So, pit stop at Mount Doom?

Burning the Old Year

2018-12-31T16:25:33Z

Burning the Old Year
Naomi Shihab Nye

Letters swallow themselves in seconds.
Notes friends tied to the doorknob,
transparent scarlet paper,
sizzle like moth wings,
marry the air.

So much of any year is flammable,
lists of vegetables, partial poems.
Orange swirling flame of days,
so little is a stone.

Where there was something and suddenly isn’t,
an absence shouts, celebrates, leaves a space.
I begin again with the smallest numbers.

Quick dance, shuffle of losses and leaves,
only the things I didn’t do
crackle after the blazing dies.

Gift fics

2018-12-28T13:46:15Z

I'm the lucky recipient of three very, very lovely gift fics.

- spn_j2_xmas: Several Fake Dates (And One Real One) by excoyote, Sam/Dean; this fic is everything my trans!Sam heart desires. ♥

- yuletide: Deviations: The End by anon, Deviations: The X-Files. Excellent glimpse into Scully and Samantha's relationship, with bonus Diana and a rather brilliant ending.

- merlin_holidays: Possessed by Light by anon, Merlin/Arthur, post-magic reveal. This one is just pure poetry.

I wrote this fic (Sam/Dean, Michael!Dean) for spn_j2_xmas.

Hope everyone's holiday season is peaceful and happy. <3

FFS

2018-11-13T16:47:25Z

I can't believe the amount of 'discussion' (read wank) that has suddenly sprung up over the term 'gencest' since the Gencest Bang was recently announced. I've been in the SPN fandom for eight years and counting, and have known the meaning of the term since the beginning.

The definition of "incest" from etymonline: from Latin incestum "unchastity, impious unchastity," also specifically "sexual intercourse between close relatives," noun use of neuter adjective incestus "unchaste, impure," from in- "not" + castus "pure".

The "cest" in "incest" means "chaste" or "pure". Effectively, "cest" = the opposite of "INcest", with "in-" being the prefix that adds the meaning of "not". You wouldn't say that words such as "incomplete", "invisible", "informal," "inefficient", etc, etc mean the same as their antonyms? This is just simple and straightforward grammar that a primary school child would know?

Use a freaking dictionary, people.

Doctor Who 11.05

2018-11-04T22:26:25Z

What a terrible, pointless, boring episode.

The surprise mpreg was hilarious. And not in a good way.

I am APPALLED at the premise. No one wants to relive the Partition through the point of view of the colonisers who caused it in the first place. NO ONE.

It's like -- I'm struggling to find an analogy here, but imagine if a white American protagonist were to go back in time and witness his ancestors murdering millions of Native Americans. And the story would be pretty much about how progressive and kind-hearted he is (look, he even has a Native American sidekick!), as opposed to those horrible ancestors of his. Yeah, no.

Do. Not. Want.

Trying very hard to reserve judgement until the actual episode, but I have no hope.

On a far more positive note, I thought Next of Kin was fabulous: not just the parts set in England but also those in Lahore. There was also some (very brief) f/f content. From reading reviews, I know many viewers were unhappy with the idea of a Muslim family affected by terrorism, which seems the worst kind of cliché, but Archie Panjabi and Jack Davenport were both as amazing as they always are, and I thought the story was sensitively told. (Take notes, Chibnall, for pity's sake.)

Ugh, Doctor Who is suddenly making me feel so awful. This is one of those times I'm just going to tell myself that it's just TV; no need to get upset about it. But still.

Crossposted at https://asra.dreamwidth.org/151497.html.

Doctor Who 11.04

2018-10-29T09:24:28Z

Love!

My favourite scene, surprisingly enough:

+ A gay woman and a woman of colour within the first two minutes of the episode. Gotta love this series. Although, let's pretend Frankie made it out alive, okay? I'm going with that.

+ I'm still not super into Graham. The tired trope of a man driven by grief for a dead wife will never be appealing. I do like his connection with Ryan and the point made about 'proper' family.

+ I cried for that last spider, omg. TALK ABOUT ANTI-SPECIESISM. I really, really love that the Doctor's dislike of guns and respect for all life forms is so much in the spotlight in Series 11. ~~Mr Big~~ Chris Noth was fabulous; maybe because he's so likeable, I found his character monstrous and villainous but also enjoyable to watch. The Trump angle couldn't have been overstated, but for once, I don't mind. Some things need to be spelt out unequivocally.

Speaking of anti-speciesism, I've been reading on ecopsychology (for my research project, and also because I'm supervising a marvellous student dissertation on the subject), and I came across a lovely point in one of the books on the topic. It says that maybe our very definition of 'sanity' needs to be revisited in the context of the world today. Why is it that so many of us suffer from depression and anxiety? When you think about it, isn't it perfectly natural to be 'mentally ill' when the world is anything but healthy and at peace? There's more, but I don't recall all of it, and the book's with my student, who took it home for the semester break. Will post more on the topic once we resume, I suppose. Lots to say about what I'm teaching next semester; but I guess it's mostly tl;dr. Have a couple of pics.

It was really awesome you all came out to @SpookyEmpire today! What’s @davidduchovny saying to the alien?https://t.co/OZZNkbJtX3 pic.twitter.com/I1UUFkkgTB
— Gillian Anderson (@GillianA) October 27, 2018

So great to see them all together again!

Supernatural 14.3

2018-10-27T15:31:35Z

This was such a blink-and-you-miss-it moment that I had to check Superwiki to confirm it, but… apparently Kaia/Claire is canon? Oh, frabjous day.

I must say though that I’m completely mystified about why it wasn’t made clear before? Or was it, and I just missed it? And even if it was, why wasn’t it promoted better? Surely Wayward Sisters might have had a better shot at being picked up if it had a canonical f/f relationship, not to mention a queer woman of colour? Seems likely that Berens and co didn’t actually intend it earlier. But oh, the lost possibilities for incestuous wayward sisters, lol.

ANYway. Looking forward to what comes of it! And, of course, how much do I love that Jody mentions Sam/Dean in the same breath as the girls falling in love?

Guess this brings the grand total of (canonically) queer women in SPN up to… five? Not bad, considering.

Winchester poem

2018-10-25T06:11:52Z

Saw this and obviously had to think of Sam and Dean.

(Sniggering at 'boning knife'. Because I'm 12.)

Doctor Who 11.03

2018-10-21T21:19:16Z

Rosa Parks. "She changed the world. In fact, she changed the universe". pic.twitter.com/zytQpKQq0S
— Doctor Who Official (@bbcdoctorwho) October 21, 2018

OMG. What an episode. So many tears. So much love.

One of the first thoughts I had was: I wonder if white people will ever know how important it is to tell a story like this. But that didn’t seem quite right. Because I have white students who have been marginalised and discriminated against, right on our campus, because they’re in the minority. So I’ll amend it to: I wonder if anyone who’s never experienced racism will ever know how important this story is. And the way it was told. Have I mentioned how much I love this show?

A story like this is so, so necessary in our times, when those in power are abusing it rampantly to marginalise anyone who doesn’t have power. And so we keep fighting.

P.S.: LOL at the possibility that the Doctor could be Banksy.

SPN 14.2 and DW 11.2

2018-10-19T07:53:57Z

This was a good, solid episode of Doctor Who. The TARDIS! ♥

I don't really have anything to say about SPN. I didn't expect to, given that 14.2 was written by the Terrible Duo. Onward.

Crossposted at https://asra.dreamwidth.org/141293.html.

lyryk @ 2018-10-14T13:08:00

2018-10-14T07:38:31Z

I can’t login to this ID from my computer, since LJ tells me my IP address is “temporarily banned”. I’m on the phone app, which is really not that great, so I’ll be at my smithkingsley ID until the issue is sorted out.

Guess this is also a good time to resume using Dreamwidth. I’m asra over there. I’m also smithkingsley on Twitter and Tumblr, if you’d rather.

WTH, LJ. :-/

The magic of 10/13

2018-10-13T04:25:16Z

Happy X-Files day, and happy birthday to Fox Mulder.

A phenomenon that only occurs once every 10,000 years: I actually remembered, in the morning, the fic idea I had when I was drifting off last night.

Weird thing of the day: I thought I’d lost my earring. Turns out it was inside my ear. Not even out of sight, just sitting there above my earlobe, and still attached. Huh.

Supernatural S14E01

2018-10-12T11:34:13Z

Sam Winchester. That is all. ♥

Doctor Who S11E01

2018-10-11T17:52:41Z

The Cliff Notes version of my reaction: too many new characters to focus on.

+ The Doctor we know, sort of, and it's exciting to see Thirteen discover herself. Re the companions, though, would really have preferred the focus to remain on ~~Yasmin~~ just one new character.

+ How much do I love that she made her own sonic screwdriver?

+ It was pretty obvious which of the four new 'companions' was going to die, given that I only saw promos with the other three. :-/

+ The whole 'Tim Shaw' thing was offensive af? Surely the Doctor of all people should know not to mock someone of a different race?

Jodie Whittaker, though. ♥

Next of Kin

2018-10-07T17:02:08Z

I'd seen somewhere, on Shabana Azmi's twitter iirc, that Jack Davenport has worked with her, but I sort of blanked out on it. Now that I've refreshed my memory, I'll go look for the series, which stars Archie Panjabi and Jack. Here's an interview with him. I love how he fanboys over Shabana Azmi, and I must say I agree completely with the interviewer's description of his responses, on the very difficult subject of terrorism, as "precise" and "eloquent".

I don't think there are any JackDav fans remaining on my flist, alas. Doctor Who fans may know him as Michelle Gomez's husband. (As an aside, just how cool would it be to see the first female Master meet the first female Doctor?) *I* know him as the gorgeously gay Peter Smith-Kingsley from The Talented Mr Ripley and, of course, Commodore James Norrington. ♥

In other news, I randomly discovered that Photobucket is working again. I spent a few happy hours going through all my old stuff. To celebrate, here's a (non-colour) colourbar I made for Peter, back when people on LJ still used colourbars.

Speaking of the Doctor: IT'S TODAY, IT'S TODAY! See you on the other side. *g*

Fic and things

2018-10-01T16:42:36Z

I watched A Very English Scandal without reading the book first, and I'm kind of glad I did, because I don't think I want to read it after all. It's by Russell T Davies (and Eve Myles plays a character named Gwen, lol), with Hugh Grant as the politician who wants to get rid of his former lover, played by the always-incredible Ben Whishaw. Maybe because it's based on true events, it's very bleak. (What else should I have expected from RTD?)

Fic reveal time; I wrote these:

- Gwen/Morgana ficlet, post-series, for Everywoman;
- Pre-series Sam and Dean fic, outsider PoV, originally posted here at spn_summergen;
- SPN Masquerade fill, Sam/Dean, for a wonderful prompt that I just couldn't resist.

Things to write in the near future include: SPN Cinema (I've chosen Before Sunset in the hope that I can write a sequel to my trans!Jared fic based on Before Sunrise); SPN-J2-Xmas; Yuletide; SPN Reverse Bang - for gorgeous art by the lovely dizzojay. Will also probably do public_call, as well as snapecase (if I can manage to figure out how it works). Okay, that's a ~lot of writing.

Less than a week to go for Doctor Who! ♥

Book #31

2018-09-20T18:07:26Z

Janice Pariat's The Nine-Chambered Heart is the sort of book that has my students in raptures and has me going... uhhh, what am I missing? It was a quick read, which does say a lot about the author's ability to engage the reader, and I also loved the premise: we see the protagonist through the points of view of nine characters she's been in sexual/romantic relationships with. (It's a really good premise for a fanfic, am I right?) Predictably, the part I liked the most was the one with the female roommate, although, alas, it's pretty much the only 'relationship' in the novel that doesn't actually turn into a relationship.

Only a few more Fandom Studies classes to go before the semester ends next week. There's SO MUCH I wanted to introduce my students to, and not enough time. At least I've got most of them hooked on Doctor Who/Torchwood (although it was my duty to warn them that the latter comes with a huge 'be prepared to have your heart torn out and stomped on' warning). Here's a (fan-made) video I posted for the class today.

One of the students has just submitted a Sam-centric Stanford-era fanfic. BRB OFF TO READ.

Book #30

2018-09-17T18:37:29Z

I just finished rereading Jamyang Norbu's Sherlock Holmes: The Missing Years, aka The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes. (I set myself a reading goal of 52 books this year, hence the title of this post; although, considering it's already September, I don't think I'm going to complete the challenge this year.) I read it twenty years ago when it was first published, and reread it now since one of my students is doing her dissertation on it. It's about Holmes's post-Reichenbach time in Tibet from when he's pretending to be dead in the gap between "The Final Problem" and "The Empty House".

Some of it didn't stand up well to a second read, but THE END, THE END! Pretty much every review I've read of Kamila Shamsie's Home Fire says that you ~must read it, if only for the very last page, and I have to say the same of Norbu's Holmes. If you're a Sherlock Holmes fan, whether ACD or Granada or BBC or whichever version, read this book for the last few lines. (It's a bit like the very last scene of An Adventure in Space and Time for Doctor Who fans.)

Re fandom things, I'm pretty disappointed that neither of my recipients for the last two exchanges I participated in responded to their gifts. Oh, well. I did manage an spn_masquerade fill, and I enjoyed writing it, so that's something.

Also also, yuletide nominations are open!

Hope everyone is doing well. <3 LLAP!

PSA

2018-08-17T16:11:20Z

Sign-ups for femslashex are open. Alas, I completely missed nominations because the exchange only posts at DW now, and no one nominated any of my go-to fandoms. Got to love whoever nominated Bill Potts/Eowyn, though.

Poetry, poetry, everywhere

2018-08-06T15:07:25Z

Last week was basically poetry week: we had the poet Gili Haimovich, from Israel, on campus. She did a few workshops with our students and gave them interviews, and everyone loved her. We also went to a poetry festival to listen to her, on a panel with Singapore-based poet Alvin Pang and Berlin-based poet Ulrike Almut Sandig. Alvin Pang stole everyone's hearts; we couldn't even buy copies of his books because they were all sold out, but he chatted with us after the panel and gave us the link to a website where we can order his books. Here he is reading 'Candles', a poem in 'Singlish' (Singapore English), a conversation between a man and his son who steals candles from a church so he can study.

We also had a three-day book exhibition on campus. Thanks to the funding for my research project, I could go wild buying books. I also ordered tonnes for our library, and one of the stalls was so thrilled with my orders that they gave me a free book. *hearteyes*

Fandom, etc

2018-07-27T15:00:22Z

Today I visited another campus of the university for various things: primarily for the proposal presentation of my PhD student, which went very well. She's a joy to work with, and her area of research, food and gender, is pretty aligned to my own interests.

Another good thing that happened is that I met the director of the Centre for Research to ask permission to appoint a research assistant for my post-doctoral project. The girl who applied for the position is another delightful person, and I've known her as a student for three years; she recently graduated from our BA English Honours programme. We hit a snag along the way when a nasty colleague, who is unfortunately pretty high up on the academic food chain, told the student that she wouldn't be hired for my project because she doesn't have an MA. I was pretty pissed off (although I managed not to show it; I've learnt my lesson about being transparent about my thoughts), because... how dare you? How dare you crush a girl's hopes about doing research work, when you aren't even the one in charge of the project? I knew the Centre for Research is really happy with my work so far and was unlikely to deny my request, and yay, it came through. So much glee. It's childish, I know, but I can't wait to see the look on Nasty Colleague's face when I tell her I'm hiring the kid.

Thirdly, I had a very enjoyable meeting with a group of students from the other campus. They found out that I was offering Fandom Studies and wanted to meet me since they're doing a research project on K-pop. My fandom heart is still with LJ and you guys, but it's so gratifying to be able to share the fandom love with students and encourage them to work on stuff that they love.

Speaking of fandom things, I've got two lovely gift fics to rec. My Everywoman gift fic is a quietly lovely character study of Scully from Karen Kosseff's point of view, including awesome backstory for Karen. My spn_summergen gift fic is equally lovely, based on one of my favourite fic possibilities: Sam at the beginning of S8. Saving Him From Hell also does justice to Amelia, and I love that; I love seeing her and Sam drawn to each other because he's lost Dean and she's lost Don, and I don't need to tell you guys how much I love that parallel between them.

Re books: I recently finished Lauren Graham's Someday, Someday, Maybe, which was pretty nice, and have just started on Felicia Day's You're Never Weird on the Internet (Almost). It's awesome so far: I can absolutely relate to her anecdotes about growing up in an internet-less world (the horror).

#TouchOfCare

2018-07-15T12:24:22Z

Drowning in work and personal stuff as usual. I managed to finish my Summergen and Everywoman fics, and I don't think they're terrible, so there's that.

I just finished grading the first round of student submissions for the semester. One of my students wrote a gorgeous paper on the Vicks ad in support of trans rights, and her writing moved me so much. This is why I teach. Video below.

P.S.: OH, and my Fandom Studies class is going so so well! <3

Because one does not simply abandon a book meme

2018-06-25T17:31:44Z

As anticipated, my students arrived for the new semester and promptly ate my brain, leaving me with little to no mindspace for anything else. In addition to my usual duties, I'm now the head of the English Honours BA programme (not at all as good as it sounds) and in charge of not one but five student clubs (theatre, poetry, writing, research, and gender studies). Good times. No, really. Having so much to do means I have much less time to dwell on other things.

Anyway, so one of my writing club students gave me a book of Terribly Tiny Tales to read, so I decided to cheat on the book meme a bit and post about it for question #2 on the list, "best bargain", because hey, a book I paid no money for counts as a bargain, right? Right. I haven't finished it yet, but here's one of my favourites:

Took me a moment to 'get' it, but when I did, I loved it.

Also, I'm offering an optional course in Fandom Studies this semester. More on that next time, I hope.

<3

A poem for Pride Month

2018-06-04T10:11:21Z

This is from the poets.org poem-a-day mailing list, which includes previously unpublished poems by contemporary poets.

In the invitation, I tell them for the seventeenth time
(the fourth in writing), that I am gay.

In the invitation, I include a picture of my boyfriend
& write, You’ve met him two times. But this time,

you will ask him things other than can you pass the
whatever. You will ask him

about him. You will enjoy dinner. You will be
enjoyable. Please RSVP.

They RSVP. They come.
They sit at the table & ask my boyfriend

the first of the conversation starters I slip them
upon arrival: How is work going?

I’m like the kid in Home Alone, orchestrating
every movement of a proper family, as if a pair

of scary yet deeply incompetent burglars
is watching from the outside.

My boyfriend responds in his chipper way.
I pass my father a bowl of fish ball soup—So comforting,

isn’t it? My mother smiles her best
Sitting with Her Son’s Boyfriend

Who Is a Boy Smile. I smile my Hurray for Doing
a Little Better Smile.

Everyone eats soup.
Then, my mother turns

to me, whispers in Mandarin, Is he coming with you
for Thanksgiving? My good friend is & she wouldn’t like

this. I’m like the kid in Home Alone, pulling
on the string that makes my cardboard mother

more motherly, except she is
not cardboard, she is

already, exceedingly my mother. Waiting
for my answer.

While my father opens up
a Boston Globe, when the invitation

clearly stated: No security
blankets. I’m like the kid

in Home Alone, except the home
is my apartment, & I’m much older, & not alone,

& not the one who needs
to learn, has to—Remind me

what’s in that recipe again, my boyfriend says
to my mother, as though they have always, easily

talked. As though no one has told him
many times, what a nonlinear slapstick meets

slasher flick meets psychological
pit he is now co-starring in.

Remind me, he says
to our family.

(c) Chen Chen 2018

That book meme

2018-05-26T06:06:48Z

I've been wanting to do this for a while. I may not be terribly regular about it since classes start next week, and once students arrive they find ways of monopolising all my time. I'm always excited about books, but I'm particularly excited at the moment because Amazon says my copy of Michael Ondaatje's Warlight will arrive by June 1st. (I'll probably find lots to say about Ondaatje in the course of the meme, so I won't go into specifics now.)

Nicked the meme from wendelah1; all questions under the cut. Book-lovers, please consider doing the meme. I'd love to see what everyone else likes to read.

Before I start, a prelude: one of the reasons I love Rory/Dean from Gilmore Girls so much is that Dean falls for Rory because she's so addicted to books.

1. Favourite book from childhood.

This list would probably be endless if I got started on it. The earliest books I remember reading were a series of illustrated books about a cat named Misty. Once I was a bit older, I devoured every book ever written by Enid Blyton. My favourites were the 'R' mysteries, and even as an adult, I love the idea of Barney, with his pet named after a Shakespeare character, living a nomadic life looking for his father, whom he knows nothing about except that he acts in Shakespeare's plays. Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys introduced me to detective fiction with teenage romance included. (Fun fact: my first ever fanfics, before we even knew that such a thing existed, were extremely gen-cesty Frank and Joe fics that my high school bestie and I wrote for each other. Teachers were extremely suspicious when they caught us together in otherwise empty classrooms, scribbling away in our notebooks.) Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle ensured that I'd never lose my love for detective fiction, and Biggles introduced me to the concept of m/m slash, although I didn't know what it was at the time. I still remember with startling clarity the ~something I felt (in Biggles Flies South, I think) when the guys are locked up together in a cell by the baddies and Algy falls asleep with his head on Biggles' leg.)

Then I graduated to sci-fi and fantasy: Asimov, Bradbury, Clarke, Heinlein, and, of course, Tolkien and C S Lewis. If I absolutely had to pick favourite books from those days, I'd pick 2001: A Space Odyssey and The Lord of the Rings. A bit of blathering about them below.

I was just thinking of Clarke's series since I read marciaelena's gorgeous fic from now until the end of the world (Sam/Dean, dystopian), and the end reminded me of this exchange between Dave and HAL at the end of 2010: Odyssey Two (the film, but it's adapted from the book).

Dave Bowman: Hal, do you read me?
HAL-9000: Affirmative, Dave. Where are you? I cannot see you on any of my monitors.
Dave Bowman: That isn't important now. I have new instructions for you. I want you to point the AE-35 antenna unit towards Earth.
HAL-9000: Dave...that will mean breaking contact with the Leonov. I will be unable to relay my Jupiter observations according to program.
Dave Bowman: I understand. The situation has changed. Accept Priority Override Alpha. Here are the AE-35 coordinates. Please do it now.
HAL-9000: Instructions confirmed, Dave. It is good to be working with you again. Have I fulfilled the mission objectives properly?
Dave Bowman: Yes, Hal. You've done very well. Now, there is one final message for you to send. It is the most important message you have ever sent. I want you to keep repeating it as many times as possible.
HAL-9000: What is going to happen, Dave?
Dave Bowman: Something wonderful.
HAL-9000: I'm afraid.
Dave Bowman: Don't be. We'll be together.
HAL-9000: Where will we be?
Dave Bowman: Where I am now.
HAL-9000: Lock confirmed on beacon Terra One. Message commencing.

(The message is:)

ALL THESE WORLDS ARE YOURS EXCEPT EUROPA. ATTEMPT NO LANDING THERE.
USE THEM TOGETHER.
USE THEM IN PEACE.

(The first 11 words are common to novel & movie; the last 7 appear only in the movie.)

(Source: Wikiquote)

This series ruled my imagination for so, so long. This bit, the idea about consciousness evolving to a place that we in our current stage of evolution can't even begin to imagine, fascinates me so much. (There's a similar notion in Carl Sagan's Contact when Ellie 'travels' to meet an alien race; they appear to her in the form of her dead father.)

LotR would take me several posts to write about, so for now I'll just say that I really really wanted to be Eowyn, lol, and Aragorn was my teenaged fantasy of the ideal man, and Galadriel... she transcends words, am I right? I did love the film adaptations a LOT, despite their flaws. I had a soft corner for Aragorn/Frodo before the films came out; the ginormous size difference put me off, heh. (But hey, if size difference is your kink, I'm so not judging.) I still love Viggo Mortensen in everything that he does, and Cate Blanchett will always be one of my favourites.

Oddly enough, Clarke references Tolkien in 2010: “Well, Io is Mordor: Look up Part Three. There’s a passage about ‘rivers of molten rock that wound their way… until they cooled and lay like twisted dragon-shapes vomited from the tormented earth.’ That’s a perfect description: how did Tolkien know, a quarter century before anyone ever saw a picture of Io? Talk about Nature imitating Art.”

To end, one of my favourite passages from LotR.

“It's like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger they were. And sometimes you didn't want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going, because they were holding on to something. That there is some good in this world, and it's worth fighting for.”

1. Favourite book from childhood.
2. Best bargain.
3. One with a blue cover.
4. Least favourite book by favorite author.
5. Doesn't belong to me.
6. The one I always give as a gift.
7. Forgot I owned it.
8. Have more than one copy.
9. Film or TV tie-in.
10. Reminds me of someone I love.
11. Secondhand bookshop gem.
12. I pretend to have read it.
13. Makes me laugh.
14. An old favorite.
15. Favourite fictional father.
16. Can't believe more people haven't read.
17. Future classic.
18. Bought on a recommendation.
19. Still can't stop talking about it.
20. Favourite cover.
21. Summer read.
22. Out of print.
23. Made to read at school.
24. Hooked me into reading.
25. Never finished it.
26. Should have sold more copies.
27. Want to be one of the characters.
28. Bought at my fave independent bookshop.
29. The one I have reread most often.
30. Would save if my house burned down.

P.S. Nominations for Everywoman are open. Go forth and nominate!

lyryk @ 2018-05-24T15:00:00

2018-05-24T09:30:39Z

Yet another deathly dull presentation to sit through. I just don't get how these speakers of illustrious repute can make things such as bloody colonial battles sound like the most boring tales ever.

Anyway. Taking the opportunity to occupy myself with other activities as usual. (If we had faculty 'development' programmes every day, I'd never leave LJ.) Today's topic: annoyance with a colleague who said, over lunch, that students who have anxiety attacks are "pampered": basically, that they're faking it for attention or whatever.

I can't begin to describe how terrible it is for people, especially professors who should know better, to be dismissive of conditions such as depression and anxiety. The worst that can happen has happened on our campus. We have proof that these are very serious and real issues that we need to know how to confront. I'm especially disappointed in this particular colleague, because we've just introduced two courses in Disability Studies (one for the BA students and one for the MAs), and he was put in charge of the syllabus since he apparently has a background in the subject. If someone with experience in the discipline has such a biased attitude toward psychological conditions that can be truly crippling to those who experience them, it really is unsurprising that so many laypeople display the same biases. (And, yes, I am thinking of people in the SPN fandom who choose to dismiss Jared's anxiety and related issues as 'attention-seeking'.)

Okay, mini-rant over. Back to pretending to listen to the speaker. (How have you been in academia for decades and not learnt that no one will listen to you if you speak in a monotone throughout your session? Seriously.)