five things

[jade_sabre]

i live! and lovie lives with me! these are all excellent things. like my job! but i will say nothing further about that for now. for now i just have links[ys].

1) can anyone give me the name of a good Napoleon biography? I feel like if I am going to be an obsessive coup-de-foudre fangirl of his I can at least know aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaall the stories behind the heartache described in these kate beaton comics.

2) is it sad to say this changed my life? perhaps not changed, but threw it into startlingly beautiful perspective, if only for a moment. And I was content.

And indeed there will be time
For the yellow smoke that slides along the desk,
Rubbing its back upon the Windows PC;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the icons that you meet;
There will be time to murder and respawn
And time for all the Chrome and Firefox
That drag and drop a website on your plate;
Time for .doc and time for .ppt
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred fanfics and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.

In the room the players come and go
Talking of their scores on Halo.

it is like being seventeen-year-old me reading Prufrock for the first time in AP English and knowing that it would be an awesome class and that here I had a poem that I could take with me for the rest of my life and just enjoy the language of it and wallow in the meaning and just hold. I--am having trouble articulating my relationship with Prufrock, which makes it difficult to explain just what about this loving parody touched me so deeply. But it did.

3) Speaking of going back four-or-five years, someone on Facebook mentioned that Folk Choir is going to sing Biebl's Ave Maria, to which I scoffed a tiny bit because Folk Choir is good and all but this is not their kind of song, and also because freshman year of college I went to a ND-and-Michigan-Glee-Clubs concert, from which I discovered Guster due to the Michigan's-version-of-the-Undertones's cover of Mona Lisa (the only track I still have from the sadly lost CD). Anyway, they had the boys onstage and also in the balcony behind the stage, and the chant solo in the middle was sung from up there, and it was just--

The concert was in Leighton, which has among its many interesting amenities a balcony seating up above and behind the stage, so that you can...watch the back of the performers' heads? (Actually, I really want to sit there one day. It would be really cool.) So during the Michigan part of the performace, the ND Club sat back there. For this song, most of them moved down to the stage, but a bunch of tenor Is and maybe some tenor IIs (I couldn't tell, but I know some of them were tenor Is) stayed up there and moved around to the side a little, so they would be better picked up by the acoustics.

One of these guys up there I was just writing to my friend about how cute he was, and then he had a solo, a gorgeous soaring falsetto solo that just completely stole my heart and flew it up to him. The song itself was soaring, beautiful, gorgeous, prayerful--I closed my eyes and mouthed the chorus (Ave Maria) along with them and just let my soul fly. That concert hall is the most beautiful performing places in the world--I haven't been to too many, but I just know it. It was...fulfilling. Beautiful. I loved it.

4) Speaking of college, or things I learned in college, or rather a lot of conversations I have been having recently about women in college and the like, or perhaps just feminism: Maureen Johnson on the whole "boys aren't reading!/don't have anything to read!" outcry (or, how a penis makes what you write suddenly interesting to the populace at large).

5) New Glee! WHY IS MY FLIST NOT DISCUSSING THIS MORE. Please do not tell me I got into Glee just in time for everyone else to be bored and ditch it, because so much happened, and it was all pretty cool! *sob*

♥


EXTRA BONUS LIMITED-TIME-ONLY LINK: romanitas graciously agreed to un-flock this hilarious, almost Growing-Up-Cullen-esque Merlin...joke...parody...hilarious thing that she and her friend did. READ IT BEFORE SHE FLOCKS IT AGAIN.

Comments

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

I thought that the president of Harvard just suggested that one possibility (of three that he mentioned) for there being fewer women than men in the sciences might be innate differences between men's brains and women's brains, and saying he hoped there would be more research on the matter.

In a scholarly, reasoned attempt to show that women are just the same as men, one professor walked out because it made her feel ill and faint (presumably she went to get her smelling salts).

[willow-41z.livejournal.com]

Judging from his remarks here, he ranks these hypotheses in the following order of likelihood:

1.) Women are "unwilling" to put in the time required to rise in the ranks of science.

2.) Men are better at math and science in their brains than women... according to some tests somewhere.

3.) There might be a little discrimination and socializing of women away from science going on.

For a different take on it, Virginia Valian has done a brilliant job of cataloging studies that document just how pervasive and subconscious such discrimination is, and how it adds up over time, in Why So Slow? It's a great book. Barnett and Rivers also do a nice explication of the "tests" myth in Same Difference (I was surprised to learn that the spatial reasoning differences between the sexes vary wildly with the type of test given, and disappear altogether with about 1 hour of instruction for women).

*shrug* I can understand feeling ill and faint when someone tries to marginalize your existence and denigrate your accomplishments. Happens to me more frequently than I'd like.

[aged-crone.livejournal.com]

Yes, he puts them in that order, and all the while does so saying that he doesn't *know*, he's hypothesizing from the evidence that he's read, and asks for more research. It's almost funny the way he keeps saying that he doesn't know, he's only going by the research he's read and personal observations, and please if somebody knows different information bring it out.

So - the question should be not, "HOW DARE HE SAY THAT?" The questions should be, "Does the amount of time people are willing to put into their jobs, both as hours-per-week and as uninterrupted-in-this career, affect how high one rises in the ranks, and, if so, do fewer women choose to put in that time, and can that explain the difference? What research has been done on differences between the brains of men and women, and what are the results of that research, and what flaws are there in that research and how can they be corrected, and what then does the research show? What evidence is there that preferences of boys and girls are innate as opposed to socialized?" And the man shouldn't have been pilloried and hounded for the speech.

As for the ill and faint - the professor who fled the room presumably believes that there are no innate differences between men and women, and that only discrimination is keeping the numbers of high-ranked academic women from being the same as that of men. That being the case, I would expect to see instances where male professors fled the room, ill and faint, because someone was suggesting that women were innately better than men at doing something. *crickets*

I don't see any denigration of the fleeing professor in Summers' speech. If anything, it would be a compliment: In spite of all these things, you're in this position; you must be incredibly good.

I haven't read Virginia Valian. Here's a discussion of Summers' speech that mentions her, though: http://old.nationalreview.com/comment/sommers200503220754.asp

And one might take a completely different track and ask: Why is it that we judge "success" as "how well you do in a paid profession?" Because that is denigrating anybody who chooses to be a homemaker instead.

[willow-41z.livejournal.com]

Well, that's the thing: if he's truly interested in finding out more, then the thing to do is write a paper (where he can cite his statistics) summarizing the research so far, not give "some attempts at provocation" at a summit for the National Bureau of Economic Research's panel. His speech sends up at least 4 red flags: 1.) no sources cited, 2.) he's not an authority in the field (he's an economist, not a scientist-- and the agenda for the conference is definitely looking at things from an economic/sociological standpoint), 3.) he wants to give "some attempts at provocation," which is usually not one's primary motive when setting out on a research hypothesis, 4.) (possibly the most egregious) he gives no justification for the ordering of his hypotheses other than his own opinion; he's supposed to be talking about the faculty research agenda, not just his research agenda. The speech is definitely not appropriate for the venue, because the venue is economics/sociology, not (hard) science (sociology of course being a science); he is definitely not the appropriate one for the speech, because he's an economist, not a scientist. So with all that in mind, the speech comes off as justification for him to stand up there and blather about things in an off-topic fashion. That is not the way one goes about research.

As for the ill and faint - the professor who fled the room presumably believes that there are no innate differences between men and women, and that only discrimination is keeping the numbers of high-ranked academic women from being the same as that of men.
I'm sure she believes men have penises and women have vaginas (though that's not a satisfactory definition. I've never actually been able to come up with one, since there is not an absolute correspondence between XY/male genitalia and XX/female genitalia. There's the famous case of a neuroscientist who had an F-to-M sex change, and people began to comment about how his work was better than that of his sister... but he had no sister, they were referring to his previous identity).

That being the case, I would expect to see instances where male professors fled the room, ill and faint, because someone was suggesting that women were innately better than men at doing something. *crickets*
Why? No one believes such statements (unless it's the usual trumpeting about "that feminine touch" and how women have this mystical power for relationships and intuition and making houses all pretty and raising children that men can't ever learn so let's not try, we'll just sit back and let them do all that), and they have no power. Nothing that women regularly do/are stuck with is considered desirable in our society. What we're "innately better" at is the stuff no one wants to do. The two statements would not be parallel, and not only because the power differentials. Also, you'd have to find the female equivalent of Summers to make a such a statement.

I'm reasonably sure, after reading Sommers' article, that she's never read Why So Slow?. It is not a manifesto. It is a very meta meta-analysis, and everything is meticulously documented, sourced and footnoted. It would be very hard to fudge data when presented in that fashion. It's disappointing that Sommers chooses to misrepresent such a book in order to achieve her ends... but I guess she was going for her own "attempt at provocation." It makes me suspicious of the rest of her claims.

And one might take a completely different track and ask: Why is it that we judge "success" as "how well you do in a paid profession?" Because that is denigrating anybody who chooses to be a homemaker instead.
Right, which is one reason men have to put up with such guff when they choose to become homemakers... "Don't you know you're supposed to be the provider, you sissy?"

However, looking at the agenda, this conference seems very much slated towards making sure women who want to be scientists and mathematicians have no systemic biases against them... there's no trace of bashing homemakers about it.

[willow-41z.livejournal.com]

This speech is the equivalent of going to a conference on diversifying science and math in terms of people's ethnicities, and arguing that the primary reason the fields of science and math are overwhelmingly white is because people of color don't want to put on the time, and then that they are less suited for such careers than white people.