In my best of 2015, part 1 post, I mentioned that one of my favorite albums of the year was the original Broadway cast recording of the musical Hamilton. I became obsessed with Hamilton pretty much as soon as I listened to it, and of course once I become obsessed with something, I want to write about it. I'm certainly not the only person who had this experience with Hamilton over the past few months, nor am I by any means the only person to write about it. This is the musical that has launched a thousand thinkpieces, appreciations, and glowing reviews. I have not actually seen the show yet (I HAVE TICKETS FOR MARCH, AAAAHHH!!!), but after many, many, many, many times through the cast album, I think I feel okay putting down a few ideas.
Read More2015: The Year That Was (PART 2)
Welcome to 2016, everybody! Hopefully this post will sneak in under the wire as a Timely and Relevant Hot Take on great things from 2015 before we get too far into this exciting new arbitrarily designated temporal unit! Here, without further ado, some more of my favorite things from this past calendar year! (Check out Part 1 for notes on books and music and please leave a note if you have favorites from 2015 that you want to share!)
**NB: These are things I enjoyed this calendar year, not necessarily things that were released/created in the last 12 months. I'm behind the curve pretty much always, but on the assumption that you might be, too, I hazard that some of these might still be useful!**
Read More
2015: The Year That Was (PART 1)
Many people lament the trend toward end-of-year lists and best-of round-ups, but then again many people are terrible. I am not beholden to terrible, joy-despising people. Sharing awesome things is a joy-conducive activity and one that I'm very fond of, so without further ado, here are just a few of my favorites from 2015. This is Part 1 (books and music); Part 2 (food, podcasts--yes, podcasts again--and other fun things) is TK in the near future.
**NB: These are things I enjoyed this calendar year, not necessarily things that were released in the last 12 months. I'm behind the curve pretty much always, but on the assumption that you might be, too, I hazard that some of these might still be useful!**
Read More
photo: Jena Priebe, "The Secret Lives of Books" from the Bibliothecaphilia exhibit at Mass MoCA, August 2015
Back-to-School Blues: Notes from an Erstwhile Grad Student
For many of our younger years, the back-to-school season is one filled with turbulence and excitement. Even long after we've graduated and left the academic calendar behind, there's often a certain irrepressible, nostalgic frisson that comes on around the first weeks of September, alongside the clichéd images of fresh pencils and school buses. For me, the magic lasted longer than for most other people, since I went back to graduate school just two years after graduating from college. I started a masters program in English literature in 2009 and moved on to a PhD program just a year later. That meant that starting in fall 2010, not only did back-to-school mean back to classes for me, it also meant back to teaching. If you think fall is thrilling and nerve-wracking as a student, just try it as a brand-new teacher.
Read More
Undercover
I'm not going to make commentary on Taylor Swift into my personal #brand or anything, but I did want to write a few words about this week's development in Swiftiana: Ryan Adams' entire-album cover of 1989.
Read MoreSummer Fun: Cape Cod in 36 Hours
in travel guide
My family always goes on one big vacation a year—indeed, often only goes on one real vacation a year, and ever since I was a tiny baby, that vacation has been to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. When my mom was a kid she used to spend her whole summers down there, although for my own childhood, we usually made do with a two-week interval, the only major time I'd spent away from home probably up until I went to college. Now that I'm a nominal grownup with a full-time job my own apartment and cats to look after, I don't spend the whole two weeks with my family, but I still manage to get down for a weekend or so every year. And I've been going long enough that I have some pretty strong opinions about what you should do if you find yourself on the Cape, so today I'm going to share some of those. This might be a bit much to actually tackle in one 36-hour visit, but let's be ambitious, shall we?
Read More
Stranger Than Fiction: A Review of the Welcome to Night Vale Novel
This is a review for the novel Welcome to Night Vale by Joseph Fink and Jeffrey Cranor, set in the same universe as the podcast of that shares its name. This book is not yet published, although you can preorder it for when it does come out on October 20—I was lucky enough to be able to get a free ARC, or advance reader copy, when I was at Book Expo America* for work in May. I realize that this puts me in a privileged position, so I'm going to try to avoid any spoilers or proprietary information.
Read More
Savory Vegetable Pancakes with Cucumber-Yogurt Sauce, or: Maybe This Is Also a Cooking Blog?
in food
Since the postings on this blog are already pretty...diverse, I figure it can't hurt to throw a few more topics into the mix. Today I'm sharing a recipe that I made for dinner. It's my third attempt at a dish along these lines and by far the most successful (it may not seem that complicated but trust me, the first try was a MESS). It was designed to use some things I found at the farmer's market and some things I had in the pantry and to be delicious; I love vegetables, but only when they taste good. I won't eat them just to feel virtuous. Have these with a nice salad (we had cherry tomato-strawberry caprese with spinach) and maybe some bread (we had the most delicious rye you will ever eat in your life) and it's the perfect light summer supper. This recipe is also, incidentally and accidentally, gluten free and vegetarian (although not vegan). I swear that just happened. Also, I know my food photography needs some work, but since this is the first of this type of entry, let's just give me a break, shall we?
Read MorePodcasts for Nerds
Podcasts are definitely one of my favorite forms of media. The podcast is an incredibly diverse, democratic, and creative format. The average podcast that I listen to is between 25 and 45 minutes long, with some outliers at the very short end being just a few minutes in some installments, and some of the more rambling ones stretching to over an hour each. I listen to several a day, mostly thanks to the fact that I walk to and from work, about 40 minutes each way. The bulk of the shows I subscribe to could be loosely called "educational" but a better word might be "exegetical" (as long as we're taking a pretty wide view of what is a "text"—and as a former academic, I certainly do). These podcasts are usually run by highly intelligent and vocally charismatic obsessives who have a passion for sharing the things they are obsessed with. Some are produced as more traditional radio essays, some as panel discussions, some as sort of dramatic monologues. (Podcasts are also the reason that this blog is built as a Squarespace site, since they are one of the most frequent sponsors on nearly EVERY SINGLE PODCAST I listen to, so when I started to think about making a blog, that was pretty much the only way I could conceive of doing it.)
Read MoreThe Confessional Poetics of Taylor Swift, or: Does Too Much Knowledge Ruin Art?
I wanted to write up some quick notes about something that I've been thinking about a lot this past week. The topic came up in conversation with my friend Margaret in conjunction with an episode she recently recorded for my favorite podcast, NPR's Pop Culture Happy Hour. (We had our conversation before the episode went live; I then listened to the episode and later we continued the conversation on Twitter.) On the episode in question (which is great, as all of that show is great), one of the topics discussed was credulity, mostly in terms of what elements of pop culture strain credulity for a person when they show up. As Margaret defined the term in this context, credulity is invoked when "some amount of knowledge you have about the subject at hand interferes with how you're capable of consuming the show or song or sporting event or anything...any time your real-world information is interfering with your ability to consume this artificial, constructed simulation."
Read More