We’re leaving tomorrow to attend The Art of Community Southwest, a three-day conference about intentional community. We’re very excited! It came to our attention some months ago when it was mentioned over at Laird’s Commentary On Community And Consensus, so we’ve had plenty of time to look forward to it. Emily and I are going with my girlfriend, Jessie, and our friend Brenden. We’re staying in a hotel and everything. And the workshops look fascinating — I don’t know how we’ll ever choose which to attend.
I’m sure we will have our laptops with us and at least some internet access, but you can expect the trend of spotty posting to continue through Sunday. You can also expect some interesting posts on the things we’ll be learning about and conversations we’ll be having: sustainability, consensus, co-housing, co-creation, and more.
On a different note, I am completely freaking out about watching the Lost season finale tonight. Eep!
But, if you want to watch a pro-abstainence good-girl christian bite off men’s dicks with her vagina, it might be the film for you!
My roommate and I are eagerly awaiting a sequel. We hope that the main character will decide to become a superhero and re-emerge in glittery spandex, guarding the world from the extreme evil of uncastrated men.
Also, this movie is self-described as “feminist horror”. Really, people?
So we’re suddenly on summer vacation, i.e. reunited with each other. We’ve been spending all our time and more capering in the immanent world.
My dear brother gave me a typewriter. It’s fairly new — early 1980s — but what a different experience from the computer keyboard! The sound. The violent physical jolt of the carriage, the motion of the hammers as they swing. It’s electric, but infinitely more mechanical than the one I’m typing from now, the flat grid of buttons on my MacBook. It makes noise whenever its on, even when one isn’t typing — a heaving, buzzing sound, vaguely like breathing.
The typewriter can correct mistakes; there’s the option to switch from the black ribbon to a white one. And it has a little bell that sounds at the end of a line. (These things may well be standard and unremarkable; I know almost nothing about typewriters, except that my parents used them all through college, and that I want to find an Underwood some day, because they’re beautiful.)
Unrelatedly, check out this link Emily sent me. Print your own beautiful, (allegedly) functional 35mm pinhole camera! They look amazing. I will do the project and report back.
From Boing Boing Gadgets, here is a video about the Curta — an incredibly beautiful, hand-cranked mechanical calculator. The video shows it in action, in all its magic and elegance, including its inner workings. Apparently, the Curta was invented in the early 1940s by a prisoner at a concentration camp. It can do all kinds of things, just like your average pocket calculator, but with satisfying clicks instead of the cold silence of the digital screen.
Very sadly, they haven’t been made for over thirty years.
I nearly always enjoy Broadsheet, but this? What the hell?
It’s a post about the fact that the percentage of alimony recipients who are male is slowly, slowly creeping up. Because the press just can’t resist, they’ve given this phenomenon a stupid, cutesy name: “manimony.”
For reasons I may never understand, the post’s author, one James Hannaham, decides to go ahead and use “manimony” like it’s a legitimate word. It’s not a legitimate word. It’s an annoying little moniker designed to simultaneously mock men who receive alimony payments and delegitimize women who out-earn their male partners, as if either phenomenon is objectionable or ridiculous. Using the word sanctions these sexist ideas. Why would someone do that on a feminist blog?
Finally, Hannaham closes with this:
. . . Men still have advantages over women in business, but certainly not all women, and perhaps not the women they married. So the question becomes: Does maleness always create enough of an advantage that manimony will turn into the new reverse racism? Or should we pretend that equality already exists so that, one day, it will?
What the hell kind of question is that?
Yes, undoubtedly, men in general are privileged over women in general in business — that’s why, as the article notes, women are the higher earners in about one-third of straight marriages, men in two-thirds. But what bearing does that have on a given couple in which a wife makes more money than her husband? What if a male partner deprioritizes his career to support his wife or girlfriend? What if a male partner is the primary caretaker of children, thereby sacrificing some of his earning power? Why should that man be treated any differently from a woman who makes the same choices? (Answer: he shouldn’t be. Women who out-earn their husbands are just as capable as any man of paying reasonable alimony — that is, women can be financial providers. It’s really anti-feminist to suggest that women shouldn’t or can’t.)
And as to the second question — “Should we pretend that equality already exists so that, one day, it will?” — how, exactly, would not allowing men to receive alimony further the quest for equality? You know what we do by having higher-earning (ex-)wives pay alimony when appropriate? We smash right through the idea that men are breadwinners, women caretakers. We smash through the idea that marriage is a financial transaction in which women become their husbands’ property. And we affirm the idea that women can and should succeed in their careers, and that men can and should be free to pursue other goals. We affirm that making money and being supported are gender-neutral activities.
As I mentioned a short time ago, I plan to read a lot of fiction this summer. Many of you, dear readers, gave me suggestions for which I am truly grateful, though most of them were of genres I’m not quite ready or in the mood to delve into right now (sci-fi/fantasy epics–thanks for trying, though!). Despite my picky, almost fearful approach to selecting fictional To-Reads, I’ve come up with a short list of recommendations (some online, but mostly from friends and family offline) and random browsing finds which I’m pretty excited about. Here it is:
Almanac of the Dead, by Leslie Marmon Silko
House of Leaves, by Mark Z. Danielewski
The Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver
The Melancholy of Resistance, by Laszlo Krasznahorkai
The Musical Illusionist, by Alex Rose
And something by Roberto Bolano, probably either By Night in Chile or the Savage Detectives.
Also, I’ll be reading the short stories Infra linked in the 19th comment of this thread, and I’ll definitely be watching the Call of Cthulhu as well. Maybe a To-See post later, too, now that I think of it…
Before I can begin on those, though, I must complete the small collection of books I’ve already amassed thanks to my mother and my aunt in the past few weeks, which inlcude Life of Pi, by Yann Martel (reading now), The Widening, by Carol Moldaw, and Half Life, by Shirley Jackson. In the past two days I’ve finished two others: Play it As it Lays, by Joan Didion, and Under My Roof, by Nick Mamatas, both of which elicited a pretty big “Eh” in response. Somehow I managed to enjoy Didion’s style, but not her subject. Her protagonists’ ambivalence/lack of control over her own life was more boring than it was engaging or interesting. My roommate and her brother have both convinced me to give Joan Didion another try, and I think her book Democracy is up next.
Under My Roof is a silly, satirical story set in a Long Island suburb at the peak of post-9/11 American irrationality and details the consequences of a father’s decision to plant a homemade nuclear weapon inside a garden gnome on his lawn and declare his family’s home and property a sovereign nation. This one did make me laugh out loud more than a few times, but as the book went on the laughs were shorter and farther apart. The book was fun for a short while, but it was also pretty insubstantial and a little stupid.
Anyway, there ya have my most recent reading update. Recommendations are still and always welcome, even if they’re for works of sci-fi/fantasy/things about werewolves and dragons. I mean, you never know.
And if you’re so inclined, leave a note about what your summer To-Reads are in comments; fiction, not, whatever. I’m interested.
It seems I haven’t posted in who-knows-how-long due to family visits and the preoccupation of a new apartment/moving in and out of the dorm. However, I have been keeping tabs on some neat things noted during brief, periodic internet check-ins. So, if I had been posting regularly throughout the week, these are some of the things I may have drawn attention to, in quick-link form (via Boing Boing unless otherwise stated):
Hopefully, blogging on my part will resume some semblance of regularity in coming days.
Oh, and another thing. Not until yesterday did I believe it was possible to truly fall in love with a piece of furniture (clearly I’ve been spending way too much time with one of my aunts, who is in the life-long process of continually renovating and redecorating her apartment). But then I saw this on display somewhere in SoHo, and whoa, were my preconceptions shattered. The picture, of course, does not do this item justice–at all. First of all, that wardrobe is BIG. My head wasn’t that much higher than the handles, standing next to it, on the other side of a glass barrier. And it’s wide. I just want to crawl up inside of it and make it my home.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
Of course, it’s so expensive that the price is available only on request, and therefore, it and I will never co-habitate. I guess I’ll see you in a parallel dreamworld, then, my whimsical Wonka-Seuss furniture friend…
Okay, at this rate this is going to become a blog exclusively about the old, lovely, functional things I accumulate. I’ve acquired yet another magical item today: an antique, functional barometer. It’s beautiful, and I was so excited to discover that it works. We’ve had a rare rainy day today so I’ve been able to watch it shift over the last few hours as the weather cleared up.
The words there are Stormy, Rain, Change, Fair, and Very Dry, with the arrow correctly indicating “Fair” weather. When I picked it up today it was forecasting “Change,” which I found spooky. And as you can see, the middle there is just class: you can see into the little mechanism.
First I found these great cameras. And now something so much better. So. Much. Better.
My uncle, upon hearing that I will be studying photography, very kindly offered to send me my late grandfather’s Rolleiflex: a gorgeous, fancy, medium-format camera, which I hadn’t known existed. And oh my God.
My mom brought it to me yesterday at my high school, where we were gathered for a dinner honoring my (nominal) graduating class. I opened it right then and there at the table and thought that I would faint.
I don’t have any more to say. It is unspeakably gorgeous and I can’t believe I get to use it. Thank you, saba.
