season of the bitch

BBC Book List

Apparently the BBC reckons most people will have only read 6 of the 100 books here.
Instructions: [I've altered these, the old ones made it messy]
1) Bold those you have read.
2) *Star the ones you loved.
3) Italicise those you plan on reading.

1 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
2 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
3 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
*4 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling (and I am not ashamed)
5 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
6 The Bible -
7 Wuthering Heights - Emily Bronte
8 Nineteen Eighty Four - George Orwell
9 His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
10 Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
11 Little Women - Louisa M Alcott
12 Tess of the D’Urbervilles - Thomas Hardy
13 Catch 22 - Joseph Heller
14 Complete Works of Shakespeare (this is so clearly unfair. I’ve read probably 80%)
15 Rebecca - Daphne Du Maurier
16 The Hobbit - JRR Tolkien -
17 Birdsong - Sebastian Faulks
18 Catcher in the Rye - JD Salinger
19 The Time Traveller’s Wife - Audrey Niffenegger
20 Middlemarch - George Eliot
21 Gone With The Wind - Margaret Mitchell
*22 The Great Gatsby - F Scott Fitzgerald
23 Bleak House - Charles Dickens
24 War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy
25 The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - Douglas Adams
26 Brideshead Revisited - Evelyn Waugh
*27 Crime and Punishment - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
28 Grapes of Wrath - John Steinbeck
29 Alice in Wonderland - Lewis Carroll
30 The Wind in the Willows - Kenneth Grahame
31 Anna Karenina - Leo Tolstoy
32 David Copperfield - Charles Dickens
33 Chronicles of Narnia - CS Lewis
34 Emma - Jane Austen
35 Persuasion - Jane Austen
36 The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe - CS Lewis
37 The Kite Runner - Khaled Hosseini
38 Captain Corelli’s Mandolin - Louis De Berniere
39 Memoirs of a Geisha - Arthur Golden
40 Winnie the Pooh - AA Milne
41 Animal Farm - George Orwell
42 The Da Vinci Code - Dan Brown
43 One Hundred Years of Solitude - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
44 A Prayer for Owen Meaney - John Irving
45 The Woman in White - Wilkie Collins
*46 Anne of Green Gables - LM Montgomery
47 Far From The Madding Crowd - Thomas Hardy
48 The Handmaid’s Tale - Margaret Atwood
49 Lord of the Flies - William Golding
50 Atonement - Ian McEwan
51 Life of Pi - Yann Martel
52 Dune - Frank Herbert
53 Cold Comfort Farm - Stella Gibbons
54 Sense and Sensibility - Jane Austen
55 A Suitable Boy - Vikram Seth
56 The Shadow of the Wind - Carlos Ruiz Zafon
57 A Tale Of Two Cities - Charles Dickens
58 Brave New World - Aldous Huxley
59 The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time - Mark Haddon
60 Love In The Time Of Cholera - Gabriel Garcia Marquez
61 Of Mice and Men - John Steinbeck
*62 Lolita - Vladimir Nabokov
63 The Secret History - Donna Tartt
64 The Lovely Bones - Alice Sebold
65 Count of Monte Cristo - Alexandre Dumas
66 On The Road - Jack Kerouac
67 Jude the Obscure - Thomas Hardy
68 Bridget Jones’s Diary - Helen Fielding
69 Midnight’s Children - Salman Rushdie
70 Moby Dick - Herman Melville
71 Oliver Twist - Charles Dickens
72 Dracula - Bram Stoker
73 The Secret Garden - Frances Hodgson Burnett
74 Notes From A Small Island - Bill Bryson
75 Ulysses - James Joyce
76 The Bell Jar - Sylvia Plath
77 Swallows and Amazons - Arthur Ransome
78 Germinal - Emile Zola
79 Vanity Fair - William Makepeace Thackeray
80 Possession - AS Byatt
81 A Christmas Carol - Charles Dickens
82 Cloud Atlas - David Mitchell
83 The Color Purple - Alice Walker
84 The Remains of the Day - Kazuo Ishiguro
85 Madame Bovary - Gustave Flaubert
86 A Fine Balance - Rohinton Mistry
87 Charlotte’s Web - EB White
88 The Five People You Meet In Heaven - Mitch Albom
89 Adventures of Sherlock Holmes - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
90 The Faraway Tree Collection - Enid Blyton
91 Heart of Darkness - Joseph Conrad
92 The Little Prince - Antoine De Saint-Exupery
93 The Wasp Factory - Iain Banks
94 Watership Down - Richard Adams
95 A Confederacy of Dunces - John Kennedy Toole
96 A Town Like Alice - Nevil Shute
97 The Three Musketeers - Alexandre Dumas
*98 Hamlet - William Shakespeare -
99 Charlie and the Chocolate Factory - Roald Dahl
*********100 Les Miserables - Victor Hugo

30. But it is not fair to count the Complete Works of Shakespeare as one book, and then force me to be honest and admit that I have not read all of them.

I bring you Sarah’s Favorite Female Desire Movies!

1. Dirty Dancing.

I submit that not only is Dirty Dancing a classic, but that it is in fact a feminist movie. The entire relationship between Baby and Johnny is about HER desires, what she wants and when. She has the power to break his heart. Her sexuality is not punished in the film (though admittedly Penny and her sister do suffer for their desires). But Baby knows what she wants, and she goes and gets it, class differences be damned. Plus, she’s studying economics of underdeveloped countries, and wants to join the Peace Corps–in the 60s. I love it. “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.”

(more below!)

» Read the rest of this entry «

According to my email from Planned Parenthood this morning, it’s National Condom Week. They sent out a link to their playlist of their favorite condom videos on YouTube, but I found something even better:

This is from Neil Gaiman’s “Death Talks About Life,” a PSA comic about HIV and condom use, from 1994. It’s out of print now, but was collected in Death: The High Cost of Living, which was one of the first comics I ever bought. Or you can read the whole thing at that link. (Also will soon be in an Absolute Death from Vertigo, so for those of you who are fangirls like me, rejoice!)

While I’m referencing holidays and comics writers, it is my duty to repost the sentiments of the wicked Warren Ellis:

Happy Valentine’s Day to all. And to those who hate the day, I say this: Valentine’s Day is a Christian corruption of a pagan festival involving werewolves, blood and fucking. So wish people a happy Horny Werewolf Day and see what happens.

From Immigration Equality:

Great News! Rep. Jerrold Nadler plans to reintroduce the Uniting American Families Act on Feb. 13!

You can make the bill a success by convincing your Representative to support the bill from Day One. Reintroducing the bill with as many cosponsors as possible will show powerful momentum for the rights of gay and lesbian binational couples!

Please call your Representative and ask them to be an original cosponsor of the “Uniting American Families Act of 2009”

Well, it’s not really that simple. But Matttbastard has a post up at Shakesville about the “Genocide Awareness Project” visiting the University of Calgary.

I had my own run-in with these assholes at Temple last year. My first reaction was shock at the giant display (no, I’m not finding pictures to subject you to). My second response was to do some quick searching on Temple’s Web site and the Temple News to find out exactly why I was stuck dealing with pictures of people dead in concentration camps or hanging from trees, next to the usual shots of the fetuses.

Apparently, since my university is publicly funded, it counts as a public forum for speech, and so even massively-funded outside groups like the “Genocide Awareness Project,” whose plan appears to be to completely alienate Jews, African-Americans, and anyone with good taste by comparing abortion to, y’know, actual racialized violence and genocide.

That said, the people behind the displays at Temple were pretty quiet, staying behind their hideous images unless someone tried to engage. And the radical cheerleaders came out to protest, which is always awesome.

I defend their right to speech and expression for sure. I believe in free speech, and though I think Woodrow Wilson was often a wanker (and no friend to women’s rights), I agree with him when he said:

I have always been among those who believed that the greatest freedom of speech was the greatest safety, because if a man is a fool, the best thing to do is to encourage him to advertise the fact by speaking.

But I believe that right stops when it becomes harassment, and I don’t think that a time, place and manner restriction on these displays (for instance, do they really need to have ten-foot dead fetuses? Just sayin’) would be too much of an infringement on their rights to be factually wrong and offensive to boot.

I would LOVE to know where these groups get their funding to take their traveling picture show on the road, apparently across the US/Canada border, too…

I forgot to cross-post this yesterday, but I ripped the LA Times a new one over at Global Comment for its lousy reporting and hit piece on my girl Jill Biden. And yes, that is DR. Biden to you.

I have to wonder, if we were discussing a male academic who taught at a prestigious Ivy League university, the reporter would feel the need to spend the entire piece debating whether he deserved the prefix “Dr.”

The article’s dismissive tone is symptomatic of the way the media treats women, particularly accomplished women in the public eye. Jill Biden has several advanced degrees, and yet chooses to teach in a community college, helping students who often cannot afford to attend school full-time. This is worthy of respect, not a quibble over whether she deserves the title as much as someone who stitches up wounds, treats skin conditions, or performs nose jobs.

But it also underlines the problems with much of newspaper reporting today: it relies on “experts” rather than information, it presents multiple opinions within a narrow range and purports them to be representative of the culture as a whole, and it focuses on ginned-up controversy instead of the actual story. It took me two minutes to find an “expert” who outlined the other side of the story. The Times could’ve done its research.

Instead, they went to press at first with a story that was not only offensive, but contained factual errors. No wonder newspapers are dying.

Read the whole damn thing.

Inspired by Amber, I’m posting the Twitter tweets that I favorited during the month of January. Because Twitter provides me with constant information and entertainment, and I love it.

If you’re easily offended…well, you probably wouldn’t be reading my blog anyway. So please, go on.

» Read the rest of this entry «

Renee wrote about the feminist dog uprising, and in solidarity, I’m showing off my puppy love.

Post-inauguration, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about the role of the blogosphere and the Internet in general in left political action.

I wrote a piece for Global Comment in which I said:

We’ve spent so long arguing that government doesn’t have to be the enemy, but the fact is that we’re used to government being the enemy. We’re used to disavowing the actions of our president loudly, to practically shouting “Not in our name,” to writing screeds of why we’re disappointed that this is our country.

No wonder we have a hard time believing that someone could get things right.

I was reading The Nation over breakfast this morning and came across this piece (which is excellent and should be read in its entirety) by Jonathan Schell.

Schell writes:

Yet in addition to being interconnected, the crises have striking features in common, suggesting shared roots. To begin with, all are self-created. They arise from pathologies of our own activity, or perhaps hyperactivity. The Greek tragedians understood well those disasters whose seeds lie above all in one’s own actions. No storm or asteroid or external enemy is the cause. Today, the economic crash is the result of investment run amok: the “masters of the universe” are the authors of their own (and everyone’s) downfall. The nuclear weapons that threaten to return in wrath to American cities were born in New Mexico. The oil is running short because we are driving too many cars to too many shopping malls. The global ecosphere is heading toward collapse because of the success, not the failure (until recently), of the modern economy. The invasion of Iraq was the American empire’s self-inflicted wound–a disaster of choice, so to speak. All we had to do to escape it was not to do it. Here and elsewhere, the work of our own hands rises up to strike us.

I was trying to find a quote this morning in which someone complained of Obama’s call for a new age of responsibility and said that it wasn’t their fault and they didn’t want to take responsibility.

And I think about the liberal blogosphere and how much of it has been defined, as I wrote before, by disavowing the actions of our government. Like leaving the Kerry 2004 sticker on your car after the last election, it seems like a big “don’t blame me” gesture, an argument like the one I made each time I left the country in the Bush years.

“I didn’t vote for him! I couldn’t help it!”

Now that the guy we (most of us) voted for IS in office, we feel like his call for responsibility is roping us back into being a part of Bush’s America. But responsibility isn’t just that.

Obama is in office because millions of people gave money, and thousands upon thousands of people took it upon themselves to volunteer for the campaign. Here in Philly there was a controversy because the Obama campaign didn’t want to pay “street money” to the folks who worked on election day, but they didn’t need to; volunteers were everywhere.

We took responsibility. We didn’t say “It wasn’t my fault, why should I have to work to fix it?”

Obama’s presidency isn’t a fun party where we punish the people who screwed up, because we all are complicit in the screwups. Like acknowledging and dealing with any other form of privilege, whether it be racial, gendered, heterosexual, cisgender, Western, middle-class, or educational, it’s not about feeling guilty. It’s about looking forward and doing something to change it.

No, it’s not my fault that Bush was elected. But I’m not going to let it be my fault that Obama doesn’t get to do all he can do.

Obama is redefining responsibility with that inaugural speech and its follow-up actions, just like he’s redefining the center. He’s taken the word away from conservatives who use it to gut welfare spending, and made it part of our vocabulary by coupling it with his famous quote from his keynote speech back in 2004, when his election to the Senate was a lone bright spot in a horrible election cycle, where Democrats were crouching defensively, letting the Right define the argument.

“It’s that fundamental belief — I am my brother’s keeper, I am my sister’s keeper — that makes this country work.”

That’s responsibility. It’s not covering your own ass and then crying out to punish the other guy. It’s looking at your own involvement and seeing what else you can do.