Happy Thanksgiving, Gentle Readers...It still seems to go against the spirit of Thanksgiving to spend any part of the day online. My family? Well, this summer someone was issued a work phone that had e-mail, but it's worked only occasionally. Nevertheless, for those who are online today, I've tried to save some time on Wednesday for finding some interesting links.
Books (Yes More Books Don't Ask Me How That's Possible I Do Not Know)
Alice Walker is not exactly an impartial critic; she was a fan who drew attention to Margaret Walker's work. (No close family connection.) Which means that many readers had Alice Walker to thank, not only for The Color Purple, but also for Jubilee. Nevertheless, I'm interested in this book.
Calligraphy
S.A.R,K,, not to be confused with "sark" as in "snark"::
Cars
The short story of the world's most ridiculously overpriced car.
Contest
Wikipedia has been sponsoring a biannual, worldwide, Science Photo Contest for several years now; for the last three or four contests they've been able to award cash prizes, although contestants agree to donate their science photos to the improvement of Wikipedia. If you are a scientist, on any level from grade school to PhD, and you happen to have captured a good clear image that illustrates something previously un-illustrated about a science topic, you could win a few thousand dollars (or euros or whatever)--or at least get your screen name published on Wikipedia! You can enter articles, too, if you've documented enough information to write a better article than they already have, which in the cases of some butterflies we've studied should be easy. The contest runs through the 15th of December. Read the complete rules:
There are sub-contests for different countries. Gentle Readers, by far the majority of winners so far have been from Russia. (The contest was originally organized in Estonia. I would not have expected Estonian editors to be especially partial to Russia.) If you live in another big, rich country such as the US, Canada, Australia, India, or Brazil, and think your country's name naturally belongs ahead of Russia's on lists of prize winners, this is your chance. And if you are in the US and are spending any part of Thanksgiving Day in the college computer center, this contest is probably for you.
Encouragement
If you are spending part of Thanksgiving Day in the college computer center...I remember the year I had to do that. I did not even tell myself anything lame like "Cheer up! Use this time to get better acquainted with an interesting person you don't see in classes, work, or your social club." There just happened to be such a person. The interest was mutual. It wasn't True Love, obviously, but it was the pleasure of hanging out with a fellow introvert. Thanksgiving dinner and Thanksgiving Day were much less of a bore than I'd expected. Then I spent the rest of the weekend quarrelling with one of the "brethren" in my social club who had eaten Thanksgiving dinner alone, and beginning to realize that Seventh-Day Adventists were always going to find fault with me for being an introvert (not to mention liking other introverts), and going down with mononucleosis. On the whole it was still a horrible weekend.
You, however, are a completely different person, going to a different university, living in a different century, and it's entirely possible that, if you use the weekend on campus to get better acquainted with interesting people, you will make a new frugal friend and have a purely delightful weekend. Anything can happen. You're twenty-two. You might as well enjoy the good things about being twenty-two--or nineteen, or whatever age you are/
Knitting
Could I knit you things like this, Gentle Readers? Absolutely. They're not hard to chart; once charted they can even be knitted on the fancier late-model machines. Would you want me to? Would you want this knitter to? I don't think.
Meme
How do we know this is not a photo of Grandma Bonnie Peters showing her rental property circa 2006? (If you look closely, of course, it's a different face.)
(a) When GBP wore a wig like that, the hair was wavier
(b) GBP would never have been seen in public in a skimpy slip dress like that
(c) The carpeting in GBP's rental property was avocado green and would not have photographed as a more tasteful blue-grey
(d) GBP closed the sliding door panel over the TV screen
Correct answer is "All of the above." And it was a color TV. And the wall phone was harvest gold. Total 1969 nostalgia trip, that house was. And by 1969 people who wore slip dresses were wearing shorter ones.
But this phenomenon--models are chosen because they conform to certain looks--leads us to...
More Things to Worry About
This is the Canadian author known as Naomi Klein. This is her best recent picture--nine years ago:
Photo donated to Wikipedia by Molzeyed, CC SA 4.0 Wikimedia Commons. (I miss the easy-to-use attribution links on Wikipedia).
This is the US-based author known as Naomi Wolf. (For a few years, because of the way her book jacket was printed, I thought of her as Naomi Fire Wolf.)
I'm not sure how those faces could be confused. The two Naomis don't look alike or write alike; one might as well mix them up with Naomi Campbell, and throw in Naomi Judd while we're there.
Well...maybe I do understand it. Careless readers mix up books and writers. Of course the way to stop confusing books and writers is to make a more thorough study of them. In my twenties, when I'd read only a few short stories by each of them, I thought Richard Wright and James Baldwin were almost interchangeable. That was clear proof of sloppy thinking. I knew that, in order to teach in the DC school system, I couldn't afford to mix up influential writers like that, so I read Wright's books and Baldwin's books until I had a firm mental impression of them as being two different men.
It wouldn't hurt confused readers to study the works of Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf. One of the things the reader will notice is that neither is exactly a conservative writer. One's much further Left than the other, but Wolf is a clearheaded moderate D.
What do writers do when people mix us up? Ellen Goodman complained of being confused with Anna Quindlen (I thought those two did write somewhat alike) as a symptom of prejudice against women. Piers Anthony wrote of being confused in a more prejudicial way with "another science fiction writer" with a reputation for behaving badly at book signings (that was before Harlan Ellison alienated all his fans)--the quirky Quaker writer made both a joke and a trademark of being seen as an "ogre," but confusion with the boorish writer cost him sales during the years when sales counted.
Two writers who really were confusible were the advice columnists known as Ann Landers and Abigail Van Buren. As each woman built her reputation, they seem to have tried to avoid acknowledging each other's existence. Many readers thought they were one person who, perhaps for copyright reasons, used two pseudonyms; their printed pictures looked alike! In the late 1970s the writers finally acknowledge their resemblance and confessed that they were identical twins. "Not clones," "Dear Abby" told readers, "though we have been compared to cyclones."
For writers who are not even first cousins, admiring each other's work is probably the approach to disambiguation that makes the best impression on readers. Of course, it helped Alice Walker, when she was relatively young, that Margaret Walker's Jubilee was worth a sober writer's sounding fangirly about. Readers might have thought that Alice Walker was saying nice things about Margaret Walker's book because the older writer was the young one's aunt...but in the end they had to thank both writers for writing differently great novels.
Naomi Klein, instead, took the incredibly solipsistic approach of claiming Naomi Wolf was her "doppelganger." And writing a whole book on that theme, central to which was a claim that Wolf was a right-winger. Golly. Klein would sound so much less like an early Margaret Atwood protagonist, about ready to stop eating or hide when her car pool are about to leave camp, if she'd tried disambiguating herself by writing favorable reviews of Wolf's books.
Philosophy
In the interest of fairness, having reviewed several books by members of "Peace Churches" this year, here's an opposing voice...Theodore Roosevelt.
The Bible makes it clear that there are times when "the Lord God teaches my hands to make war and my fingers to fight," as well as times to "turn the other cheek." There are times to "resist not evil," and times to "resist the Devil and he will flee from you." There are times to "answer a fool according to his folly" and "answer not a fool according to his folly."
But even when the use of force in self-defense is justifiable, war is never a good thing. If the enemy force us into a war, then we can ask God to teach us to fight--or to be martyrs, if we feel that personal vocation. Even then war always wastes things others will want, destroys lives that will be missed, and harms people who have done others no harm.
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