storytelling

Candy (of Smart Bitches) has put together a very important dictionary definition for billnapoli. Click, and you shall learn about the inspiration for her sudden leap into morphological territory. I personally plan on re-reading this definition about fifty times a day.

Digby has more on this napoli business, but do be sure to read the Smart Bitch defintion too. Read it early, and read it often.

EDITED TO ADD: Molly Ivins has more to say in her usual no-nonsense style. (Thanks to Barbara for the heads-up.)

...I find [Napoli's abortion stance] so profound I am considering putting Sen. Napoli in charge of all moral, ethical and medical decisions made by women. Certainly lucky for the women of South Dakota that he's there, and perhaps that's what we all need -- a man to make decisions for us in case we should decide to do something serious just for our own convenience.

Look at some of the incompetent women we have running around in this country -- Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, now there are a couple of girls in need of guidance from the South Dakota legislature. Female doctors, lawyers, airplane pilots, engineers and, for that matter, female members of the South Dakota Legislature -- who could ever trust them with an important decision?

In South Dakota, pharmacists can refuse to fill a prescription for contraceptives should it trouble their conscience, and some groups who worked on the anti-abortion bill believe contraception also needs to be outlawed. Good plan. After that, we'll reconsider women's property rights, civil right and voting rights.

For years, the women's movement has been going around asking, "Who decides?" as though that were the issue. Well, here's the answer. Bill Napoli decides, and if you're not happy with that arrangement, well, you'd better be prepared to do something about it.

how do you define napoli?

Posted by at 11:00 PM | Permalink | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

Because it was also a wonderful revenge dream.

When I was up for tenure at the University Michigan/Ann Arbor, things were tense. The tenure review process at UM is harrowing. In the humanities the turn down rate (at that time) was about 80 percent. Once I heard the dean say that they would rather err on the side of getting rid of a good person than holding on to a bad one. She said this openly, without apology. As if it were no more important than chosing between chicken and beef on a menu. Of course she was talking about whole careers, about people who (some of them, at least) have all their self worth wrapped up in the tenture decision. She also said: we give negative evidence more weight than positive evidence.

Oh, lovely.

So people tended to get really squirrley when they were up for tenure review. Me, I got defiant. My committee said, should we ask for a year's extension so your new book will be out? No, sez I. Absolutely not. They can take me or leave me as I am. I was very cranky, during the whole process. If they had turned me down, I wouldn't have been surprised. I would have gone off to do something else. Angry, yes. But not surprised, and certainly not unprepared.

A few nights before the decisions were announced I had a dream. In the dream I was in the front room at home, reading (always, always reading). There was the sound of a plane flying very low. Very, very low. I went out onto the porch and saw a small plane, the kind that seats about thirty people, circling and sputtering directly over the house. As it came lower I could make out the faces pressed against the windows, and I recognized every one of them. Adminstrative faculty types. The kind who make tenure decisions, particularly the ones who made the process as difficult and depressing as possible. Including the dean.

And the plane crashed, right into my garden, and it all went up in smoke, and all those administrative types? Literally, pushing up daisies.

Then I did get tenure, but somehow my anger never quite went away.

Posted by at 4:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (7) | TrackBacks (0)

I read Auntie Beff's Sum of Me weblog pretty much every day but as she's got a very particular commenting policy, usually I can't tell her what I'm thinking. And I do actually think a lot about her, because she's got an interesting life and way of looking at things.

And now she's come over here to ask questions, so my dilemma is solved. Here are the answers.

What was the other anxiety dream?

I'll save that for a bedtime story. Mwahhahahaha.

How's the writing going?

It could be going better. There's something missing, something to tie the story together. I think I maybe might have an idea, which I am going to work on today. But I can't talk about this until it's solved, so later.

Should I ever speak to my mother again?

I'm actually glad you asked this.

You know you're never going to change her, right? She is who she is, and she gives you what she gives you (or doesn't). If you can take her at face value, you can probably have a cordial relationship. I imagine at this point your anger and disappointment and hurt are overwhelming, so logical decisions are hard. Here's something my therapist told me twenty years ago that I still think about: you can define yourself, your history, your needs and wants, or you can let person X do all that for you. But person X's you and your you are never going to be the same person. If you can't be comfortable with person X's version of you, you might well be better off stepping away.

I haven't spoken to my person x in those twenty years. I think about her sometimes. Not so much anger now, but a clearer set of emotions. There's a little regret mixed in, but mostly I know it was the right thing to do. Now, this is not my mother I'm talking about, but it's a blood relative who claimed responsibility for raising me, so the parallel is pretty strong.

It's a shitty situation, Auntie Beff. If I were closer I'd make you quiche (see below) and pat your head and listen while you talked. I'm sorry I'm not.

Do you have any good recipes for quiche?

You know quiche is just savory custard, right? Eggs and cream beat up and poured into a pastry shell. You can add anything that isn't so wet that it disturbs the egg/cream ratio. Cheese is the usual (and to my mind, indispensible) but you can add any kind of vegetable (precooked if it's something knotty), fruit, meat, fish. Salt, pepper, toy cars, whatever. The golden ratio is 4-5 eggs per pint of cream. You can use half and half, and your arteries will thank you.
Oh and, bake the pastry shell before you put the custard ingredients into it. Seal it with egg white, or you'll get a soggy crust.

Who invented liquid soap and why?

A little known fact: Liquid soap was invented by a Mrs. Hortense Cole of Walla Walla, Washington. When asked what the original purpose intended for her slippery concoction, Mrs. Cole blushed and shut the door in this reporter's face.

Posted by at 11:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

So. I give away a couple lousy ARCs and you all go running off into the woodwork, leaving me here to mutter to myself.

Not that you should worry. Really, I'm fine sitting here in the dark, by myself. What more could I want? It's a writer's lot.

Sniff.

You could ask a question. Maybe I would answer it. Who knows?

Posted by at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (10) | TrackBacks (0)