I'm warning you I'm weightless
Apr. 17th, 2013 02:33 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lotesseWelp - I keep posting these declarations that I'm doing better, and then I don't post again because I don't want to have to eat those words. Not doing better; pretty crazy this last week, maladaptive & panicky. I've got this problem where university stuff (deadlines, expectations, evaluations) makes me crazy, and my crazy makes me not good at university work, which feeds the crazy even more. I think I'm going to see if I can get permission to take my prospectus defense in the fall, instead of 3 May when it's currently scheduled, because I'm driving myself to distraction with panic over it; note that I have still not pulled it together enough to tell my advisor this, being vastly ashamed of my own inability to overcome my crazy. I did tell my father, though, which is almost harder for me.
It's Wednesday, so now that I've depressed myself let me talk about what I'm reading. I rbrought Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs to class today for a student who turned up absent, so I spent most of my office hours rereading it myself. I really, really dislike the judgmental quality of Levy's prose, but do find myself in accordance with her upset at the empornification of contemporary feminism - although I feel like growing up in fandom, and pretty isolated from mainstream pornography and raunch culture, gives me something of an oddball perspective of the issue, because for me porn is associated primarily with freedom from the male gaze and the need to please it. I've also been working through Rachel Ablow's The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Marriage Plot, which is super interesting but also somehow disappointing. Ablow argues that Victorian novels function as wives, teaching good moral and sympathetic values; but there is, I think, a more radical question to be taken up about the emotional nature of that sort of teaching work - what's the difference between a gentle maternal spoon-feeding of sympathetic values, Dickens style, and more Brontean demands for recognition and valuation whether the reader wants to or not. And then I also, because I was feeling sad and wanted to turn it into angry because angry feels stronger to me right now, picked up Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth - and because it fascinates me the same way Dune used to, where I feel like there's something big and important and flawed and fascinating in it that's just out of my reach.
As you can tell from the promiscuity of this reading list, I've been feeling narrowed down and understimulated - my brain is full of the nineteenth century and nothing else, and I don't think it's doing my particular brand of obsessively anxious crazy any good. So I'm trying to feed it some different stuff - and I wanted to ask the math&science-savvy among you for book or - ideally! - documentary recommendations. Not too jargony, not too sexist? I could go back and rewatch the old Nova specials that I was obsessed with as a kid, but somehow it seems like a bad idea to spend too much time poring over science that's nearly thirty years out of date!
My brain feels narrowed down and
It's Wednesday, so now that I've depressed myself let me talk about what I'm reading. I rbrought Ariel Levy's Female Chauvinist Pigs to class today for a student who turned up absent, so I spent most of my office hours rereading it myself. I really, really dislike the judgmental quality of Levy's prose, but do find myself in accordance with her upset at the empornification of contemporary feminism - although I feel like growing up in fandom, and pretty isolated from mainstream pornography and raunch culture, gives me something of an oddball perspective of the issue, because for me porn is associated primarily with freedom from the male gaze and the need to please it. I've also been working through Rachel Ablow's The Marriage of Minds: Reading Sympathy in the Marriage Plot, which is super interesting but also somehow disappointing. Ablow argues that Victorian novels function as wives, teaching good moral and sympathetic values; but there is, I think, a more radical question to be taken up about the emotional nature of that sort of teaching work - what's the difference between a gentle maternal spoon-feeding of sympathetic values, Dickens style, and more Brontean demands for recognition and valuation whether the reader wants to or not. And then I also, because I was feeling sad and wanted to turn it into angry because angry feels stronger to me right now, picked up Franz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth - and because it fascinates me the same way Dune used to, where I feel like there's something big and important and flawed and fascinating in it that's just out of my reach.
As you can tell from the promiscuity of this reading list, I've been feeling narrowed down and understimulated - my brain is full of the nineteenth century and nothing else, and I don't think it's doing my particular brand of obsessively anxious crazy any good. So I'm trying to feed it some different stuff - and I wanted to ask the math&science-savvy among you for book or - ideally! - documentary recommendations. Not too jargony, not too sexist? I could go back and rewatch the old Nova specials that I was obsessed with as a kid, but somehow it seems like a bad idea to spend too much time poring over science that's nearly thirty years out of date!
My brain feels narrowed down and
no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 08:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-17 08:24 pm (UTC)It's a history of that new science of chaos and complexity theory but very biographically focussed.
Of course, it's about men, mostly, but it is very fun to read.
Hope you feel better soon.
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 12:33 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 02:01 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 05:17 am (UTC)As long as you're not up against a funding wall you should take the extra time if you can. University stuff is a horrible process. <3
no subject
Date: 2013-04-18 12:59 pm (UTC)As for books, I recently read The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II by Denise Kiernan — it appealed to me more for the historical context but there's quite a bit about how scientists and regular folks came together and the different roles they played in changing raw plutonium into what was needed to build the Atomic bomb to help end the war.