Last week, we had Larry Lessig in as a guest speaker by virtue of this video. The whole thing is about 20 minutes and it’s very good — it’s a presentation he gave on creative freedom.

If you’re just looking for some funny, however, skip the video ahead to about 8:40, where Lessig presents three examples of what he calls “remix culture.” The first will particularly amuse fans of the Muppets. The second (at 9:30) becomes a bit of an eyesore, but just wait for it… And it only lasts a minute, because at 10:30 there’s a beautiful political romance.

In other news, a notice on the school website announces that the main dining hall “will be going trayless February 25th to 29th.” (I love the way they phrase it.) We’ve got about six inches of snow on the ground tonight — I guess the cafeteria-tray-as-makeshift-sled phenomena is universal.

Events I’ve planned to blog about in the last month, but didn’t:
-The writer’s strike.
-The rally in Harvard Square for the writers’ strike, which I didn’t take time off work to go to, but my roommate did and got to meet Joss Whedon. Actually, I did too, briefly, because he was signing stuff at a little sci-fi bookstore after the rally and was still there when I got off work. It was pretty awesome.
-The Golden Compass and the brouhaha that the Christian right managed to create around it. I highly recommend the book, by the way, very highly. The movie is a pleasant enough way to spend a couple of hours but is not an acceptable substitute.
-Mitt Romney’s speech about why his religion shouldn’t matter to his presidential campaign. I didn’t see the speech, I just read about it and meant to read a transcript, but haven’t. If he continues to look like a contender, I’ll get around to it eventually. He worries me, and I can’t put my finger on why, except to be flip and say that he looks like the evil Mayor from season 3 of Buffy. (Source. Not my cleverness; though I think the whole list is hilarious.)
-Alex and the Ironic Gentleman by Adrienne Kress. A fun and funny YA adventure — and its author was one of three who were fantastically nice about letting me ask them questions for a paper I was writing on author blogs. Definitely another recommended read.

Enjoyable things that happened while I was home for Christmas:
-Two lovely Christmas dinners in one day.
-Going ice skating.
-Laughing at my brothers’ oddly decorated gingerbread cookies (One that stands out is a bell that B. frosted in white and spelled out “E.A. Poe” on the top in little chocolate sprinkles. (”Hear the sledges with the bells, silver bells, silver bells, what a world of merriment their melody foretells…” Yes, the poem gets darker; it is Poe.))
-Getting to hang out with Liz before her move and see Elf in the new digs.
-Teasing Mom for calling it a “white Christmas” when it hailed on Christmas morning.
-Beating my brothers at ping pong. Sometimes.
-Getting to show off my beautiful ring…did I mention that we got engaged?

I took him to a poetry reading his first evening here. The readings are a regular thing, and the graduate students from both the publishing program that I’m in and the more traditional MFA program can sign up to read for about fifteen minutes. It’s held at the school, and the audience is mostly made up of the same pool of grad students. Anyway, I’d let myself be talked into being one of the readers for that night. It went really well! There were maybe fewer people than there might have been because of some subway problems that evening, but there was still a decent crowd, including a bunch of my poetry and publishing classmates to introduce Pug to. I read five or six poems, and the audience was appreciative.

The other big event was that we went to see Wicked on Sunday night! It’s a great spectacle show with a few especially hummable tunes, and we really enjoyed it! Compared to the book, the show restructures the plot entirely (and twists the ending to make it much lighter), but in general it does manage to stay true to the characters.

And of course in between, we had a great time wandering around the city, hanging out with my roommate and her boyfriend and being out usual silly selves.

On the job front, I’ve heard a resounding silence from one place, but the medical journal had me go out to their corporate office and interview with HR last Thursday. So now they’re doing background check-y sorts of things, ferreting out the deep dark secrets in my past… Right. Last I heard, the process is going smoothly — and I actually got a pleasant note from one of my references after they called him.

Another happy: my roommate and I decorated for Halloween this evening. Life is good.

Well, when last heard from, I was with the family, nose deep in Harry Potter. Since then, I’m back in the city, back in school, and on the hunt for the elusive full-time job.

In the last month, I’ve interviewed for four positions, and the first two have already given me the “thanks, but no thanks.” The other two were both last week, so I’m waiting to hear back from those. One is a company that publishes books on religion (especially Buddhism and Hinduism), Eastern philosophies and also some fiction, poetry, and history. I certainly wouldn’t turn my nose up at the other one (a very well-respected medical journal), but I’m especially excited about the first one.

I have two evening classes, same as last fall. One is magazine ethics, and the other is book publicity. My ethics prof has turned out to be hilarious, so a class that was not one of my first choices looks like it will turn out well.

When I got back in August, I let my roommate talk me into helping out with a production of Crimes of the Heart that she was assistant directing. She was putting together a group of villagers to sort of set the scene before the show and during the two intermissions. Lots of improv, lots of gossiping about the people in the play. Plus, Crimes happens to be set in small town Mississippi in the 1970’s, so this became a fun opportunity to pull out my outrageously fake Southern accent and see how many times I could work in phrases like “bless her heart!” each night (there were five performances in early September). It was a lot of fun, and the cast were a really neat bunch of people.

***

Further evidence of my strange sense of humor:
(I forget how I tripped over these… I had them saved here in a draft post, just waiting to be inflicted on you all.)

Before-they-were-famous celebrity commercials. Yes, the famous person aspect is amusing in some of them (Keanu Reeves, anyone?). But also: why are commercials suddenly hilarious once they reach the ten year age mark?

80’s robots we should have by now (maybe). Check out the “present day equivalent” of Data…

Social stereotypes in cereal mascots. What, you’re still with me? No, seriously, it’s worth a laugh. Or a frown in distress over what society is coming to. Or perhaps a frown over how easy it is to over analyze cartoon characters. Your choice.

And while we’re wandering around Cracked, let’s take a look at the five questions that had better be answered by season two of Heroes. Not bad as a refresher, especially if the show hasn’t crossed your mind all summer. I like it, but the drawback of having about ten “main” characters is that none of them really take on a life of their own.

Meanwhile, Multiplex does Shrek 3. Which I haven’t seen, just for note. Movie cliche, pop culture reference!

Meanwhile, my apartment has been a veritable hotel lately — first the roommate’s family here for her graduation, then the boyfriend here for his birthday, then the college friend here until she could start to move into the apartment where she’s subletting a room for the summer. All very nice and good fun, but nice to be back to normal-ish.

My six-week summer class started up last Monday and meets two nights a week. I like the prof, and the class is an interesting mix of people for whom this is their last class, people who are half done; MAs and MFAs; even a few juniors and seniors mixed in with the grad students. It’s a copyediting course, so it’s basically a lot of exercises in being nitpicky, which — hey, it’s me — is actually kind of fun.

My roommate and spent the middle of March apartment hunting, under the impression that we would have to move when our lease ran out on June 1. Our current building is gradually being rennovated and sold as condos, but as it turns out, that process is going more slowly than the owners anticipated (as I understand it, real estate is a buyer’s market right now), so they’re letting us renew the lease for another year. So that means I don’t get to be rid of our stained carpets, stained countertops, and finicky shower, but I am very glad to not have to move. Besides, I love the area around us, so I’m glad not to leave just yet.

School is almost finished for the spring — my last class is next Tuesday. I’ve been spending a lot of time in Research Paper Land, Group Presentation Land, and Final Project Land, but the end is in sight. Of course, there’s still a last paper, project revisions, and poetry revisions to do in the next week, but still — light, tunnel, yeah.

Funny little story involving the denim bag with the Cherokee alphabet that my cousin made for me. It was sitting behind me in class last week when my classmate, A., looks at it and says, “Is that the Cherokee alphabet?” I say yes it is — but looking at it, the top (where it says what it is) is hidden in a fold of cloth. “How did you know?!” I ask. Apparently he studied linguistics in college. Impressive!

Baseball season has started, which is a big deal up here! I don’t pay much attention, and I still know more about what’s going on in baseball than I ever have.

While we’re on sports, the Boston Marathon was just over a week ago. The weather was dreadful, but not quite dreadful enough to call it off. I was at school all day and the marathon ends very near here, so when I went wandering around 2:30, it was just ending and there were lots of runners everywhere, each with a support group of friends and family as well as a bright orange Adidas bag and a silver mylar blanket (looks like aluminum foil for humans, invented for the space program, I think?)

Since then, it’s warmed up and finally feels like spring! It was so strange to think that school was about to end when I was still wearing my wool coat every day.

Despite being swamped, I did finally finish season 3 of Babylon 5, so I’m in great suspense about how Sheridan will get out of that pit! Triumph over a Balrog, perhaps? I just know that he does, because (refrain) I’ve seen season 5… But the series makes it pretty clear that the outcome is never the point (we know from the first episode that Londo and G’Kar die at each other’s hands); what matters is how we get there.

I highly recommend Radioland Murders, which is kind of a cross between Clue and A Prarie Home Companion. Good fun! I’m half way through The Emperor and the Assassin — it’s moving very slowly, and I’m not sure how the two plots are going to come together…with luck I’ll have a chance to finish it tomorrow night. And then I’ve saved Twelfth Night for last, so maybe Friday or later in the weekend, and then Liz will actually get her DVDs back! They’re coming, I promise.

In between, I’ve also discovered (after the clip I linked to here has made me curiouser and curiouser) that lots and lots of Doctor Who can be found on YouTube…

The big excitement of last weekend was the Loreena McKennitt concert I went to on Saturday! Fabulous…but I think it needs a post of its own!

“Do you have Cher-e-o-kee blood?”
-C., asking about the bag my cousing made for me that has the Cherokee alphabet on it. I think it’s hilarious — there should be a Native American rock band called Chereeokee, the Singin’ Indians.

“You’re not a Jedi for fun. That’s like your job.”
-L., my classmate. We were looking at an article that compared a young fisherman and his mentor to Luke and Obi-Wan.

“Christina, you can’t bring your author back from the dead…even though he may be from Transylvania.”
-G., my prof, reassuring my classmate. We were writing promotion plans for the manuscripts we are hypothetically publishing. Obviously her author can’t go on book tours, but his point was that she has the translators.

“I thought you were going to say ‘Oh, it’s in Rhode Island!’”
-R., my classmate, after I reveal (following considerable debate) that the house I have described in a poem is entirely metaphorical.

And on the Babylon 5 front, Sheridan has declared independance. A great episode — I love when Delenn gets to be a badass. Also just saw the two-parter that deals with the B4 timetravel storyline from season 1, which was several kinds of cool. My heart went out to Garibaldi, though. He’s in a coma when Sinclair gets reassigned, and now the guy comes through the station and all Michael gets is a last-minute note.

Phoenix was gorgeous, while Boston was cold, cold, cold two weeks ago. (We kept track. Phoenix: almost 70. Boston: 17. Etcetera.) Coming back to cold weather wasn’t too much of a wrench, though — last week we had some gorgeous weather, it almost felt like real spring! Meaning I went out Wednesday morning with NO hat, NO scarf, NO gloves! Fewer pieces to keep track of — I almost lost my hat on the subway a few weeks ago. I’d tucked it under my arm and it slipped out as I was leaving the subway station. Hit the cold air outside, missed it, and ran back. Lucky me, some wonderful person had picked it up and set it on top of a fire extinguisher! Nothing like starting the day with a scare! But I digress…

My first full day in Phoenix, we headed a little further south — Pug, me, brother C., and girlfriend A. — to spend the evening at Kitt Peak. Along the way we stopped at the Indian ruins at Casa Grande, as well as a Mexican place in Tucson that is notable for serving meat that they dry in what you might mistake for a birdhouse with mesh wire walls. Very tasty. We had so much good Mexican food last week.

Kitt Peak has quite the public outreach program. You come for the evening, watch the sun set and the moon rise from the mountaintop. They have a few astronomer types on staff to explain everything, and as it gets dark, they open up two or three of their medium-sized telescopes and point them at things for everyone to peer at. Quite fantastic! Pug had been before on one of their family trips out there — he’d been talking for some time about wanting to take me there. Naturally, it’s great for seeing a huge wash of stars that aren’t visible for most of us, but we happened to be there during the full moon, so that washed out a lot, but still definately not a wasted trip! The slightly perilous part is that when you leave, they don’t want everyone’s headlights creating light pollution for the telescopes, so they send a van down in front and everyone else caravans down the first mile with only the parking lights on. (At that point, we were not sorry for the moonlight!)

So that was Saturday. Sunday we wandered around Phoenix a little bit, particularly Scottsdale’s Old Town, which isn’t far from where Pug works. Scottsdale is one of the nicer suburbs, reflected in things like higher property taxes — and the city’s use of them. Some of the civic buildings, the performing arts center, and the library are all right next to this lovely park area that just keeps going and going — fountains and lots of green grass and a stage/amphitheater area or two. There happened to be a Celtic band performing that afternoon, complete serendipity! At first we didn’t think much of it, some of their songs didn’t sound that Celtic, but then I heard one that I have on one of many CDs that my dad has bought because he heard a song on NPR, but most of the album isn’t so great. The song was “The Newry Highwayman” by Solas — and at first I thought it was Solas, but the singer later admitted to having stolen it from them. But our interest had been caught, so we went to sit in the grass and listen.

Speaking of Celtic artists and concerts, Loreena McKennitt is doing a North American tour this year! She’ll be up here in late April and then in Arizona in May, so with luck we’ll both be able to go…just not together. Exciting anyway, though! I need to see if anyone I know is interested — though if not, I will go alone in a heartbeat.

Phoenix weather was gorgeous — hot enough for shorts one day! — but evenings cool off as soon as the sun goes down, which is great and supposedly keeps the evenings pleasant all summer, like in Albuquerque.

Later in the week, because of Pug’s strange but very nice every-other-Friday-off schedule, we were able to head north of Phoenix as far as Sedona and red rock mountains. We found a short-and-sweet trail to hike up, which was enough to tell our lungs that we had left sea level far behind! Down was easier. We also perused some of Sedona’s art galleries and stopped at more Indian ruins — cliff dwellings called Montezuma’s Castle (a misnomer — no relation to the Aztec leader) on the way back. Of course they don’t let you anywhere near it anymore (apparently my grandfather’s family visited in the ’30s when they let you climb the ladders up into the dwellings) but it’s still very impressive. And frankly, after a guide pointed out exactly where each ladder would have led, I’m perfectly okay with my vantage point from the ground.

I was wearing my Year of the Humanities T-shirt that day and had my hair up (originally to hide the fact that it had been mostly wet when we left that morning), and so many people commented on my shirt! The back reads “Think Human, Act Human, Be Human, Study the Humanities,” and before we’d even gotten into the little museum, a pair of little old ladies started admiring it. The shirt also got me noticed by a park ranger (who saw me again as we were leaving and said, “There’s the humanities lady again!”), and an elderly gent who commented that more people in the world should behave according to such sentiments. By the time we left, turning to read exhibit signs was making me self-conscious…

…but not nearly as self-conscious as I felt at the mall a day or two before. We had gone because Pug wanted hiking boots to take to Sedona, but we also browsed some jewelry stores, looking at rings. Which by nature apparently involves dealing with sales ladies who are far too perky (but I promise I was good and didn’t snap at anybody). We made an interesting combination of He Who Learned About Jewelry From His Mother and She Who (by and large) Doesn’t Have a Clue. Not quite true — I lived with Poke long enough to understand when people talk about jewelry (like how the rectangular one is an emerald cut and the funny-shaped one is a marquis, unless it’s the other funny shaped one, which is a trillium, which is a fun name but they don’t put those in engagement rings, usually), I just have very uncertain ideas of what I like. So they showed us lots of shiny while I tried to form opinions about things like round or rectangular (oops, emerald-cut) and cathedral settings and why exactly do I think this is god-awful ugly and Could You Live With This For The Rest Of Your LIFE. Oh no, someone’s asking me to make decisions again… Shockingly, previously mentioned perky sales ladies generally exclaimed over how my opinions were exactly right, which didn’t quite convince me that I have Good Taste. Whoops, that’s the cynic coming out again… Anyway, nothing conclusive yet of course, though there were some elements that I particularly liked, like one with a band that had a couple of twists on either side of the stone. Call it a fact-finding expedition.

An exciting week, as you can see, and I haven’t even gotten to the opera and the Renaissance Faire. Yes, I really was just there for a week! I can’t even claim that I dragged him to the opera. C. and A. came too, so we had a nice evening of it. The opera was a version of Beauty and the Beast written by a French contemporary of Mozart, though it was sung in English. I feel like I should find this inappropriate or unfaithful to the original and therefore bad, but I do actually like it. It was a good production and an interesting portayal of the Beast — they chose to steer away from the usual bear/boar/lion sorts of beasts. There are a number of bird references in the opera, so they made him a bird of prey, and I thought it worked well. There were a handful of dancers dressed in court garb with large bird headpieces — neat!

Interestingly, except for going to the airport (which has a pretty central location), this was the only time we were really in Phoenix proper. It really is a sprawl, though it’s very much a planned sprawl — everything is a grid, so it really is easy to find your way around. (And god knows, much as I love Boston…it makes NO sense. Ditto London.)

Speaking of the airport, since it is in the middle of the city, and since the sky is usually so clear, and since there are few tall buildings around, you see airplanes in the sky constantantly! More than FWB, and more than Boston, where you just don’t notice them. At night you can see their lights coming from a long way off, sometimes two or more in a row off into the distance as they approach the airport. Actually plane-watching was a running theme of the week — in Sedona, we could see their airport for light aircraft from the baby mountain we hiked up. The airport’s on a mesa, so it was really cool to watch a little plane land there. Almost like landing on an aircraft carrier, it seemed.

Saturday was the last full day I was there and we drove out to the Arizona Renaissance Festival, which is a major production and lasts for something like eight straight weekends, so it has a small village of permanent structures outside the city. Pug had the outfit he’s put together over the last few years; I took the long red skirt and cobbled something together (pictures are at Flickr). We spent the afternoon there looking at artisans’ wares — leather, metals, garb, all the usual goodies. Plenty to attract those who aren’t rabid fans of fantasy or history, but generally with a Renaissance flavor of some kind. Funny things like dragon puppets that sit on your shoulder; you control them via a wire or two that can be threaded down your sleeve (some adorable faces, too!…but we restrained ourselves). Watched an acrobat walk up a flaming rope. Pug put a “crowning” touch on his costume with an amazing French-cocked hat — we suspect that with the brim flat (un-cocked), it will double as a good, shady hat for even such activities as hiking. This would also be minus the plumes, of course… Another leather worker whose wares we admired had created leather book jackets to wrap around your favorite volumes. Prominently displayed were leather covers made for the Harry Potter books — each one had a simple design stamped into the cover that was representative of the book. A snake for Chamber of Secrets, a goblet for Goblet of Fire, etc. (No, we didn’t buy those, either.)

Since I’ve gotten back, I’ve been busy working on a couple of papers due in the next couple of weeks. For Book Overview I’m in the middle of a book critique — we had a long list of books we could choose, all of them about books or editors or publishing or some such. Mine is called The Gutenberg Elegies: The Fate of Reading in an Electronic Age by book critic Sven Birkerts. I picked it because it sounded like a topic that I have an opinion about, but as it turns out, Birkerts is more interested in bemoaning our changing culture and writing elegies for the death of literature than looking at what may lie ahead for books, reading, and the publishing industry, which is what I’m interested in. As far as I’m concerned, the reports of literature’s demise are premature. Birkerts presents himself as a huge Luddite who is afraid of the technologies that I think offer some intriguing and even bright possibilities for the written word. So he’s pretty frustrating. I like to picture Sven Birkerts meeting The Internet and, shall we say, totally freaking out!!!

Meanwhile, it’s full steam ahead for the Magazine Editing assignment for which my professor, wanted us to interview an editor. After fretting about the whole idea, I wrote to my boss from the New Hampshire internship a year and a half ago, and he offered me a list of several “wonderful people,” who wouldn’t mind talking to me. He also mentioned that he and a couple of the editors I’d worked with would be in Boston at a conference for social studies teachers and invited me to stop by and say hello. The conference was last week and was held at a hotel about three blocks from school, so I did go and we talked for a bit about Emerson and Boston and Cobblestone and their glut of interns last summer (six of them! Six!!) and conferences and such. They had display copies of the Civil War books with them — I hadn’t seen the finished copies yet — and they look great! Nice people, good to keep in touch.

Meanwhile, I had been setting up not one but two phone interviews (because I’m clearly a masochist…). I managed to stress myself out worrying that I wouldn’t hear back from the editor I contacted and then I would be pushing the deadline to get in contact with someone else, so I contacted two people to start with (Chris Clark of Highlighs, who I’ll talk to next Friday and Suzanne Morrissey of BH&G, with whom I’ve already spoken) and both responded promptly (so I’ll probably just write about the first one unless the second interview is just that stunning — which it could be).

I talked to Suzanne Morrissey on Thursday and she was very friendly and eager to talk, so even though I think I was an awkward mess, all in all it came out okay. I suppose it can’t have been all that bad, because at the end of it she asked if I would be interested in doing freelance writing for her, which I certainly would! As the “special interests” editor, she puts together magazines like “Colorful Kitchens” and “Simply Perfect Storage” (she has five all together) that only come out once or twice a year and don’t have a subscriber base but are available at grocery stores and sometimes hardware stores where people who are re-doing their kitchens (or whatever) can pick it up. The piece she offered me is not a huge amount of writing, but it’ll be a little experience, probably a byline, I get paid for it, and it could lead to similar projects if it goes well. She’s mailing me all the details this week. I’m a little worried by all the papers I’m writing at the same time, but I feel this is something I shouldn’t turn down!

In lighter news, we had a snowy St. Paddy’s Day here! After feeling so springy earlier in the week, Friday took a turn for the colder and the snow was collecting on the ground by the time I came home at noon. My roommate got off work at three due to the weather and announced that we were going for a walk! It was the first really pretty snow, uncomplicated by sleet, ice, rain, etc., so we took our cameras. We wound up stopping along the way for eggs and butter so we could make pancakes and have our own pajama party in front of the tv — we’ve gotten hooked on Heroes, but we’re both in class when it’s on this semester, so we tape it and are usually a week or two behind. So we’re caught up for the moment — very exciting!

We were less excited when we woke up next morning to find water dripping through the living room ceiling. Maintenance guys were around most of the day — apparently other apartments had similar problems and it was because melting snow on the roof was leaking through the building. So they shoveled off the roof and told us that there was no need for extensive wall repairs like after Christmas. We told them we knew one roofing place they’d never use again… We’ve spread a tarp out under the drips, which were fortunately nowhere near any electronics or furniture that couldn’t stand a little water. The dripping has stopped, though the carpet is still damp. Ew.

Despite the weather, I did spend yesterday evening wearing the green out at an Irish pub near Central Square with a few friends. Very crowded, of course, but we had a good time. We were sorry we’d forgotten our light-up green buttons and bobbley shamrock headbands…wait, no, actually not.

So that’s my life in a (really really big) nutshell. Very busy, but pleasantly so!

Brutus:
Remember March, the Ides of March remember:
Did not great Julius bleed for justice’ sake?
What villain touch’d his body, that did stab,
And not for justice? What! shall one of us,
That struck the foremost man of all this world
But for supporting robbers,–shall we now
Contaminate our fingers with base bribes
And sell the mighty space of our large honours
For so much trash as may be grasped thus?
I had rather be a dog, and bay the moon,
Than such a Roman.

- Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, IV iii

I hope this doesn’t bode ill for the phone interview I have set up for this evening. One of my profs has designed an assignment for which he wants us to interview an editor, so that’s what this is. Eep. From our correspondence, she seems very friendly, though. More on all that life stuff presently…

1. Bookstore tourism. That’s right, independent bookstores are becoming tourist destinations. It’s a little kooky, but I think it’s cute.

2. Viggo Mortenson founded an independent press (and they have a very strange main page). I knew he was a poet and an artist, but this was news to me! This blog has a nice piece all about it.

3. This year’s Newbery Award winner is causing a furor among parents and librarians. Apparently it uses the word “scrotum,” which, you know, is completely inappropriate for nine to twelve year old children. Because of course children are entirely asexual and we wouldn’t want them to learn the scientific words for their genetalia. It would be much better for them to be completely embarassed by their own sexuality and become repressed or repressive adults who freak out when scientifically appropriate words like “scrotum” appear in children’s books.

Whether the book is any good or not I don’t know (though now I intend to seek it out) — reviews are mixed, though as noted, it did just win the Newbery.