A Historic Moment -- the Women's March

After the trauma of the election, I shut off from politics as much as possible. Mostly, I just couldn't afford the energy, not with my own precarious graduate student situation. I had a dissertation to finish and, even when I completed the first draft, there's the terrifying knowledge that my job prospects are statistically abysmal, that we're a single-income family whose income ends in April, and we're still not sure about *M immigration status, mostly due to bureaucratic incompetency. Not to mention all the c.v. building things I must do in the meantime. Plus, being ABD, I tend to be cut off from all human contact, so word of mouth filters down to me slowly. Even had I heard, though, my lack of car has, over the years, given me the tendency to block out events beyond a five-mile radius of my home.

 So while a part of me realized that the Women's March yesterday would be big, I didn't quite realize how big it was.

 All over the news and social media, I kept seeing images from the protesters and activists on-scene, not only in Washington D.C. but in satellite areas. It gave me an immense pride and respect to see all those people protesting what's currently happening, and I realized that not going at least to one of the satellite marches will be a big regret of mine.

 And the administration reacted as we've come to expect -- ignoring the march, posting a bizarre press conference where the press secretary had an apoplectic fit about news organizations accurately reporting the size of Trump's inauguration crowd, Trump's himself ranting about crowd size while addressing the CIA before their Memorial Wall of Agency heroes, which is about as clueless and insulting a thing as I can imagine.

 I really wish I could be more active in all this.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Genre Fantasy Bestsellers through 1990

Image
I've been studying Keith Justice's Bestseller Index , which compiles information from two separate bestseller lists -- New York Times Book Review and Publishers Weekly -- up through 1990, and the results are ridiculously fascinating. For instance, you wanna take a stab at which SFF author has the most individual books appear on a bestseller list? No, it ain't Heinlein, Clark, Herbert, or Asimov. It's not even Terry Brooks or David Eddings. No, the answer is Piers Anthony . And even if you somehow pulled that name out of thin air, I guarantee you'll never guess how truly dominate Anthony was. Up through 1990, Anthony had more than double than number of distinct bestsellers than the next most frequent bestseller, Anne McCaffrey. Whereas Anthony had an astounding  22 different books appear on a bestseller list, McCaffrey had "only" 9.** Now, caveats. These numbers need to be taken with one (or two) grains of salt. For instance, although Anthony had 22 two dis
Read more

Thoughts upon Reading Tolkien's New & Expanded LETTERS

So, I'm reading through the newly expanded version of Tolkien's Letters. One thing I hadn't properly realized is that these letters were part of Carpenter's original manuscript back in 1981, but Carpenter had to cut them due to cost. Turns out that Carpenter had a pretty keen eye on what could bear cutting -- most of this new stuff isn't terribly interesting, but I discovered a few nuggets. VINDICATED!! (Me, sorta) Naturally, whenever you read new primary material, your first instinct is to check to see if anything contradicts something you've said in print ... especially biographically. Well, I've made three big "biographical" claims, and here's my sigh of relief: Concerning my claim that, in 1954, Tolkien and colleagues contrived to create CS Lewis's academic chair at Cambridge in exchange for them nominating EM Forster for the Nobel Prize. Nothing in  Letters  supports or contradicts this. In my recent article for  Notes & Queries ,
Read more

Uncovering CS Lewis's First Religious Poem

 So, with my article's official acceptance by the journal English Text Construction , it's time to let the cat out of the bag. Using a combination of metrical analysis and biography, I've ascertained with near perfect certainty the first religious poem C. S. Lewis poem ever wrote .... a short poem, "Sweet Desire," that scholars have never previously paid any attention to. This poem is firmly datable to early 1930, probably January or February is my guess, and given the poem's subject matter, it's clearly talking about CSL's fears and intellectual trepidation about becoming a theist and abandoning atheism for good. It's basically Lewis's version of Caedmon's Hymn . The full metrical details will have to await my article, but one interesting caveat on my claims to firstness. In my peer reviewer's commentary, they recommended I contact a CSL scholar named  Charlie W. Starr, who's been working on Lewis's handwriting for quite a lon
Read more