throbbing light machine

I owe some back-comments, but as I seem to be getting sick y'all just get linkspam today.

on #yestogayYA, via_ostiense, Just Buy More Books!: a timely critique of systems of capitalism & consumption that underlie this whole imbroglio

at chromatics, Four artworks of Sekhmet: because awesome lion-goddesses = never not good

over at The Chronicle, an article on On Shame in Academic Writing

and a bloody fascinating piece on tarot-reading: The Querent

So I was sure when I got a snotty email in my inbox, sent from one of my professors to the entire class, banging on about the use of "they" as a generic pronoun rather than "he," and calling the entire thing a grammatical error - the best part was when he lamented that soon the war would be "lost," and we wouldn't be able to enforce patriarchy on our own students - that if I was not the main target I was at least included. I'm the most vocal feminist in the class, certainly. And so I was sure that I'd be marked down, and I was sort of bracing myself to write letters and possibly contest the grade if that bit of sexist pedantry was my only sin - and then I opened my grades, and the bastard gave me an A. He never gives As! Sir, I'm confused.

I had a jonah week of it this last - too many readings that made me feel angry, attacked, policed, chastised for my politics and for the way I want my politics to interact with my scholarship. (One of my classes is stuck on surface vs. symptomatic reading, and neither camp seems to speak for me, or in any way that I find useful. it's been very irritating.)

But - blessedly! - I get to read Virginia Woolf for next week. It's been so soothing, so comforting. Reading her makes me cry - I weep with her, but I also weep because it feels so good to have her state, with her own inimitable grace, the truths that I hold most dear. She gives me solid ground to stand on, and as grad school thus far has been an exercise in painful attempted destabilization, I felt pathetically grateful to come back to her.

Three Guineas has new resonance for me this time around, now that I've moved up a layer in the academic establishment. And this long passage in particular made me weep and sigh and cheer, rather embarrassingly as I was reading in the grad student work room:

*

'But it is also plain that outsiders who find you thus occupied must ask themselves, when they receive a request for a contribution towards rebuilding your college, Shall I send it or shan’t I? If I send it, what shall I ask them to do with it? Shall I ask them to rebuild the college on the old lines? Or shall I ask them to rebuild it, but differently? Or shall I ask them to buy rags and petrol and Bryant & May’s matches and burn the college to the ground?

‘These are the questions, Madam, that have kept your letter so long unanswered. They are questions of great difficulty and perhaps they are useless questions. But can we leave them unasked in view of this gentleman’s questions? He is asking how can we help him to prevent war? He is asking us how we can help him to defend liberty; to defend culture? Also consider these photographs: they are pictures of dead bodies and ruined houses. Surely in view of these questions and pictures you must consider very carefully before you begin to rebuild your college what is the aim of education, what kind of society, what kind of human being it should seek to produce. At any rate I will only send you a guinea with which to rebuild your college if you can satisfy me that you will use it to produce the kind of society, the kind of people that will help to prevent war.

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Ugh. I'm at once immensely tired of my coursework, and feeling really unprepared for the end of term. I keep psyching myself out over not much really, but somehow since it's grad school it feels like it's all Important and Hard and Scary.

The ideal length of time for a class is an interesting question - I was talking to someone in my cohort about how our 14/15 week semester feels too long to me, and she said that on the contrary, she'd really prefer at least 17 weeks. I think I'd like 11/12, a little longer than my undergrad trimesters, but still brief enough to never turn into a slog.