April 1, 2011
National Poetry Month 2011!
I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon and am not entirely sure how or if I’m going to get back on properly, but in the meantime I thought it would be fun to do another round of posting a poem a day for National Poetry Month—a tradition since 2007! 😉 As always, requests are welcome. Enjoy!
August 11, 2009
Musings on motets and writing without acquiring encyclopedic knowledge on a subject
Gye Nyame recently requested a post about songs I like, which I’m going to interpret relatively loosely, because on his blog he recently mentioned motets (or rather, I see as I click over to the post in question, a particular motet), and I thought, ooh! Motets! I know about motets.
When I was a junior in high school I got it into my head that I should audition for choir. I’m not sure where the idea came from (I was… okay, and really still am, when given half a chance… a dedicated band geek), maybe from successful experiences in various musicals, but I do distinctly remember my boyfriend at the time pooh-poohing the idea. (Harrumph.) At any rate, I have a good ear, which got me into the chamber choir for my senior year. In the chamber choir we focused largely on motets, about which I went over to Wikipedia to brush up my knowledge/memories.
Whereupon I discovered that I pretty much don’t know anything about motets. Read the rest of this entry »
August 10, 2009
Musings on writing and blogging and taking risks
I want to blog more—indeed, I want to write more in general. Part of the problem with doing so, of course, is that it involves… blogging/writing more. My major problem is feeling like I don’t have anything interesting to say. Perpetually. I’m a quiet person to begin with; lately it seems like waiting until I have something I feel is worthwhile to say leads to my saying nothing at all. The problem, of course, is that little phrase I feel, the inclination to self-censor my thoughts, observations, and creative impulses, because who could possibly find them interesting? Read the rest of this entry »
July 23, 2009
I’m not dead!
I don’t want to go on the cart!
Various circumstances decreed that I take a summer break from blogging, but I hope to be back next month. (Though, of course, now that I’ve typed that, I’ve found something I want to link to later today…) I’d like to do some more profiles of banned/challenged books, so in the meantime: any suggestions?
June 4, 2009
In and on the news…
So much has happened lately: the issues of torture and the abuse of detainees continue to rear their ugly heads. President Obama nominated Justice Sotomayor for the Supreme Court (and the wingnuts, predictably, went completely batshit) on the same day the California Supreme Court upheld Proposition 8. Dr. George Tiller was murdered. On all of these subjects I tend to find myself vacillating between being at a complete loss for words and babbling incoherently, and ultimately I feel like there’s really nothing I can say that others haven’t already said better. I’m not a journalist; I need time to let things stew before I can adequately articulate my thoughts and feelings. To wit, when Evil Bender told me on Sunday that Dr. Tiller had been murdered, first I said, “No,” partly disbelieving him entirely and partly hoping Tiller had been shot and rushed to the hospital and had been thought to be dead but would actually turn out to be alive. My next response was to tear up and say, “Motherfucker.” Neither word makes for a particularly substantive blog post.
Okay, so why am I going into this now? Well, something goofy came across my desk this morning that I thought would make for a nice lighter-side post, but I was concerned that without having at least acknowledged the other things going on in the country these days, it would come off as insensitive (at the least) and/or as if I’d been living under a rock. So. There we are.
Fucking-A, dude.
April 19, 2009
Tell it WOC Speak: Women of Color and allies carnival
Just a brief heads-up that the third installment of the WOC and Ally Blog Carnival, put together by Renee of Womanist Musings, is up, and it is — of course — chock full of good reading. Go check it out!
March 25, 2009
Thanks, WordPress!
Evidently I’m not just the Lizard Queen, but also a Newt Regent — WordPress tells me I could make this blog iamanewtregent.com for just $15 per year! I have no inclination to claim that URL nor to spend money on a blog that five people read (waves at y’all!), but it’s always good to know what my other titles are…
October 20, 2008
57th Carnival Against Sexual Violence
I am honored to have had my post on Laurie Halse Anderson’s novel Speak included in the most recent Carnival Against Sexual Violence. As always, the carnival is full of posts that are well worth reading. Go check it out!
(Also, a big thank you goes to the reader who nominated my post for the Carnival. It means a lot to me to know that someone out there feels my writing is worth reading.)
September 12, 2008
Feminist Carnival
The 64th Carnival of Feminists is up! As ever, there’s plenty of good reading listed there. I wanted to take a moment to highlight the posts by a couple of recent additions to my blogroll: Radical Feminists and Cis Privilege by Renee at Womanist Musings, and Uterus Art by Debs at Don’t Stray from the Path. And as much as I appreciated the latter of the two posts for giving me a perspective I’d never considered before — for, quite simply, making me think — the post of hers that I really want to share is Across the Porn Divide:
…the stalemate we are currently in will only continue as long as we persist in talking about rather than to women we disagree with, and continue to make generalisations, or untrue statements about those women. Something needs to happen to break the deadlock, or this movement we call feminism will cease to move at all, and will die from stagnation before achieving all, or even any, of its goals. Women on both ‘sides’, and from all ‘feminisms’ need to start listening to other women, women who do not agree with them, women who’s life experience is vastly different to theirs, women who have made choices they feel are wrong, or that they would never make themselves. If we are all talking at once, we cannot hear what anyone is saying, and listening is the key to communication and learning.
It’s a superb post, and well worth the read for those interested in feminist movement.
Happy reading!
September 10, 2008
Community organizers speak up
During the RNC, both Sarah Palin and Rudy Giuliani made cracks about community organizing. The idea was that community organizing doesn’t provide a person with valuable experience as far as a future career in politics goes, and overall their remarks came across as denigrating the work that community organizers and organizations do. Kevin at A Slant Truth explains some of the problems inherent in those ideas:
It’s ironic that Palin, Guilliani and the rest of the GOP would make fun of community organizing because community organizing is the epitome of one of the central mantras of conservatism: pick yourself up by your bootstraps. That’s what community organizing is all about. It’s about people taking control of their lives and their communities and trying to make things better for themselves. It’s recognizing that no one is going to do for you what you won’t do for yourself. You can talk about “actual responsibilities” all you want, but the truth of the matter is that community organizing is taking the ultimate amount of responsibility–not only to yourself, but to everyone in your community.
To counter the Republican put-down, many people across the blogosphere took time on Monday to discuss and honor community organizing. There’s a full round-up at the above link, and it’s well worth checking out. I appreciated this statement, from the SAFER blog: “community organizing is at the heart of American democracy, and those who belittle it reveal only their lack of trust in the democratic process and their lack of belief in our Declaration of Independence’s long-delayed promise of equality for all.”
I am the Lizard Queen! 