Long time, no write! It has been a rough semester as I’ve tried to figure out how to balance my personal life (friends and family) with all of the work on my plate (editorial and academic). And now, with my mom’s situation being what it is (progressing from Stage 3 to Stage 4), I’m taking another week to finish my dissertation prospectus draft and then heading home to Tennessee for a while.

Another thing I’m doing this week is cleaning up this house. And one thing I came across was my extra copy of this book.

That’s right: I have two copies. Want to know why? Well, my friend gave me a copy for my birthday, and I’m keeping that copy. And as for the second copy, I received it from the publisher when I won the “create your own meme” contest at the original Feminist Ryan Gosling tumblr. I swear that Danielle Henderson must not have received that many submissions (because mine really wasn’t that funny, IMO), but it is definitely true that my heart nearly stopped when I saw I had won one of the books. As I’ve said already to many of you, this may be the closest I ever get to greatness.

So, if you happen to be one of the people who found the FRG tumblr hilarious (and you want a copy of this for your own hot little self), leave a comment here letting me know. All comments received by next Wednesday, May 29 (at 11:00 PM CST), will be entered into the random generator, and I’ll send this little jewel on to you. Though there is plenty of love in my heart for FRG, I just can’t justify keeping two copies of this book to myself.

Peace,

*J

PS – If you really want to be entertained for almost two hours straight, listen to this old episode of How Was Your Week (in which Julie Klausner interviews FRG author Danielle Henderson). These ladies were made for each other. Ooh, and Carrie Brownstein’s interview is wonderful as well!

So, like most people my age, I’m plugged in to social media (Facebook, Twitter, etc.). And one thing that I’m seeing more and more lately is my peers—yes, I’m calling out my peers here—complaining constantly about grading. I’m talking about multiple posts a day about how irritating grading is; how stupid students are; how ignorant some of their students sound in their writing; and how much smarter students would be if they actually listened to their instructors’ advice and comments. Wah wah wah. And of course now that semester’s end is approaching, I’m seeing it more often than usual.

Now I won’t be the first person to sign up for an extra batch of papers to grade. If you were to ask me what the worst part of my job is, there is NO CONTEST between grading and the rest of it. It’s a pain. It’s time-consuming. Sometimes it feels like a fruitless endeavor. But I’m willing to bet that every single occupation in the world has some equivalent: some task that drains the life out of you; the task that is always the thing to get crossed off of the “to-do list” very last because it is the one thing you just don’t want to do.

I get it.

But I’m sorry, people. This is a fundamental part of who we are and what we do as writing and literature instructors. I’m fairly certain that we all knew ahead of time that this was a component of “the job.”

So here are a few suggestions for those of you out there who are using your Facebook account as a bitching post. I don’t know everything about everything, but I do know that I have the equal right to complain about your complaints.

1. It is enormously stupid for you to compromise your professional integrity by using social media to denigrate your students. I will admit, I’ve occasionally posted something TOTALLY absurd or hilarious that a student of mine has said or did. I’m not innocent, but I’ve sworn off the idea. Let’s keep in mind that our students have a right to privacy, and that posting about them (even vaguely) could get us into enormous amounts of trouble. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter how private your settings are; the people in your community have access to what you are posting, which means your higher-ups or potential employers could as well. Don’t wreck your chances of getting and keeping a job by creating a reputation for dissing your students on Facebook.

2. No one cares. I don’t think I need to explain this one. If fellow academics don’t really want to hear it, it’s probably true that no one else does either.

Keats’s death mask, located at the Shelley and Keats Memorial House in Rome, Italy

Here’s a favorite of mine, from 1818, just three years before his untimely death—

When I have fears that I may cease to be
    Before my pen has glean’d my teeming brain, 
Before high-piled books, in charactery, 
    Hold like rich garners the full ripen’d grain; 
When I behold, upon the night’s starr’d face, 
    Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 
And think that I may never live to trace 
    Their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; 
And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, 
    That I shall never look upon thee more, 
Never have relish in the faery power 
    Of unreflecting love;—then on the shore 
Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 
Till love and fame to nothingness do sink. 

Adieu,

J

“What’s in your head, in your head, zombie?” –The Cranberries

I’m the kind of person who is always at least two years behind pop culture. I discover most TV shows after they’ve gotten about three seasons out on DVD. I dabbled in the first three Harry Potter books for about five minutes in the eighth grade, then left them alone until the final book came out in 2007. And don’t even get me started on Coldplay, which I didn’t even discover until their Viva la Vida album in 2008. They’ve been around since 1996! Jeez.

Molly, Zombified

All that goes to say that I seem to find myself perpetually behind the times. And my latest obsession with ZOMBIES is no exception. For years (decades, even), the whole western world has been overrun with the fear of zombies. People have been freaking out about the imminent zombie apocalypse and creating intricate plans to prepare for it; I, meanwhile, have been la-dee-da-ing through life without so much as a brain-smashing self-defense baseball bat to my name. I mean, my ignorance was so bad that I didn’t even know who George Romero is. Really.

So at the beginning of October, I decided enough was enough. I was going to educate myself on zombie culture if it was the last thing I did (before the zombie apocalypse, anyway). I declared October “National Molly-Needs-to-Learn-About-Zombies Month” and set out expand my zombie knowledge horizons. And after a bit of discussion with of my Zombie Expert friends, I decided to commence my zombie education with 28 Days Later, then get dabble in The Walking Dead, and finally round things off nicely with the original zombie movie, Night of the Living Dead.

Part of my zombieducation has included trying to figure out what exactly zombies are and what they actually represent in our culture. The OED gives four definitions of the word. Apparently anyone who is “dull, apathetic, or slow-witted” is a zombie. In World War II, Canadian soldiers who got drafted to serve on the home front were zombies. And a dranky drank comprised of rum, liqueur, and fruit juice is called a zombie.

But the definition I’m most interested in is listed first in the OED’s entry, and describes a zombie as, “[i]n the West Indies and southern states of America, a soulless corpse said to have been revived by witchcraft.” This definition was first used in 1819 and is pretty close to our current cultural understanding of zombies, but it’s not quite up to par. And sure enough, a closer inspection of this entry shows that the OED has been sleeping on the job. The zombie definition hasn’t been updated since it was published in 1986! What the heck, OED?

Thankfully, though, Wikipedia’s much more helpful on the matter, differentiating between the aforementioned witchcraft zombies and the pop culture ones I’m interested in. Here, I find that zombies are “mindless, reanimated corpses with a hunger for human flesh, and particularly for human brains.”

It turns out that zombies have been around for a while now. Ever since people have been writing, they’ve been writing about zombies. They’ve just been called different things, like “revenants” and “vampires” (no, not the glittering kind, Stephanie Meyer; the I-vant-to-suck-your-blood kind). And throughout the ages, they’ve always had one thing in common: they are undead and they want to terrorize humans in some way, whether it be sucking their blood or eating their brains.

Several zombie critics, notably Chuck Klosterman and Lars Bang Larsen, have concluded that zombies represent our culture’s fear of capitalism and its all-consuming consumerism. I agree with them that zombies represent the postmodern era’s loss of individuality and autonomy.

But I think zombies are saying something even more interesting about our culture. The Otherness of zombies, their undeadness, is what’s important: they once were humans, but now are not; even in their undeath, though, they still maintain many of their human physical features, but are still soulless and mindless monsters. Fear of zombies has to do with humanity’s fear of the Other becoming unrecognizable, or, more specifically, becoming the familiar. Zombies embody the fear that one day, the world that you know and love will change instantly into a strange, lonely, and dangerous one that still looks the same as the old world. The zombie apocalypse, therefore, represents an event in which everything in the world changes, but few people notice or care because, on the outside anyway, everything is still basically the same.

That’s my take on zombies. What do you think about them?

—Molly

Check out my DIY tutorial for ribbon napkin rings, as well as the rest of Mandy’s fantastic site. She’s really so clever and crafty, and she happens to be a health-care bureaucrat, too (making her my hero in many ways).

Happy Thursday, friends!

*J

If you’re in the market for Halloween kitsch, check out some stuff I’ve found around the web in the way of party decor.

• vintage postcards and other old-fashioned goodies from Blumchen (I did buy some of these yesterday!)
• adorable colorful straws from Paper-Source
• finger puppets from Party City (my friend gave us some of these over the weekend, and they are SO cute)
• haunted paper dolls from MyPrintables (these are adorable AND free)

How about you? How do you plan to celebrate your Halloween?

Cheers,

J

If you had asked me ten years ago if I believed in ghosts, my answer would have definitely been, “Hells no! Only nutcases believe in ghosts.”

If you ask me that question today, I’m not so confident in my answer!

Okay okay, we can all probably agree that there are crazy-folk out there who seem to see a ghost inside every shadow. And of course there are people who really make me wonder if the ghost business is not just some enormous racket geared toward taking advantage of people who are either very skittish in the first place or who are vulnerably grieving lost loved ones. (See this week’s heartbreaking article on Jezebel about Theresa Caputo, the Long Island Medium.) But the difference between my life now and ten years ago is that since then, I have met several smart, rational, honest, non-manipulative people who claim to have experienced the supernatural. While I can’t say that I’ve ever seen anything otherwordly with my own eyes, I’m hesitant to disbelieve people who say that they have—especially the people whom I’d trust to tell me the truth in any other matter.

Over the next couple of weeks, I’ll be piping up once in a while with some ghost-y, halloween-y posts. This part of the world I now live in seems to be quite rife with paranormal activities, so maybe my newfound interest in the subject has to do with the local way of life. Until then, here are a few ghost-y links to keep you wondering:

• The picture above is of a truck that I found circling my neighborhood a few days ago. The fine print says “After Midnight Paranormal Investigations,” and they will examine your ghost problem “at no charge ever.” Check out their website. I guess they are the local Ghostbusters; and if I ever find Zuul in my fridge, I’m calling ‘em!
• I recently discovered this podcast, Anything Ghost. I haven’t listened to many episodes, but I did listen to this short one on paranormal activity related to the gruesome deaths of Bonnie and Clyde. Some believe the shadow seen in this video is the ghost of Bonnie Parker at the Baker Hotel in Texas.
• My favorite American ghost story is the tale of the Bell Witch. Since I hail from Tennessee, it’s of personal interest; but I also have a fond memory of going to see a friend performing in the outdoor dramatic reenactment of the haunting of the Bell Witch in Adams.

Seriously, I’d like to know what you think. Have any legends in your family? Any stories of your own?

Boo! And happy hauntings—

*J

Now, ever since I moved to this part of the world, I’ve heard about persimmons’ magical fortune-telling powers. Supposedly  the persimmon’s seed—when cut in half—will look either like a knife, a fork, or a spoon; and each piece of cutlery is indicative of a certain type of winter ahead.

• knife: icy and bitterly cold
• fork: mild
• spoon: snowy

This lore is repeated every year in the Farmers’ Almanac; and every fall, folks get on the local news channels to cut open a persimmon seed to predict what our winter is going to look like. This year, I got to see one for myself when Marty skillfully used his gardening shears to cut open a tiny seed.

And the verdict is . . .

What do ya’ll think? Do we have a snowy season upon us?

Cheers, friends!

*J

I know what you’re thinking: “It’s October! Are you serious? We’ve still got Thanksgiving in the way, not to mention Halloween! Christmas items aren’t even on the shelves yet! Except for maybe at Hobby Lobby . . .”

You’re right; it’s not time for Christmas. Not even close. But this card made me so ridiculously happy yesterday, because it came from none other than Oklahoma’s own Christmas Card Man.

Last year, on the old Number2137 blog, I mentioned Patrick Osborne—aka, the Christmas Card man. My friend and author-extraordinaire Jenny B. Jones had posted a story on her blog about the Christmas Card Man, and had challenged her readers to send this guy a card for Christmas. Basically, he loves Christmas cards! (Both sending and receiving them.) Last year one of the local news channels asked for you to send him a card (via their address), and here they are delivering the cards his way.

Clearly, this is a special dude. And goodness almighty, his Christmas-card list is sooooooo long this year, that he started sending them out in September. Talk about holding up his end of the bargain! And for sure, Mr. Patrick Osborne is going to get a Christmas card from me every year from now until forever. This year, I’ll probably send some stamps too, so that he can keep this up next season.

Talk about the small, simple joys in life. Thank you, Mr. Osborne!

Now, I don’t feel good about posting his address here on the internet; but if you are interested in sending him a Christmas or holiday card this year, shoot me an email at theboohooker@gmail.com. I’ll let you know how to send something his way.

Cheers, and “happy merry Christmas”!

–J

—from Rules of Civility by Amor Towles

from ‘Punch’ magazine, London, 1856

Once in a while I get interested in an expression simply because I have no clue where it came from. Such is the case with “tit for tat”! Admittedly, I also looked this one up because I wondered if the first word of said expression has any relation (etymologically) to the somewhat crass term referring to a woman’s breast (which it apparently does not). If you, like me, hate the words tit, tits, titties, or any variation thereupon, don’t feel bothered about saying “tit for tat” once in a while. From what I can tell, they aren’t too related in terms of origins.

(And UGH, I hate those words so much that I HATE that I had to even type them here. UGH!)

Anyway, it seems tit for tat is a variation of the phrase tip for tap, first seen hundreds of years ago. The ever-reliable OED defines it as “One blow or stroke in return for another; an equivalent given in return (usually in the way of injury, rarely of benefit); retaliation”; and they offer the first example of playwright John Heywood’s verse “The Spider and the Flie”:

That is tit for tat in this altricacion. (1556)

So simply, each of the words tit, tat, tip, and tap all (at some point) meant “a blow” or “a strike.” One was the same as the other; hence, one strike for another. Hit for hit, punch for punch. You give one, you get one in return.

It puts me in the mind of the German word schlag, which is a multipurpose term that always refers to a “hit” of something, whether it be used literally or figuratively (for example: Kaffee mit schlag is coffee with a hit of whipped cream). The fact that English has FOUR short, onomatopoeic words that all basically mean schlag just makes me laugh. I mean, how much hitting and punching was going on that FOUR words were necessary?

Two things I haven’t made sense of yet:

1) First, that tit for tat is also rhyming slang for a hat (or titfer) in the twentieth century (see the Songs and slang of the British soldier: 1914-1918, a dictionary);

2) Second, that tit for tat is apparently a ladies’ phrase according to J. Quincy in the early 19th century: “I shall . . . give . . . what politicians call a Rowland for their Oliver, and what the ladies term tit for tat.” Say what? To be honest, I can’t even tell which John Quincy the OED is referring to here (the physician? the president? don’t know). This idea of the term being “for feminine use” points me back toward the coarser meaning of tit, but I still don’t think there’s proof enough for me to connect them.

Just some weird, werd-nerd musings from the country . . .

Love,

J

PS – While researching, I discovered that Tit for Tat is also the title of an erotic piece by the very prolific romance writer Delilah Fawkes. Pretty sure THAT title is a double entendre.

PPS – On a related note, someone found this blog by Googling “book a hooker” today. A first!

(Photo credit: Dickinson College Civil War Research Engine)