New Kid on the Hallway

You've got mail!...maybe

When you were younger, did you get all excited for the mail? I totally used to look forward to checking the mailbox, because anything that arrived for me was pretty much going to be cool - an actual letter or card of some kind, or maybe a package - fun stuff.

By now, however, my physical mailbox is usually filled with bills, junk flyers, and catalogs (which are occasionally fun, but these days I toss them without looking at anything because if I don't look at the ads, I won't want what they're pushing). It's much less exciting. There are even times of the month where I dread getting the mail because I don't want to get certain bills.

So e-mail has become my, "oh, goody, something cool!" thing. Because yeah, I get a ton of spam and boring e-mail, but a lot of e-mail is stuff I signed on for, or actual communications from cool people. I'd say I get a lot more "cool" mail via e-mail than via snail-mail by this point.

The problem, of course, is that snail-mail comes once a day - I know once I've picked up the mail I don't have to think about it till the next day. E-mail, on the other hand, arrives willy-nilly, whenever, according to no fixed schedule. Which is part of what makes it fun, but which also means that I can get a little obsessive about checking my (three!) e-mail accounts. Do I have any e-mail now? No. What about now? Nope. Any yet? Nada. Now? Oooh, e-mail - oh, it's a coupon off pet-food. Well, okay. Maybe there's something now....

Obviously if I'm actually working - teaching class, cleaning the apartment, cooking dinner, exercising, whatever - something that involves not being in front of the computer screen - I don't stop every two minutes to check e-mail. (My students might rightfully take offense at me checking e-mail during class. Although, hey! If they check e-mail when I'm not engaging enough, can I check e-mail when they're not engaging enough?) But if I'm writing or doing class prep or something else that involves computer time? And especially if it's not
perhaps the world's most exciting task? I'm an e-mail inbox-clicking machine.

All of which is to say, I think I need to get a life.

Indecision

You know how I mentioned before that I was 95% certain I'm going to law school here, so that I don't have to move away from NLLDH? I'm still 95% sure, but I'm going nuts because I still can't quite pull the trigger. I'm deciding between Here and Away, and I keep going back and forth. I'm supposed to have decided by now, but I asked for extensions from both schools because I can't quite decide.

It seems like it should be a straightforward decision for Here. They're pretty comparable schools, with no real edge to one or the other. Both Here and Away offer programs in the legal fields that really interest me. They're separated by two measly rankings on the all-important US News & World  Report rankings (Here is ranked slightly higher). I've visited both, and I very much liked the students and faculty and sense of community at both. Given that, it seems to make more sense that I should attend Here, since one of the reasons to go to law school in the first place is that it's a (slightly) more portable field than academia or the sort-of-connected-to-academia field in which NLLDH now works, and I'm not willing to live apart from my husband for a job any more. If I go to law school Here, I don't have to. (Plus, I REALLY like the weather better Here than Away. A lot of people in this country move to Away specifically for the weather, but I like winter, I like snow, and while I could give them up for 75-degrees year-round, it's the 90+ and 100+ degree days that slay me; I'll take my bad weather cold.)

But I can't quite pull the trigger and reject Away, and here's why: they really want me to go there. I'm a huge sucker for flattery, and Away is good at it. They've offered me a generous scholarship. (Cost-wise, the scholarship isn't a deal-sealer; it doesn't make Away cheaper than Here, it just makes Away's cost comparable to Here's in-state tuition. So financially, the scholarship makes it possible to attend Away over Here, but it doesn't make it a significantly better deal. Psychologically, however, the scholarship is a big deal.) When I visited Away, the dean of admissions knew who I was instantly and was incredibly welcoming. And I came home today from a message on the machine from the Away admissions dean, checking to see if I'd made a decision and reiterating how much they'd like to see me attend.

Here has been quite a bit more blase about my charms. No money (in theory it's still a possibility, but nothing has been forthcoming yet). The admissions dean was very pleasant, but didn't have my application info at her fingertips when I introduced myself and has generally been harder to get hold of and less responsive. I mean, Here has admitted me, I think they'd be happy to have me, but I don't get this sense that they'd be so! super! excited! to have me attend that Away exudes.

But here's the thing: one of the things I started wondering today was how much my immersion in academia is skewing my reaction to Away and Here. For instance, it was so drilled into me that you should never attend graduate school without funding that I think the scholarship offer weighs more heavily in my mind that perhaps it should. (Face it, either way I'm going to go into debt; the scholarship just makes Away comparable to Here, not actually less expensive.) In my grad program, there was something of a distinction between those who had funding and those who didn't; the latter were continually scrambling for it and I think they sometimes felt considered second-class citizens in the department. I don't think the same situation holds in law school at all. Sure, scholarships are good, it's nice to feel wanted, but full-rides are rare, and the common assumption is that all will be going into debt together. Funding in my grad program meant that I got TA experience, which was seen as a bonus for future employment; law school funding doesn't provide any experience that I can't get if I pay my way. And having a scholarship is certainly no guarantee of landing in the top 10% of my class, nor does not having one mean I can't.

I also have to remind myself that I'm not interviewing for an academic job; while a school's degree of enthusiasm is important, this isn't like trying to determine how well I'll fit in a department of 10 or 12 historians. I am going to be one of many students, and we'll all be judged by our performance, not by our pre-enrollment reputation among the admissions people. It's perhaps worth mentioning here that law school courses are all graded on a curve, and law school students are ranked by GPA. There's no "everyone pretty much gets an A," as in most Ph.D. programs. So however smart I look to admissions people now, it really won't matter once exams roll around. (I should also add that grades in first year courses are pretty much all determined by one exam at the end of the semester. Doesn't law school sound fun?) In my grad program, everyone pretty much got As, so funding (or lack thereof) helped create a sense of an academic pecking order among the students. In law school, that academic pecking order is calculated and determined for you explicitly, regardless of how you're paying for school.

I also find it hard to get out of the academic habit of specialization. As I said, Here and Away both have programs in especially one field that interests me. Away's program is, I think, undeniably stronger. They have some amazing internationally-known scholars in the field, and they even offer a LLM (masters of law) in the subject. Here's program is not quite as good. But that said? Here has a program in this area, which sets it apart from probably 90% of law schools. And again, I'm not getting a Ph.D. - I'm getting a J.D. The J.D. is a general degree, in which I need to take courses in a lot of different subjects, not just one field that interests me most. Even within my area of interest, I'm not going to write a dissertation; I just need to take some courses to prepare myself to get a job. Most employers aren't going to care if I take those courses with Here's very-slightly-less distinguished scholars rather than Away's superstars. Moreover, who knows what other areas of law might draw me into their spell? Nonetheless, I keep thinking like an academic - I keep thinking of Away's program as if I'm going to be looking for a dissertation advisor.

I'm writing this not because I'm looking for advice on where I should go - though feel free to give some if you feel inspired -  but more to articulate these ideas to myself. I think I started to realize today how some of my academic habits are getting in my way. Then again, I'm not in law school yet - I may have this all wrong! But I have to make a final decision soon, and if this makes me feel better about staying Here and rejecting Away, then it serves a purpose. (What I think would be perfect would be to attend both schools, or to have Away and Here change places, since then I could have all the things I like about Away, AND live in the same place as my husband. But unless someone figures out some exciting things about physics, and soon, neither of those is an option.)

Adventures in technology

Something I'd forgotten about, in those three years when I wandered the Dark Side used a Dell computer, was the fun of playing around with new and exciting bits of software. I don't know why I was never motivated to find things to refine my Dell into the best "me" machine I could, and just stuck with the little bit of tweaking that the basic machine allows you to do, because I used to use quite a few add-ons on my old Apple computers. Then when I moved here, and started using NLLDH's old MacBook, the machine was elderly enough that I didn't think much about trying new things. But in fact, it was the machine's elderliness that led us to buy me this new one, and in the last week or so I've been having a ball trying out all the nifty software gadgets that everyone who has a Mac knows about already.

We bought me this machine so that I could try Scrivener, which is writing software intended to let you store and draw upon lots of different kinds of information while you write. You can draft, edit, and outline; you can view your files as index cards on a corkboard; you can do keyword searches. It's honestly pretty neat, and all I needed to see was a screenshot of a draft document open side-by-side with a PDF file to think I wanted to try this. Because how often have you had to flip back and forth between windows and applications to move from the thing you're writing to the thing you're writing about, and vice versa? The pathetic thing is that I haven't used it very much, because I haven't been writing anything lately that requires any serious research and thus would allow me to road test it properly (the simple book review isn't a great test case). If you'd like to read a better review, you can check out what Merlin Mann at 43Folders has to say.

But Scrivener was just the start. I've now also joined the large following accumulated by Quicksilver, a little launcher-type application that allows you to do a huge range of things without leaving your keyboard. I've never been into launchers prior to this - maybe because they always seemed mouse-dependent, and I eschew the mouse whenever possible? - but the way that Quicksilver allows you to do so much by keyboard has sucked me in. From any window or application, I can open up Gmail in 4 keystrokes (because god forbid I have to wait any longer than that to read my e-mail). I can e-mail text to someone. I can open any document on my hard drive. I can get the definition of a word. For a mouse-hater like me, it's wonderful. The intro tutorial here gives you a good idea of what Quicksilver can do, and I suspect I've only scratched the surface so far.

I've also become fascinated by various planner kinds of applications. Most of them are organized more or less around David Allen's Getting Things Done (GTD) (which, if you've heard of, you know has attained near cult status, and if you haven't heard of it, some of these comments won't make sense, but the Wikipedia entry might be helpful). I am not really a true believer, but some of the system works for me, and some of it I leave (e.g.: I really appreciate the idea that what you write down on a to-d0 list needs to involve verbs, not nouns, and that you need to break your projects down into their smallest component parts. Therefore, don't write on your to-do list something like "prescriptions," but instead, "pick up prescriptions at Walgreens," and if your project is "paint the backyard fence," don't write "paint backyard fence" - you need to write stuff like, "check paint prices online," "go to hardware store to choose paint," "buy paint, primer, rollers, and gloves," and "prime fence" before you can write "paint fence." The context thing is not especially helpful for me - Allen emphasizes dividing up your tasks by where you need to be to do them - at home, in the office, at the computer, etc - which is doubtless helpful for lots of people, but most of my tasks don't require very different contexts. I'm not calling people a lot, so I don't need a "@phone" list, that kind of thing. And Allen also advocates a "waiting on" list, where you put tasks you've delegated to someone else and can't do anything about until you hear back from them, which again, isn't really relevant to my life.)

Given my ambivalence, the programs that follow GTD really closely haven't been that appealing to me. For instance, Midnight Inbox is very very pretty, but it really screams GTD (and, not surprisingly, the business world) to me, and so there was too much of it I didn't want to deal with. Things, however, while still basically a GTD application, feels less restrictive (it also feels a little incomplete, as it's not yet officially available for purchase; you can download a free preview for the moment). I haven't worked out all the ways to get around it by keystroke yet, though, and as my fondness for Quicksilver suggests, that's a big thing for me. Even more promising is OmniFocus, brought to you by the people who created OmniOutliner (and OmniOutliner Pro), one of the best outliners out there (also something I've been playing around with). OmniFocus is fast, clean, pretty, and very negotiable by keyboard.

What is really intriguing me about these planner programs is that in conjunction with Quicksilver (and the Services that Apple makes available in Leopard), I can send new to-dos to my Things or OmniFocus inbox with a few keystrokes, from any application or window, whether or not Things or Omnifocus are up and running. I can also e-mail myself to-dos.

The downside to both Things and OmniFocus is that they cost money. I wouldn't say they're expensive (the full release of Things will be available for $39 if you sign up before the launch date and $49 after; OmniFocus costs $49.95 with educational discount, $79.95 without), but you know, money is money, and there are a lot of neat free web-based services out there. Lately I've been enjoying Remember the Milk, which allows you to create to-do lists, organize them by project or due date, and give them tags. What's really spiffy about Remember the Milk is that again, you can rig it to work with Quicksilver, so you can send yourself tasks even when you're not on the Remember the Milk site (you do need to be connected to the internet though, of course). And even spiffier (at least, if you're someone like me who has her Gmail inbox open just about all the time) is that you can arrange for Remember the Milk to display your to-do list next to the messages in your inbox. You can also arrange for your to-do list to get sent to Google Calendar or iCal or Microsoft Outlook, where they appear either in traditional to-do list format or, if they have due dates, as events on the calendar itself - so you can integrate online to-dos with online (or offline) calendars.

Personally, I haven't decided yet if I want to make the shift to organizing my life electronically. At the moment, I have a paper planner that I really love, and it's one of my last refuges from the digital world. I like writing by hand, and I love pens, and it turns out that besides grading papers, organizing my life in my paper planner is one of the few occasions I have actually to use all my nifty pens to write things by hand. There's something really satisfying about crossing out by hand a task that I've completed - it's much more tactile than clicking in a check-box and seeing strikethrough text appear. I like the way each page of my life is physically separate in my paper planner, rather than running together on the screen. I find it more revealing to flip back through my paper planner to see what I had scheduled when, and what I got done when (and how many days in a row I had to write down a task before I completed it), than to scroll through screens on the computer.

The only problem is that I have to make sure to open up the paper planner and write things down, and check it to see what it is I'm trying to accomplish on a given day, and I'm not always very good at that (I go through very organized phases and very unorganized phases - the latter are usually when I'm either too busy to look at the planner, or when I have so little scheduled - like over winter break - that I can't be bothered to look at it). I'm not sure I'd be any better about this with an electronic planner, but given how much I love my new laptop, and how often it's open and I'm staring at the screen, the change is worth considering.

Anyway. I realize I'm probably the last person to discover these different applications (and I know I've read about some of them on people's blogs anyway), but it's been fun fiddling around with my computer again.

Martha Stewart I am not

Adventures in soap-making continue: the stuff I already made has cured enough to use, and it's really nice! Well, texture/feel/lather-wise, anyway - I am still working on the aesthetics. The plain and simple cold process batch I made came out beautifully hard and creamy (which sounds rather obscene...) but it's in all sorts of odd shapes, because I used a round Tupperware tub for a mold and then had to cut it up into bars, so I have little half-crescent pieces, which do not satisfy my strict sense of bath aesthetics at all.

After that, I made two batches using the hot process method, because I am impatient - cold process soaps need to cure for 4-6 weeks before you can use them, to ensure that the saponification process is complete and all the lye is gone, but the hot process method cooks all the lye out at once, so that as soon as your soap is has hardened in its molds, it's ready to use (although waiting a couple of weeks to let it dry/harden a bit more is probably a good idea).

What has became evident with my hot process soaps, though, was that I cooked them a little too long, and parts of the soap dried out, so that these bars, although they work beautifully, look a bit like they're suffering from the heartbreak of psoriasis or something, mottled with some dry and flaky patches. (That's one of them, up there at the beginning of this post - doesn't it look sort of motley? Not that using Photo Booth to photograph it helps the poor thing. Oh, and I put coconut milk in it, which the lye cooks and carmelizes the sugar in, which is why it's that sort of unappealing tan color.)

So yesterday I thought I would try the cold process again, and I made what looks like it will be a beautiful batch of creamy soap marbled with cocoa powder (I scented the soap with peppermint so they will be Thin Mint soaps!) - that is, assuming I can ever get it out of the mold (AKA my pyrex loaf pan). (I should give it a few more days before I start worrying about getting it out of the mold, though.) It turned out so nicely that I decided I would make some more soap today. I would make a slightly bigger batch! I would make an even better swirl!

Well, it turned out that my "bigger" batch still wasn't big enough for the plastic box I was using as a mold, so if this batch works, it will consist of very flat little bars. And I had some tangerine essential oil, so I decided that to go with the citrus theme, I would make a nice sunshine-y yellow swirl using turmeric to color the swirled bits (it's recommended as a natural colorant). But I didn't really measure and I used WAY too much turmeric. So instead of a nice bright yellow, I got a dark pumpkin. And I colored way more of the soap than I really needed to swirl, so I ended up with huge glops of dark pumpkin instead of nice swooping swirls. And when I was cleaning up, the turmeric got onto EVERYTHING, the smallest amount turning everything it touched pumpkin-colored. So I now suspect that once this soap is cured, it will produce pumpkin lather. I was kind of hoping to make stuff I could give to my mom and my sister, but this may end up as another batch that only a mother could love. (We'll have ugly soap coming out our ears! But we'll be very clean. Even if we turn pumpkin.)

In which I go on at surprising length about not much

NLLDH and I went out yesterday and explored an outlet mall in the suburbs of this fair city. It's kind of like a transplanted version of an outlet mall I visited occasionally from Former College City (it was a few hours away),  because they're done by the same people, and walking in was an odd blast from the past - I said to NLLDH, "I feel like I'm in [City X]!" He reminded me that we'd always had fun in City X, unlike Former College City, which helped me regain my equanimity.

Afterward, though, we agreed that it was a slightly sad kind of place. Maybe it's just the time of the shopping year - well after the holidays and the greedy post-holiday sale binges, but not yet quite time for spring shopping - but the place felt a little empty and desperate. It's always a bummer when you try to wallow in consumerism for a fun distraction and find yourself confronted with its fundamental emptiness.

Which isn't to say that I don't enjoy some good shopping - it's just that our fortunes were a bit mixed. I've been wanting new sunglasses forever, and we found a Sunglass Hut staffed by an actual FEMALE EMPLOYEE. Since one of our shared pet peeves is the usual fraternity-jock-stereotype guys who populate sunglasses stores, this seemed like a great opportunity, and it was even more encouraging to discover that instead of having to ask the salesperson to open each and every case for you as in the regular stores, the outlet store had all the cases open, so you could try on anything and everything without having to deal with the salesperson (I don't really like help when I shop - good salespeople are wonderful, and scarcer than hen's teeth; I prefer to be left alone than to deal with non-wonderful salespeople. Since this woman didn't seem inclined to leave her seat, we were good). Unfortunately I did try on what felt like every pair in the store and found none that floated my boat. They all seemed to be the same shape, too big and rectangular for me. Plus, NLLDH was really bonking from an early-morning run, and sunglasses are really one of those things where you need someone with you who can say, maybe/those are good/DEFINITELY NOT, and he wasn't quite up to the task at that point. And it's stupid, but something about that was really disappointing. In fact, I'm all bummed again, writing about it today. I am such a little kid.

But I did end up getting a new pair of chocolate brown ankle boots (a staple of my wardrobe, and my current pair is terribly scuffed), and a pair of pants and a blouse from (yes, wait for it) Brooks Brothers. NLLDH and the saleswoman raved over the blouse on me, and I bought the pants because I already have three pairs in other colors, although once home I was forced to acknowledge that they've changed the cut slightly and they're the tiniest bit tight in the waist. Sigh. The salespeople at Brooks Brothers, even the outlet, are actually always really good and helpful - this woman was honest about how the pants were fitting on me, so I guess I can trust her about the blouse - but again, I like to be left alone to shop. I was in the dressing room changing back into my own clothes and NLLDH was talking to the saleswoman about me, which was making me nuts (I kept thinking, "Stop talking so she'll leave and I can come out of the dressing room already!"). Anyway, he told her where I worked and all, and when I came out she was very pleasant but of course started trying to sell me more stuff (I mean, it is her job), and in an effort to push their khakis, she said, "Now, I don't know - are you allowed to wear chinos to work?" That was pretty funny, I have to confess.

So, it was a fun day in some ways, and in other ways it was sort of disappointing. This is what one gets when one attempts to acquire happiness along with material stuff, I suppose, although myself, I'm still pretty fond of material stuff. Now I'm sitting here trying to figure out how best to organize my day, and I think the first order is acquiring more stuff - but food this time. If I don't go get more cat food I think they'll end up eating me pretty soon. And then it will be time to start prepping for the weekly grind all over again.

Books to movies, or, why I liked The Golden Compass

I saw The Golden Compass this weekend, which - in case you've been under a rock recently, media-wise - is the big-screen adaptation of The Golden Compass (published in Britain as The Northern Lights), the first volume in children's author (and atheist) Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy. While there's been a fair amount of criticism of the movie, I have to say that I loved it.

In saying that I loved it, however, I'm not going to claim it's a brilliant movie. A lot of the criticism that I've seen has focused on pacing - that it's slow and sort of didactic at the beginning, and then that it races at a breakneck pace to the end. And I can understand that criticism. Nonetheless, I adored the movie, which got me thinking about the difference between something being good and enjoying it all the same.

One of the reviews I saw somewhere suggested that viewers would enjoy the movie more if they hadn't read the book, and I actually disagree. I think this goes back to central problem of translating a book to film - how can you do so in a way that preserves the book's essence and adequately represents it? A common response is that people will enjoy a film if they don't know the book, if they don't know what the film really "should" be like and don't know what they're missing. Now, I'm so not a film scholar (or a literature scholar, for that matter), so this is all a layperson's opinion and not a scholarly argument. That said, I can kind of get behind the idea that a movie is never going to be able to transplant a book to the screen - that the very process of changing genres creates something new. You cannot expect a movie simply to transfer a book to the screen, in the same way that writing isn't just about transferring ideas from your brain to the page - in both cases, the very process of transfer creates something new and at least slightly different. And it seems to me that the more a movie is "just like" the book, the less it's likely to be a very good movie (unless of course the book was very movie-like to being with, which is possible). So The Golden Compass can't (nor should it be) simply the book transliterated - it has to be something different. Of course, the problem is that frequently people who know the book from which a movie is taken will measure the "truth" of that movie based on how much it's like the book, and the less it's like the book, the less happy will be the books' fans.

Anyway, what I loved about The Golden Compass was that it created a (beautiful) visual space in which I could relive the books, in a way that was largely dependent on my own knowledge of those books. In that respect, it probably isn't the best movie, because my enjoyment of it depended on something outside of the movie itself. Here the pacing criticism is probably a legitimate one. For instance, there's a point in the movie when Lyra, the protagonist, rides Iorek Byrnison, the ice bear (also known as an armored bear, also known as one of the panserbjorne - and my absolute favorite invention of Pullman's, apart from the very concept of people's souls walking around outside their bodies as animal companions called daemons), across a snowy expanse to a house, where she makes a gruesome discovery. The ride is visually absolutely beautiful. The discovery, however, is made fairly quickly, and the horror that it should inspire in the viewer is probably therefore minimized. Because I'd read the book, however, and because I knew what they were going to find in the house, I experienced the ride as a dreadful moment of suspense, and I responded to the moment of discovery not so much as to what was being portrayed on the screen, but as to how I know it's described in the book. Because I had been horrified when I read that section in the book, I was equally horrified when I saw that part of the movie, even though the movie on its own did not succeed in creating that degree of horror.

It's almost as if I enjoyed the movie so much simply because it reminded me of what happened in the book.

This is not to say that the movie has nothing going for it. It's visually beautiful (though it's probably not for you if you a hard-core minimalist, because it's fairly ornate and elaborate). The special effects are incredibly well done - I nearly swooned when Lyra walks into the palace of the ice bears and becomes the focus of a circle of massive polar bears in armor. (Yeah, I have a thing for the bears.) The performances are wonderful - Nicole Kidman is a spectacular icy evil stepmother, and Dakota Blue Richards does a great job at being an ordinary, obstinate, occasionally bratty girl. (Daniel Craig is also wonderful, though sadly not on-screen very much - I've seen a review call him criminally underused, but dude, he's just not in the book very much!) And while the movie does minimize any direct connection between the evil power-hungry Magisterium and the Christian church, I don't think it particularly butchers the story.

But really, I loved the movie because I love the book, and somehow the movie makers created a world that allowed me to map my own understandings of the book onto their visuals, and that succeeded for me more because of that understanding than despite it.

I should add that this hasn't been the case for other fantasy book-to-movie experiences I've had. I actually think that the more the Harry Potter movies mess with the books - editing, streamlining - the better the movies are; in the case of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, I felt like the movie improved on the book, making it into something stronger and cleaner, and I'm happy to expend with some of the book's original details to end up with that result. And in the case of the Lord of the Rings movies, even though there were changes I disagreed with and that jarred me while watching (especially the portrayals of Faramir at the end of The Two Towers and Denethor in The Return of the King, both of which inspired those moments of "What?? Why did they change that? That makes no sense!" that interrupt your immersion in the story), overall the director's vision of that world was strong enough and compelling enough to override mine. I don't think the makers of The Golden Compass were able to accomplish either of those things - to improve upon the book, or to create a vision of the book that stands independently from it - but in conjunction with my own knowledge of the books, they did give me an extremely enjoyable movie-going experience.

(Full disclosure, in case this helps you better understand my comments here: I cried almost every time Iorek Byrnison was on-screen. I was a wreck during the fateful almost-intercision. I am a sentimental fool over this book.)

Grading jail

I'm in it. Probably won't be out for a few days. May come up with something to say here by then, or may be too brain-fried. Will see.

May actually be able to include subjects in my sentences then, too.

Now must go remove an orange cat from the stack of papers. 'Scuse me.

In anticipation of the fun tomorrow

I saw Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix today.

Loved it.

I'm kind of a sap (as well as kind of tired), but I was misty-eyed throughout at all my favorite bits. Flying through the London night on broomsticks was just plain COOL.

Anyway, just wanted to say that I think the reason why I love the movies (at least since the third - the second was kind of tedious and the first a little slavish) is that they have what Rowling lacks recently: an editor. To turn these huge books into reasonable movies, you have to cut a LOT. And in the last few, I think the directors have done a really good job of keeping the core, the essence, of the tale, and jettisoning what's really not necessary.

Sure, everything they cut is doubtless someone's favorite pet moment. (Very minor spoilers: I missed the scene with Neville's parents, and Peeves's salute to Fred and George.) But honestly? I kind of think the movie did a better job with the narrative. There are some places where it simplified things so nicely that I felt like the movie was showing the way the book should have been. (I had the same feeling about many of the cuts in the Lord of the Rings movies, too.)

So, anyway. Yeah, I'm happy. And although it would have been nice to reread book six prior to tomorrow morning, I've at least had my Harry Potter batteries recharged (um, wait, that sounds kind of dirty...).

See, I skimmed the NYTimes headlines today

After the cranky Washington Post piece accusing readers of Harry Potter of infantilism, I was pretty pleased to see Michiko Kakatani's really positive review of book seven. To be honest, I'm not sure that I completely agree with her assessment of Rowling:

[Her] magpie talent has enabled her to create a narrative that effortlessly mixes up allusions to Homer, Milton, Shakespeare and Kafka, with silly kid jokes about vomit-flavored candies, a narrative that fuses a plethora of genres (from the boarding-school novel to the detective story to the epic quest) into a story that could be Exhibit A in a Joseph Campbell survey of mythic archetypes.

The flip side of "fusing a plethora of genres" is a certain sense of derivativeness. Of course, this is a staple in fantasy literature, going back to Tolkien's reliance on Old English and medieval literature in creating Middle-Earth. And I'm not really one to criticize the Harry Potter books, as I love them with a deep passion.

What strikes me, though, is that I love them despite what I can see as their flaws. It doesn't really matter that Rowling in recent volumes has desperately needed an editor willing actually to work with her prose - they're still some of the most enjoyable things I've ever read, and this raises the perennial questions of why we enjoy what we enjoy, and whether enjoyment is (or should be) a major criterion in determining "good" literature. Given their popularity, it's clear that readers of Danielle Steele's books find a lot of enjoyment in them. Yet I'd never call Danielle Steele "good literature." At the same time, the fact that so many people enjoy them suggest that at some level, they're important - if not in advancing the cause of Great Literature, so to speak, as a kind of piece of evidence about modern culture (and I want to emphasize that I mean no criticism of people who read and enjoy Danielle Steele, even though I don't).

Going back to the New York Times, there's also an interesting article about abstinence programs and the responses and funding they're currently getting, the main point of which is summed up in the headline: "Abstinence Education Faces an Uncertain Future. It argues that in fact support for abstinence education seems to be waning, pointing to cuts in funding from Congress and widespread research demonstrating the programs' lack of effectiveness. What struck me particularly was the following quote from a director of an abstinence program, which focuses on the connection that the abstinence camp makes between remaining a virgin until marriage and a successful marriage:

“You have to look at why sex was created,” Eric Love, the director of the East Texas Abstinence Program, which runs Virginity Rules, said one day, the sounds of Christian contemporary music humming faintly in his Longview office. “Sex was designed to bond two people together.”

To make the point, Mr. Love grabbed a tape dispenser and snapped off two fresh pieces. He slapped them to his filing cabinet and the floor; they trapped dirt, lint, a small metal bolt. “Now when it comes time for them to get married, the marriage pulls apart so easily,” he said, trying to unite the grimy strips. “Why? Because they gave the stickiness away.”

Um, what? One's virginity is the stickiness that keeps people together? I think this is one of the strangest analogies I've ever seen.

The problem, however, is not so much the analogy as the reasoning behind it. If sex "was created," who created it? I'd imagine that answer is pretty clear for Mr. Love, but we're not all believers in an omnipotent, omniscient God.  I suppose one could say that evolution created sex, even though I'm sure that's not something Mr. Love would buy, but if evolution created sex (which is a pretty awful way to put it, I have to admit), I doubt that the purpose was to bond people together, and certainly not in a human institution such as marriage. Biologically, it's pretty clear that sex is a way to propogate the species, and all the pleasure we associate with it is just a way to help ensure that happens. Beyond that, any purpose attributed to sex is one that we humans have created. And given that they are human creations, I have a really hard time privileging one purpose over another. For some people sex means one thing, for others it means another. As long as everyone involved has reached the age of reason and is a willing participant, the meaning that other people attribute to sex is none of my business - as long as they don't try to force me to agree with theirs.

I don't really have a problem with church-based abstinence programs - if your church doctrine holds that one should not have sex before marriage, great! talk about it in church! I do really hope, however, that changes that the article points to will toll the death knoll for abstinence programs in the schools. Because placing them in the schools elevates one purpose for sex above all others, and I don't think it's the public schools' place to decide that for people.

Dear internets,

I am in kind of a crappy headspace right now.

I would really love to hear some jokes.

Your needy pal,

New Kid