Lisa Batya Feld's Blog, page 18
March 10, 2011
Life changes so fast they're giving me whiplash!
I turned in my thesis on Monday and I defend in two weeks; it feels very surreal. I think all but one of the pieces are frigging awesome, and the remaining one is just plain great. So now the next stage is to start submitting them to journals and see what happens, as Gregor would say.
Meanwhile, I've turbo-charged the job search, I'm layning two aliyot (chanting the bible, for those who don't know Hebrew) this Saturday, and putting out a (figurative) fire, which I think is adding to the surreal feeling because there's no real diminishing of adrenaline.
Plus a moment of comic relief: the other night, at 4AM, my neighbors decided to practice guitar power chords. When I bashed on their doors, they shouted back, "Hang on, we're just getting to the good part!"
Meanwhile, I've turbo-charged the job search, I'm layning two aliyot (chanting the bible, for those who don't know Hebrew) this Saturday, and putting out a (figurative) fire, which I think is adding to the surreal feeling because there's no real diminishing of adrenaline.
Plus a moment of comic relief: the other night, at 4AM, my neighbors decided to practice guitar power chords. When I bashed on their doors, they shouted back, "Hang on, we're just getting to the good part!"
February 27, 2011
Happy Birthday!
Happy birthday,
![[info]](https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/hostedimages/1380442897i/1319734.gif)
mabfan
!
Wishing you much awesomeness and delight in the coming year, although with two wonderful daughters, that's pretty much guaranteed. :)
mabfan
!Wishing you much awesomeness and delight in the coming year, although with two wonderful daughters, that's pretty much guaranteed. :)
February 14, 2011
Grrr.
Went to pull out my flash drive last night to get some major work done for thesis, and it's missing. I've checked the computer lab, the English building, the student center, the library, and the campus police, and none of the lost-and-founds have it.
Now, thankfully, because I'm paranoid like that, everything was backed up. I'm pretty sure I haven't lost anything. But with just three weeks left to write and revise this thing, I really could have done without the extra pressure and distraction of "Where the hell is it? What am I doing? ARGH!" And I still have to completely gut and revise ten more pages in the next four hours and send them to my advisor. Awesome.
Now, thankfully, because I'm paranoid like that, everything was backed up. I'm pretty sure I haven't lost anything. But with just three weeks left to write and revise this thing, I really could have done without the extra pressure and distraction of "Where the hell is it? What am I doing? ARGH!" And I still have to completely gut and revise ten more pages in the next four hours and send them to my advisor. Awesome.
January 18, 2011
Me no english
Seriously, WTF, America? I mean, it's one thing if you want to take a show from somewhere and remix it, bring something different to it, especially after several years. That's how we get awesomeness like new versions of Battlestar Gallactica, or Star Trek, or Dr. Who. But if all you're going to do is hire new actors with American accents and keep everything else, you're just doing really expensive cosplay. I don't see the point. Just import the freaking original and have done with it.
This kind of reminds me of the whole kerfluffle when Steven Spielberg was kicked out of his first meeting with JK Rowling for saying, "Okay, the first thing we need to do is set Hogwarts in America, because no one is going to want to see a movie where the kids speak with British accents."
This kind of reminds me of the whole kerfluffle when Steven Spielberg was kicked out of his first meeting with JK Rowling for saying, "Okay, the first thing we need to do is set Hogwarts in America, because no one is going to want to see a movie where the kids speak with British accents."
January 9, 2011
lisafeld @ 2011-01-09T14:04:00
Done, done, finally freaking done! All 50 books read and written up.
1. Sherman Alexie, War Dances
2. David Auburn, Proof
3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
4. Pierre Boulle, Bridge Over the River Kwai
5. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
6. Ethan Canin, The Palace Thief
7. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
8. Willa Cather, My Antonia
9. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
10. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
11. Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
12. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
13. Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
14. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
15. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
16. Jerry Gabriel, Drowned Boy
17. David Grossman, To the End of the Land
18. Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World
19. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
20. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
21. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog
22. Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
23. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
24. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
25. Par Lagerkvist, The Sibyl
26. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
27. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
28. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
29. Sue Miller, The Good Mother
30. Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening
31. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
32. Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise
33. Amos Oz, The Same Sea
34. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
35. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
36. Marilynne Robinson, Home
37. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
38. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
39. Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
40. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
41. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
42. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
43. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
44. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
45. Michel Tournier, Friday
46. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
47. Unknown, Beowulf
48. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
49. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
50. A.B. Yehoshua, Mr Mani
1. Sherman Alexie, War Dances
2. David Auburn, Proof
3. Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey
4. Pierre Boulle, Bridge Over the River Kwai
5. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities
6. Ethan Canin, The Palace Thief
7. Truman Capote, In Cold Blood
8. Willa Cather, My Antonia
9. Charles Dickens, David Copperfield
10. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
11. Nathan Englander, For the Relief of Unbearable Urges
12. Gustave Flaubert, Madame Bovary
13. Karen Joy Fowler, The Jane Austen Book Club
14. Jonathan Franzen, Freedom
15. Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny
16. Jerry Gabriel, Drowned Boy
17. David Grossman, To the End of the Land
18. Jane Hamilton, A Map of the World
19. Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
20. Thomas Hardy, Jude the Obscure
21. Jerome K. Jerome, Three Men in a Boat: To Say Nothing of the Dog
22. Denis Johnson, Jesus' Son
23. Jamaica Kincaid, Annie John
24. Nicole Krauss, The History of Love
25. Par Lagerkvist, The Sibyl
26. Jhumpa Lahiri, Unaccustomed Earth
27. Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It
28. Gabriel Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude
29. Sue Miller, The Good Mother
30. Brian Morton, Starting Out in the Evening
31. Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita
32. Irene Nemirovsky, Suite Francaise
33. Amos Oz, The Same Sea
34. Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar
35. Marilynne Robinson, Gilead
36. Marilynne Robinson, Home
37. Henry Roth, Call It Sleep
38. Bernhard Schlink, The Reader
39. Jane Smiley, The Age of Grief
40. Zadie Smith, White Teeth
41. Muriel Spark, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
42. John Steinbeck, East of Eden
43. Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
44. Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina
45. Michel Tournier, Friday
46. Anne Tyler, The Accidental Tourist
47. Unknown, Beowulf
48. Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse-Five
49. Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway
50. A.B. Yehoshua, Mr Mani
December 23, 2010
Chick lit for guys?
I'm on book 48 of the 50 great works I need to read for my annotated bibliography, and it's suddenly occurring to me how many of the great works of literature involve a male author writing from the perspective of a woman who has an affair: Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina, Tess of the D'urbervilles, Lady Chatterly's Lover, etc. Plus modern novels like Freedom, To the End of the Land, etc.
Now, that's not to say that I haven't enjoyed a lot of them. Anna Karenina was fantastic, and Tess practically had me in tears. Not so crazy about Madame Bovary, but you can't win them all. But seriously, what's going on here? Why the focus on female infidelity from the woman's perspective? Is it that male authors think the most important issue for a female protagonist would have to be a conflict of the heart, rather than the "coming of age" or "conquering problems" stories of her male counterparts? Are they writing about what is scariest for them as men, the idea that the women they love might not love them back? Is it at all relevant that men are far more likely to be unfaithful than women, and if so, is it that the authors are trying to justify and universalize their own behavior, or is it that they want to tell the story of what drives men to infidelity, but are afraid that this is too "sissy" a subject for a male protagonist, and change the sex of their heroes?
Any thoughts?
Now, that's not to say that I haven't enjoyed a lot of them. Anna Karenina was fantastic, and Tess practically had me in tears. Not so crazy about Madame Bovary, but you can't win them all. But seriously, what's going on here? Why the focus on female infidelity from the woman's perspective? Is it that male authors think the most important issue for a female protagonist would have to be a conflict of the heart, rather than the "coming of age" or "conquering problems" stories of her male counterparts? Are they writing about what is scariest for them as men, the idea that the women they love might not love them back? Is it at all relevant that men are far more likely to be unfaithful than women, and if so, is it that the authors are trying to justify and universalize their own behavior, or is it that they want to tell the story of what drives men to infidelity, but are afraid that this is too "sissy" a subject for a male protagonist, and change the sex of their heroes?
Any thoughts?
November 21, 2010
Weighing in on Jane
For those who haven't been following the Jane Austen kerfluffle the last few weeks, the controversy centers around manuscript pages that have just been scanned and put on line, revealing that the original text is full of odd spellings and heavily punctuated, while the published works Austen is known for are much more streamlined (I am trying to explain the situation without using words that have bad connotations on either side, for reasons that will become obvious).
The response has been explosive: people are saying this means Austen was edited by A MAN and question what this means for feminism; they worry that the great author's reputation has been tainted by the revelation that her words (or at least her semicolons) are not entirely her own; etc.
I found this to be a very measured response (It's just a page or two, but for those who don't want to click though, it points out that punctuation and spelling had been fluid concepts for a long time and were only starting to be codified in Austen's time, and how important are commas, really), but I felt like it went a bit too far in the other direction, explaining away and diminishing the importance of the shift.
So here's my take as an author and editor:
1. No one is arguing that the fatuousness of Mr. Collins or the wit of Elizabeth Bennet can be credited to anyone but Jane Austen. The woman was a genius for creating characters and employing them with a wonderful dry humor.
2. Editing is almost always an essential part of the process of getting a word out of the author's head and into the hands of the public. For every Lovecraft that rails against it and every Richardson who goes through 40 versions trying to get the exact reaction he wants, there's a billion authors in between who wrote something that was pretty good and showed it to someone in hopes of either polishing it to make it awesome or smoothing it out to make it more accessible to an audience. Whoever did the editing, this doesn't put Jane's work in a special category.
3. HOWEVER, part of the craft of writing is not just the substance but the presentation, the music of the line. The "A Fifth of Beethoven" disco remix is not the same as "Beethoven's Fifth," and what holds for music holds for literature as well. The truth is that the pacing and tone of Austen's work shifts when the spelling and grammar changes. The question is whether (A) Austen was happy for changes that allowed her to clean up her rough drafts, (B) Austen wasn't crazy about/didn't care about the changes, but understood this was part of the publishing process, or (C) Austen strongly objected to the changes and felt they violated the heart of what she was trying to say in her work. The problem is we don't KNOW, because much of Jane Austen's correspondence was destroyed by her sister Cassandra when Jane died. We know from the manuscripts that she often scribbled out her own writing, trying to find the exact right word, trying to make her writing stronger. We know she was greatly surprised at the look of one of her books in print, which seems like a possible negative response, but we also have correspondence that shows her successfully resisting attempts by a potential patron to dictate what she wrote. So it's hard to judge where she stood on these edits to her books, whether she was a victim or a willing participant. It's a mystery that isn't likely to be solved, and even if we could ask her or find one note that commented on this process, it's entirely possible she had mixed feelings on the issue.
In the long run, historians and literature critics are going to spin a lot of theories about what this all means and never conclusively prove any of them. But for casual and even passionate readers of Austen, this isn't likely to change much. Our modern eyes are more accustomed to the published versions, and we're probably going to keep reading the books in the familiar style and enjoying the hell out of a brilliant writer.
The response has been explosive: people are saying this means Austen was edited by A MAN and question what this means for feminism; they worry that the great author's reputation has been tainted by the revelation that her words (or at least her semicolons) are not entirely her own; etc.
I found this to be a very measured response (It's just a page or two, but for those who don't want to click though, it points out that punctuation and spelling had been fluid concepts for a long time and were only starting to be codified in Austen's time, and how important are commas, really), but I felt like it went a bit too far in the other direction, explaining away and diminishing the importance of the shift.
So here's my take as an author and editor:
1. No one is arguing that the fatuousness of Mr. Collins or the wit of Elizabeth Bennet can be credited to anyone but Jane Austen. The woman was a genius for creating characters and employing them with a wonderful dry humor.
2. Editing is almost always an essential part of the process of getting a word out of the author's head and into the hands of the public. For every Lovecraft that rails against it and every Richardson who goes through 40 versions trying to get the exact reaction he wants, there's a billion authors in between who wrote something that was pretty good and showed it to someone in hopes of either polishing it to make it awesome or smoothing it out to make it more accessible to an audience. Whoever did the editing, this doesn't put Jane's work in a special category.
3. HOWEVER, part of the craft of writing is not just the substance but the presentation, the music of the line. The "A Fifth of Beethoven" disco remix is not the same as "Beethoven's Fifth," and what holds for music holds for literature as well. The truth is that the pacing and tone of Austen's work shifts when the spelling and grammar changes. The question is whether (A) Austen was happy for changes that allowed her to clean up her rough drafts, (B) Austen wasn't crazy about/didn't care about the changes, but understood this was part of the publishing process, or (C) Austen strongly objected to the changes and felt they violated the heart of what she was trying to say in her work. The problem is we don't KNOW, because much of Jane Austen's correspondence was destroyed by her sister Cassandra when Jane died. We know from the manuscripts that she often scribbled out her own writing, trying to find the exact right word, trying to make her writing stronger. We know she was greatly surprised at the look of one of her books in print, which seems like a possible negative response, but we also have correspondence that shows her successfully resisting attempts by a potential patron to dictate what she wrote. So it's hard to judge where she stood on these edits to her books, whether she was a victim or a willing participant. It's a mystery that isn't likely to be solved, and even if we could ask her or find one note that commented on this process, it's entirely possible she had mixed feelings on the issue.
In the long run, historians and literature critics are going to spin a lot of theories about what this all means and never conclusively prove any of them. But for casual and even passionate readers of Austen, this isn't likely to change much. Our modern eyes are more accustomed to the published versions, and we're probably going to keep reading the books in the familiar style and enjoying the hell out of a brilliant writer.
November 15, 2010
Good timing
Bad news: Thesis defense has been moved up by our department, so I have to defend in mid-March, which is pretty effing terrifying, because I'm going to have to hustle to have all my stuff handed in by late February. I am so glad I'm not taking classes next semester...
Good news: This means the new releases by Jim Butcher and C.J. Cherryh will be released AFTER I defend and not tempt me when I'm trying to get everything ready. I can sit at Barnes and Noble as long as I like when they come out, guilt free.
Good news: This means the new releases by Jim Butcher and C.J. Cherryh will be released AFTER I defend and not tempt me when I'm trying to get everything ready. I can sit at Barnes and Noble as long as I like when they come out, guilt free.
November 9, 2010
Blech
Spent the weekend sick, and still feel awful. Just a chest cold, but my voice is gone and it's hard to breathe, plus tired all the time.
However, went yesterday to health services to check it out with them, and as long as I was there, got a flu shot and a meningitis shot (we have outbreaks of both on campus right now). The result of this is that both my arms are still screaming at me a day later. Going to try to survive my class, my internship and two rounds of meetings, but I really wish I could just crawl under the covers and die.
However, went yesterday to health services to check it out with them, and as long as I was there, got a flu shot and a meningitis shot (we have outbreaks of both on campus right now). The result of this is that both my arms are still screaming at me a day later. Going to try to survive my class, my internship and two rounds of meetings, but I really wish I could just crawl under the covers and die.
November 5, 2010
Good news all around
I'm caught up enough to spend the whole day at Barnes and Noble! (Or what's left of the day, after I spent the morning playing Lords of the Realm II)
I have my reading date, and it's a date when my parents can actually come out and see me!
Two weeks from today, I'm going to be home!!!
My mom's book ships today! This is her second collection of poems, and it's pretty awesome. I'm not at all biased, of course.
Someone was throwing out a perfect copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, so I snagged it. While I totally understand the arguments against Chicago, the fact is that if I'm going back into editing, I'm going to need to use it, so getting a $60 book for free is a pretty awesome deal.
Life is good.
I have my reading date, and it's a date when my parents can actually come out and see me!
Two weeks from today, I'm going to be home!!!
My mom's book ships today! This is her second collection of poems, and it's pretty awesome. I'm not at all biased, of course.
Someone was throwing out a perfect copy of the Chicago Manual of Style, so I snagged it. While I totally understand the arguments against Chicago, the fact is that if I'm going back into editing, I'm going to need to use it, so getting a $60 book for free is a pretty awesome deal.
Life is good.
