General Catch-up

Hello my dear friends,

I know I have been terribly absent. I taught intensive classes this summer, actually got something like a chapter of my dissertation done, and then moved house! I am back in my beloved Bay Area, in Berkeley, a wonderful, wonderful city, and still dissertating away, as well as applying for academic jobs this fall (to begin next fall).

I have reopened my etsy shop, and I made some cool new accessories this summer in a few new designs that I am excited to share soon!

I also was pleased to be asked by a good friend to make her a hair accessory for her wedding earlier this month. I was so flattered that she liked what I sell on etsy! It was my first custom made piece, which was a fun adventure -- we looked at some of my completed designs to find something that worked with her aesthetic and with what I had in stock. I even made her a little muslin "rough draft" so she and her hair-dresser could use that for the trial appointment. In the end, I trolled vintage and thrift stores until I found a great silk scarf with enough white to make a little flower, and then I almost wrecked the scarf by by washing it..... and almost wrecked the first flower I made by applying a stiffener that had worked great on cotton, but left marks on silk. Luckily, I had made a "back up" flower in case something happened to the first one. And my friend liked the second better anyways, thank goodness. She was a total bombshell at the wedding, and I loved how the little silk "flower" looked! Hopefully she'll send me a pic I can post.

If I had been charging her, that little flower would have easily cost her twice as much as I usually charge, considering the time and energy and materials. I can see why bridal items can seem to be so overpriced, but the care and energy that goes into pleasing one customer is a lot extra, it seems to me. I was glad to do it as a gesture of love for my friend, though.

I also was commissioned to do some freelance writing, which was a lot of fun, but also hard work.... I am not used to modifying my style for commercial writing, and I had to tone down my long sentences, tone down the purple prose, and just be much less flowery, generally. Still, it was good money and gave me some confidence that if this academia thing doesn't work out, there may be other ways in which to apply my skills.

This is a text heavy post, but tomorrow will be an image heavy one, so forgive me in the meantime :)

Dissertating

I am deep in my dissertation work right now, with deadlines looming, and I have to plan 2 summer classes that are both starting in a month, so I am taking a break from Etsying and Blogging for the near future. But it is only temporary!

Today in Dissertation Writing, Politics, and Jewelry

PDK got back from his loooong trip to India yesterday -- woohoo! Brought me some lovely presents of the gold and silver kind, too :)  I love the pretty silver earrings he and his sister picked out -- they make the loveliest chiming sound if I shake my head and I've never seen anything like them. I did find some very similar ones on etsy so you guys can see what they look like (since I am too lazy/busy to take pics). Apparently they are called jhumka in North India and jimiki or jitniki in South India, and they are shaped like bells, or you could see them as inverted lotuses.

image via jhumkas on etsy

Instead of hooks, though, mine have posts like these. So beautiful!

image via jhumkas on etsy

So after his three weeks off, he's back at work today, and I am home, planning on doing PhD work.... I am revising and adding to a chapter (well... the chapter, since it's the only one I have written), and I have a plan of how to do it, finally, after rereading and editing and changing the organization of the forty pages I have already written.  I've been thinking about it all day, but have yet to put pen to paper (well, keystrokes to Microsoft Word).

I am also excited about my plan for the evening, which might sound boring to most people: I am going to a meeting with Santa Barbara's representative in California's Assembly, Das Williams, to hear him talk about California's budget, which is in a constant state of crisis. I long wanted to be a lawyer and follow in my civil-rights-defending father's footsteps... until I came to the realization that I was not sure I could emotionally or mentally handle the weight of deciding others' lives with my actions, since any mistakes I made could mean a loss of freedom or loss of life for my clients. Still, I have remained pretty politically engaged, especially with my pet issues: prisoners' rights, women's rights, the environment, and higher education.

I am looking forward to hearing an update on the budget, not least because it directly affects my employment at the University of California. Grad student, undergrads, and faculty at the UC have been fighting and protesting budget cuts, and Jerry Brown, who I voted for, is still proposing an additional $1 billion in cuts to the UCs on top of what has been cut in the last two years, even with his proposals with increased taxes. A sad day for a public university system.

The constant undermining of public support for higher education is one reason that I am thinking strongly of leaving academia when I (finally) finish my PhD. There is no reason to stick around in a system that is making it impossible for me to actually engage with and directly educate students, not just lecture and evaluate them, and yet is still giving them a degree at the end.

If you are interested in reading more about the way that college students are losing out while paying more for a college education in California, you might want to check out the links below. I am just going to put my blinkers on for the next four hours and focus on poetry, and then return to caring deeply about these problems at the town hall meeting this evening.

Links

• Remaking Higher Education -- a great on-the-ground blog by a UCSB Prof who is involved in the UC administration;
• "A Perfect Storm in Undergraduate Education," Parts 1 and 2 in the Chronicle of Higher Education;
• This activity is a fun and interactive way to try to fix California's budget problems.

An Unconscionable Abuse of the Semicolon

I am a terrible, slow, inaccurate typist, and this passage, composed of only TWO sentences, made me want to die as I was taking notes for my dissertation yesterday.

“To start with some definitions, by ‘avant-garde’ I am referring to historical waves of artists in the twentieth century associated with innovative formal practices and their legacy. Manifestations of avant-garde practice generally are regarded as formal and sociopolitical, and typically involve groups of artists with shared principles who often work in more than one medium or genre; synthesize disparate influences and techniques including ‘high’ and ‘popular’ culture, deliberately attempt to undermine or contradict formal markers of rigidified artistic structures and ruling ideologies; consider art to be apolitical and aesthetic instrument with direct agency; push art and society forward into new and unfamiliar terrain; employ technical features designed to unsettle and interrogate unitary voices of authority and totalizing narratives; explore formal modes such as open field, performative, and alternative poetics based on extra-semantic properties such as visualization and sound; question the nature and possibility of a nonproblematical speaking subject; animate multiple voices in preference to a centralized stable narrator or persona; transcend boundaries of nationalism, draw on international influences, and maintain dialogue with artist sin other nations and cultures; and frequently use collage, bricolage, fragmentation, and pastiche in order to create palimpsestic or dialogic texts revealing multiple frames of reference and mechanism of interpretation.”

from “Diaspora and the Avant-Garde in Contemporary Black British Poetry” by Lauri Ramey in Noland and Watten's Diasporic Avant-Gardes.

It's not a bad definition of the avant-garde, though. All-encompassing, to say the least.

Better ways to use semicolons:

• 
  Vintage cream/yellow typew...

  lettershop
  $13.50 USD
• 
  Semicolon Black Laser Cut ...

  agirlfrommar...
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Semicolon Brooch

nerdgoddess

$8.50 USD

Semicolon Letter Press Nec...

WoodenNickel...

$29.00 USD

Beginning at the beginning

I do things with words. This has always been the beginning, for me. My professional life is a word-heavy occupation -- being a hopeful academic and all -- and for me, that is always a good thing. But I learned in my printing and book-making class back in college that words are not just carriers for ideas -- they are either embodied in our mouths or materialized in ink pressed on paper (or, here, in pixels lighting up on your screen). In other words, saying something and making something -- both are vital.

So, I am starting this space as a personal space, not entirely separate from my public academic life, but full of all the other delights (and perhaps sorrows -- fingers crossed they won't be so bad) in my life.

And now, to begin at the end: tonight I came home to find a sniffly, sick boyfriend in bed, taking a well-deserved nap. I then took this opportunity to make him a lovely, Indian-spiced lentil curry full of spice and fragrance, and planned to pull out all the stops with turmeric-scented potatoes and spicy kale on the side.

But, understandably groggy at 8 p.m., PDK was not so hungry, so I happily turned instead to the brown bag of gorgeous chanterelles picked up at only $15/lb at the Santa Barbara farmers' market yesterday! Quickly simmered and browned in butter and served on garlic toast, they were a perfect dinner, accompanied as they were by red wine and good conversation with our dear roommate Ms. E.

Tomorrow is sure to be much spicier, since those lentils will be sitting in their juices, slowly creating even more heat from the chilis. And I'll be back to the dissertation, since I'm already 4 days behind on my chapter draft, promised to writing partner Kevin last Sunday (damn...... here comes all that workaday life hurtling back in again).