West of the Moon

Archive for March, 2006

We still know how to do this.

It’s been difficult, these last few months, reading the webjournals of friends who are doing this “fifty new recipes in 2006″ thing. Janet and Julia and Peter are making posole and moroccan spaghetti squash and chocolate meringues and arugula pesto and bourbon bread pudding, and Matt and I? We’re kind of calling it [...]

Tags: cooking, food

radio silence.

Sorry for not posting–the dissertation and I are having some quality alone time. I hope to rejoin society soon, but cannot give real estimates.

Tags: dissertation

Rice and Salt.

I’ve been re-reading The Years of Rice and Salt recently, and I’m even more impressed than the first time I read it. I picked it up again because I’ve been thinking about alternate histories, and what the form has to say about history in general. I don’t normally like alternate history stories–there was [...]

Tags: alternate history, history, years of rice and salt

oh, Berkeley.

Friday night, stopping at the video store to pick up a movie, it felt like Berkeley itself was on display. Two kids, I’d guess around eight and ten years old, wearing hand-knit fringed ponchos in ugly earthy colors, were running around the store backwards with their arms stretched out. Their mother browsed the [...]

Tags: berkeley, madness

it lives! (UPDATED: It does not live!)

I don’t think it’s going to surprise anyone who knows me to know that I’m extremely attached to my computer. All of my different types of work and most of my play depend on the computer. It’s a big responsibility for such a small machine, and I try to show my appreciation. [...]

Tags: powerbook, technical difficulties

posthumanism and the body.

Someone (hi!) asked me in email whether my rant about posthumanism and the rejection of the body was in any way similar to Elizabeth Bear’s recent journal posting on the subject, and I told her that I’d try and answer here on the weblog, if I had time. And, well, I had other things [...]

Tags: feminism, posthumanism, technical difficulties

found objects.

Making the rounds of weblogs and webjournals this morning, I kept trying to care about that feminism/happiness study (discussed blandly at Slate and much less blandly by Ms McCarron), but I can’t do it. People with complicated goals are disappointed more often than people with simple goals! Film at eleven! Sorry. [...]

Tags: feminism, yeti lobster

The State of the Susan.

It’s not a bad time for a general check-in, I think, given how sporadic my posting has been.

The Graduate Program: is almost over. I’m graduating in May, and my dissertation progress is pretty much right on track. I’m going to have to keep working pretty hard between now and May (my filing deadline [...]

Tags: checking in, graduate school, teaching

turnabout.

Last night I had a dream that it was mid-semester and I had completely forgotten to attend one of my classes. But this wasn’t your standard student-anxiety dream! The class I’d forgotten was one that I was teaching.

Tags: dreams, teaching

morning in the library.

Settling in for another day in the Education library. Today I’m starting on the vast quantity of books I ordered from off-site storage (Northern Regional Library Facility, or NRLF). I explain to the student working the desk that I have books from NRLF waiting, but that there are probably twenty or thirty of [...]