Things I overheard while talking to myself

Right now we're reading Paradise Lost in my English class, and I am again reminded of how many problems I have with the Adam and Eve story.

Even when I was a little kid (and admittedly a little smartass) certain parts of that story always just bothered me. For one thing, the "God made Eve out of Adam's rib" thing made no sense to me since women are the ones who create life and give birth, and when I mentioned that to my professor he said that it could be read as men being jealous of women for being able to do that when they can't, so for this story they appropriated it.

Also the whole bit with the woman being the one responsible for the Fall didn't make sense to me either. No offense to men, but considering that over 90% of Darwin Award winners are men and that a man is far more likely to die in an accident caused by a lapse of judgment I think you can make a pretty good case that men tend to be more impulsive. Not to mention how the entire story, especially Milton's version, is extremely misogynistic and basically has the message that women should never be left alone to make any decisions without a man nearby (hah), and a couple passages actually have early feminist ideas coming out of Eve's mouth with the express intent of mocking those thinkers. I should also add that being raised Unitarian means that the whole idea of Original Sin is something that I've never accepted either (if you want to use D&D terms I think that everyone starts as True Neutral and has the potential to go either way on the alignment scale).

I also have a bias against Adam and Eve because when I first came out multiple kids in my grade would cleverly (or so they thought) point out that it was "Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve" as part of their homophobic douchebaggery. I wish I had read enough at that point to counter that Adam and Eve didn't do such a great job since in the story they get humanity thrown out of heaven! Or there's always the retort I've unfortunately never had occasion to actually use, which is "If God had wanted us to be naked we would have been born that way."

But mostly the problem I have with this story is how it's been used to keep half ot he population down and justify treating them like crap. There are some other creation stories from different parts of the world that have a similar theme about the first two humans, but most of those don't make women out to be the villains as much as this one does.

I have a shiny. And I can't stop clutching it.

The talk he gave was awesome, and he's funny as hell and really interesting. I think the biggest laugh was when he talked about how he had found out that Martin Scorsese was directing Shutter Island and it got leaked a little while later, and he got an email from an author friend with the subject line "Scorsese" and the text of the email was "Fuck You."

I got to ask a question about the moment he seems to have in every one of his books that's the major "Oh shit!" that completely takes you by surprise, and his response was that while some authors can get a lot out of really subtle moments he has to do the equivalent of drop an atomic bomb, and he brought up Shakespeare and the moment at the end of Othello when Othello realizes what he just did. When I was getting the autograph he also thanked me for asking that question.

So if you excuse me I'm gonna be in a puddle of fangirly goo for the next few hours.

The BBC believes most people will have read only 6 of the 100 books here. How do your reading habits stack up?

Bold the ones you’ve read! Italicize the ones you’ve partially read!

01 Pride and Prejudice - Jane Austen
02 The Lord of the Rings - JRR Tolkien
03 Jane Eyre - Charlotte Bronte
04 Harry Potter series - JK Rowling
05 To Kill a Mockingbird - Harper Lee
06 The Bible
( Read more... )

I wasn't disappointed by the film version of Shutter Island, and I gotta say that watching that movie after reading the book is very interesting. I'm not gonna spoil it, but a lot starts to make sense once you know what's really going on.

One thing I noticed was a lot of odd choices for how it was filmed including violating some rules for how you frame and edit a series of shots, but tying into the above it was all done for a reason. When the book finally drops the bomb I remember putting it down for a second to clear my head, since that is how you do a twist.

I also looked up the director and found it was none other than Martin Scorsese, aka the guy who did Taxi Driver, so he knows a thing or two about mindfuckery. I do love movies that do that, which might be why I liked Inception, which come to think of it also had Leonard DiCaprio, and in fact that movie has a few similarities to this one in terms of a spectral wife appearing and generally screwing with your head.

I do like movies and books that make me think, and I honestly did not see that twist coming.

I had a glass with a little bit of hydrogen peroxide mixed with water at my desk so I could treat a cut on my hand, and I forgot it was there. I'd stupidly placed the glass right where I tend to put my drinks, so naturally at some point I reached over and took a sip.

Big mistake. Luckily I figured it out almost instantly and spit it out, and that stuff was so diluted in the first place that I doubt it'll do anything to me. Still, that was a dumb one.

Since I had a day off due to "Bunker Hill Day" (a bullshit holiday invented by the state leg to appease the unions because they're aren't any other holidays in June) but still had class I went over to Cambridge once my class got out. I mostly just looked around until I got tired, but I stopped into the MIT bookstore and bought Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett in his Discworld series. It's a series I've always wanted to get into but haven't known where to start, and in a podcast I was listening to recently they said that one's a good intro if you know nothing about the universe. I'm only a few pages in but I'm already laughing.

And someone's smoke alarm is going off. Seriously, this seems to happen about once a day around here. I can't tell if it's the same people each time or if there are just a lot of really stupid people living in this apartment building. For the record I've set ours off twice, and the first time was due to the catastrophic failure of the original oven and not really my fault. I don't remember what happened with the second one except it involved chicken, but I haven't done it since and those were both right after I moved in.

Jesus Christ even as I'm typing this one is going off again! I'm going with the stupid people theory.

Well, the final cost of my textbooks this semester is around $200. To put it in perspective, that's a full week's pay for me at my internship, down the drain in the few minutes it took me to order them.

*twitch*

And that was after I combed the internet for the lowest prices available and fished around for codes to take a few dollars off. But I have all of them ordered now (no way I'm going through the campus bookstore due to the vast difference in price, shipping price and time be damned) so I don't have to think about it anymore until they show up.

I know pretty much anyone who has gone through higher education has probably said some variation of this string of curse words when it comes to textbook costs, but really, really, what in the Sam Hill goddamn freaking fucked up shit is with it?! I love books and education is important, blah blah blah, but it's just ridiculous.

Feels like I just got mugged, and at the end of the semester I'll just get screwed again when they'll rip me off on the buyback price. *headdesk*

Besides NaNo, I've also been reading The Killer Angels for part of my Civil War class. That book actually inspired me to change one character in my story from an infantry officer to cavalry, and though my concept of the character has pretty much stayed the same besides that there are now elements of John Buford in there.

The Killer Angels is, by the way, an excellent book, and I can see why it's been praised as one of the best pieces of Civil War literature period. It has that quality of just scanning really well, and I've read over a hundred pages of it in one day without feeling like I've been forcing it. That's what I call good writing.

Michael Cunningham, one of my favorite authors, is working on a new book. He's best known for The Hours, but I personally think his best work is a book called Specimen Days, since it showed how well he can develop different periods since it had parts in three different time periods.

They interviewed him here about it. It also turns out that he lives in Provincetown, so he's a local boy, relatively speaking.

Right now I'm reading a book about Hannibal (the general, not the cannibal) called Pride of Carthage which, while historical fiction, does offer some insight into how Carthage worked.

And after reading about them in comparison to the Romans I can't help but find myself thinking "Screw Rome! I'm rooting for the Carthaginians!" And yeah, I know how it turned out, but overall Carthage seemed less dickish than the Romans. Neither empire was particularly nice since that was how it worked back then, but the Carthaginians didn't rub it in your face as much when they won. I admit I don't particularly like Rome in general, there's even a line in this book about how they took the Greek gods, renamed them and hoped no one would notice, which pretty much sums them up to me.

It does beg an interesting question about what might have happened if the Romans hadn't won and if instead of a great Italian state there'd been a great African state. I think the modern world would look quite a bit different. I'm sort of playing with that idea in something I'm writing since the Africa/Middle East analog never got conquered and pretty much stayed independent. That's one thing I like about history, it gives you ideas.