@WhyNotZoidberg I've hit a point gaming wise, where I don't need the game to waste my time. I've also realised that unless the game is really good, I don't need to replay or play on insane difficulty. So I'm with you on looking up solutions.
I finished the very Ontario Meet Me by the Lake by Carley Fortune and I enjoyed it quite a bit.
I don’t always listen to Canada Reads, but I try to pick up a few books off the list every year just to get me out of my usual circuit of speculative/sci-fi, fantasy, closed-door yearning romance novels, and whatever non-depressing queer darling has come out that year. Sometimes there is an overlap. Sometimes not.
Next I’m planning on picking up Denison Avenue (a vastly different novel, but still very Toronto - which is an interesting choice for a former Calgary mayor (naheed nenshi) but admittedly I don’t know much about him) #bookstodon@bookstodon
Heute im DLF in der langen Nacht: „Die Schriftstellerinnen Brigitte Reimann, Irmtraud Morgner und Maxie Wander sprechen in ihren Werken offen über Ängste und Sehnsüchte, unerfüllte Träume und Visionen.“ (Sendung von 2014.)
@ankegroener danke für den Hinweis, wäre mir sonst vielleicht entgangen. Schätze gerade Irmtraud Morgner nicht nur wegen des Vornamens sondern auch wegen der #Märchen und Trobadora Beatriz. #Maerchen@buchstodon
Which is in fact because I have just finished #AliSmith's 'Spring'. It is a beautiful novel. Part 1 is particularly brilliant. I'm not sure about its flirtation with magical realism in part 2. We need a writer who can find hope without recourse to magic.
On the other hand, it is more mythological realism than magical. We can believe in myth making and story telling. What is real is not the mundane, but the eternal or, better, the eternal in the mundane. Smith is on the side of the angels because she believes in art, in myth in story telling. Spring, with its promise of life, is contrasted with winter which is dark and unenchanted. It is also art and the mundane. Smith is with Chaucer not Elliott. So am I.
What I particularly like is the motif that none of this is about you. It serves to cut the privileged down to size, but the moral extends. The story isn't Florence's or the Machines. It is a shared world and 'world' here is truely all that is, was, will be or even could have been the case.
Dr. Sherita Goldon was forced from her position as chief diversity officer at #JohnsHopkins University for including the following (helpful, accurate, and necessary) definition of privilege in an email newsletter:
"a set of unearned benefits given to people who are in a specific social group. Privilege operates on personal, interpersonal, cultural and institutional levels, and it provides advantages and favors to members of dominant groups at the expense of members of other groups...“ 1/2
"Privilege is characteristically invisible to people who have it. People in dominant groups often believe they have earned the privileges they enjoy or that everyone could have access to these privileges if only they worked to earn them. In fact, privileges are unearned and granted to people in the dominant groups whether they want those privileges or not, and regardless of their stated intent.” 2/2
Follow up: One of the papers I resubmitted after an R&R where I had to write a 6,300 word memo was rejected. One of the reviewers decided that the language and paper structure that he (it is probably a he) suggested that we use last time wasn't good enough, and that we should rewrite the whole thing again.
In case you're wondering what my first experience at Sociological Perspectives was like:
All R&Rs, no matter how much work needs to be done, must be returned within 60 days. The editor is sometimes willing to give you a 3 or 4 day extension, and that's it.
The reviewers (I had) are micromanagers who want to rewrite the paper for you, and in at least one case, will forget what they told you to do the last time.
Decent base pay, a fair amount of pto, and a stellar 401k match are my absolute requirements. My wants are unnecessary as I’ll put up with a lot if my needs are met.
Although in my field this was all achieved through the power of a union.
"Few documents that survive from #medieval Europe were written by women or even dictated by women. Those that do are often formulaic, full of legal and religious language. Yet the wills and censuses that survive, and which I study, open a window into their lives and minds, even if not produced by women’s hands. These documents suggest that medieval women had at least some form of empowerment to define their lives – and deaths."
@yvonne Thanks for that interesting article by Prof Joëlle Rollo-Koster, which draws attention to the documentary treasures in store for a new generation of historians while perhaps understating the wealth of evidence accumulated by her own!
The will of one famously independent woman in medieval England is available in the original French with translation & analysis on the resource page at https://barnes1.net/FHGE/
@TheConversationUS "Like the outlaws Robin Hood and Al Capone, will #Trump become larger in legend than he was in life? "
I've sensed that the outlaw hero archetype of the American collective unconscious, in Jungian terms, has been activated, since vigilantes in cowboy hats were able to defy and other the Obama administration at Malheur (which means misfortune in French) in early 2016. From here in Japan I sensed a disturbance in the force, as it were, and my foreboding has been more than realized as Trump 'rode the whirlwind' and permitted repressed Christians to be their worst true selves, and held Open House for Russia in the White House.
The evil that the outlaw 'hero' does gets lost or laundered in the mythologizing that makes them seem larger than life, legendary. Americans with their collective legacy of the Wild West, Roaring 20s, and notorious con men, are particularly susceptible, as Trump has shown, to following the Pied Piper, or being led into temptation.