentaries on Cat and Girl
1. It's funny because it's true.



2. May be true, but I just like the way it sounds! That's one thing about "rock & roll" as the kids are calling it these days--I never identified with (or identified, for that matter) the whole subcultures (clothes, looks, philosphies, posing, graphic design, etc) that go with the sub-genres. I just like the way it sounds. Sometimes.


- posted by k @ 5:59 PM

 
Say what?

• Gavin Newsom had an affair with his married secretary and it became publicly known? Too bad it wasn't a guy, but then again he's no McGreevey.
  

• Ellen is hosting the Oscars?

Why didn't anyone tell me? It's like I'm living in another country or something. Sheesh.

In other news, if I am ever rich and famous (which will never happen), I want whoever picks out Ellen's clothes to pick out mine. I will lose some weight if I have to, but I will wear neither lime green nor hot pink, and especially not together.

Labels: clothes, Ellen, gavin Newsom, oscars, San Francisco, scandal

- posted by k @ 4:16 PM

 

• Full moon AND very bright Saturn tonight. If it's clear enough to see where you are, do get out and take a look.

• Uh-oh. What was the second thing?

- posted by k @ 11:47 AM

 
Things I am completely sick of

• Applying to graduate programs

• Working at 9:30AM on a Saturday and getting underpaid and having a long commute back in traffic.

• The internet connection in my room going out right before the weekend.

• Gas and bloating

• Living in a dorm

• People whom I have designated as less mature than myself, and their inherent and unending dramas.

• Living in Uxbridge

Facebook makes me feel old and snarky, but I'm not quite sick of it yet. Give me another week or so.

Can I go home now? To my real life? Pleeeeease?

In other news, I think I should have just taken a lot more computer science and been an application developer. What was I thinking? Is it too late?

- posted by k @ 3:19 PM