The lives of many literary greats remain a relative mystery; literary critics and historians are often left to piece together details from letters, documentation, and, sometimes controversially, the author’s work read for repeated motifs. They then draw what conclusions they can about the authors’ lives. One of the most prolific female poets in the English literary canon, Emily Dickinson’s life is preserved in letters and artifacts from her life. When examined as a body of work, Dickinson’s poetry reveals a pattern of focus on women’s interior lives and relationships that may be regarded as queer, especially with the added dimension of her close relationship with her sister-in-law. This essay examines a selection of her poems through a queer lens, highlighting the poems’ relationships to female love and Dickinson’s life and arguing against established patterns of erasing Dickinson’s queer identity.
Critical representation of Dickinson paints her an immensely private, reclusive individual. Known in her Massachusetts home of Amherst as “the Myth,” Dickinson “lived a nun-like existence, wearing only white, seeing no one but her sister, writing poems that almost no one saw” (Nicholson). This suggests that the aforementioned canonical portrait of Dickinson is mostly accurate, but though she saw few in person, she had a rich inner existence, expressed in her many poems and letters. Indeed, both her poems and letters were directed to her “most trusted literary audience,” Sue Dickinson (née Gilbert) (Nell Smith 56). Dickinson shared “about 250 poems” with Gilbert, “by far the largest number” compared to Dickinson’s other family members and acquaintances (Franklin 3). While the particulars of their relationship are lost to time, Dickinson and Gilbert unarguably shared an intimate connection; many of Dickinson’s poems are directed, either explicitly or implicitly, to Gilbert. Despite this, “until recently most literary critics have refused to acknowledge her love for other women,” instead continuing to prop up the image of the maidenly recluse (Faderman 43). Twentieth century critics, acknowledging the romantic and erotic contents of Dickinson’s poems, embarked on a “quest for the identity of this ‘reclusive spinster’s’ elusive (male) love,” though evidence shows “no significant heterosexual involvements until [Dickinson] was well into middle age” (Faderman 43). More recent literary criticism examines Dickinson’s poetry through a queer lens, but there is a long history of criticism going to “great lengths to explain away the content of same-sex love in her poems” (Faderman 45).
diff --git a/public/hugo-podcast/index.html b/public/hugo-podcast/index.html index d5199c1..e9ad43a 100644 --- a/public/hugo-podcast/index.html +++ b/public/hugo-podcast/index.html @@ -57,8 +57,7 @@ hugo-podcast -I’ve been podcasting on and off for over ten years now — all shows that I’ve since abandoned1, either intentionally or due to time — but I’ve kept websites for them up and running for archival purposes. Originally, the sites were powered by WordPress and podcasting plugins (PowerPress and then Podlove). I didn’t want to continue paying to host the sites nor maintain a WordPress install2. I could, of course, use one of the many podcast hosting services out there — but just like I believe in owning your own space on the internet, I believe you should own and control your podcast feed (and not have to pay a company $15/mo in perpetuity). I use Hugo (which I then deploy with Cloudflare Pages) to generate the sites and feeds; I chose Hugo because I understand how to use it. I’m sure you could make this work with other static site generators. There’s an 11ty plugin out there, for example, which is far more advanced than what I’ve set up. But I built this myself. It works. It does not require me to endlessly fiddle or update (unless I want to).
I am not going to cover hosting your audio files in this post. I offload mine to a storage zone on Bunny; my podcasts are low traffic, so that costs me $12/yr. You could probably get away with using archive.org for free instead, as long as you can get a direct link to your mp3. I’m also not going to cover creating a theme for your podcast in this post. I made my own for both of my sites, but you can easily use a premade one.
diff --git a/public/index.html b/public/index.html index b48de03..69aa95d 100644 --- a/public/index.html +++ b/public/index.html @@ -60,12 +60,15 @@I’m backporting a bunch of content from my old blogs so I can finally stop maintaining WordPress blogs. Here are the posts that I’ve moved over:
+I’m still playing Fields of Mistria, although I have had a few mid-day game crashes this week. The game is in early access, so I can’t complain too much, but it’s the first time it’s happened to me. It’s frustrating to lose progress, but I suppose I should get into the habit of saving a few times throughout the day.1
-I listened to SUCK UP ALL THE OXYGEN by Hutch Harris because I saw the cover on Bandcamp and thought it was funny. The album was fine but not for me. There was a time in my life when I probably would have been really into this, but it’s not now.
-A friend of mine is a big fan of Florence + the Machine. I confessed to only really knowing (but liking) her hits, “Dog Days” and “Cosmic Love.” I asked which album she would recommend I listen to; she said How Big, How Blue, How Beautiful (2015),1 and I texted her about some of the songs on it. She asked if I was listening to the whole thing given the back to back messages; I said yes, and I started to consider how I like to consume music.
We live in a shuffled playlist and artist mix culture.2 We collect our favorite tracks or let an algorithm serve us up suggestions of “you might like” or “this label paid for this to be fed to the masses.” I do it, too; much of my music listening is done passively, as a backdrop to other tasks that aren’t consuming my entire mental energy like driving or cleaning or unpacking (i.e. non-diegetic video game style background noise meant to go mostly unnoticed).
diff --git a/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html b/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html index a133eb8..2ce876a 100644 --- a/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html +++ b/public/litr-250-close-reading-2e/index.html @@ -57,8 +57,7 @@ litr-250-close-reading-2e -In the beginning of Chapter VIII in the third section of To the Lighthouse, pages 186-187, Virginia Woolf’s unique approach to perspective and introspection create a subjective presentation of reality and relationships, supported by extended metaphors of fluidity and stillness. On a boat trip mandated by Mr. Ramsay to the titular lighthouse, Cam and James anatomize and unfold their feelings towards their father. Cam evolves as the boat moves across the sea while James’s unflinching rage and violence towards the patriarch repeat in this section as the sailboat halts and space contracts to exacerbate his indignation. Woolf thus frames and explores the figure of Mr. Ramsay and the nominal motif of a journey through individual introspection and excurses. 1
The selection picks up directly from the end of Chapter IV, shifting away from an interlude wherein Lily Briscoe works on her painting and contemplates her own relationships to both Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, the former present in the scene with Cam and James, the latter casting a long shadow over it – James’s hatred of Mr. Ramsay was first introduced in an Oedipal fashion in the novel’s very first chapter, where James sees Mr. Ramsay as basking in “the pleasure of disillusioning his son… [and] ridicul[ing] his wife,” and James perceives his mother as “ten times better in every way than” her husband (Woolf 8). Woolf seemingly disregards flow and a coherent progression of events by bisecting the boat journey with Lily’s artistic journey; her prose instead acts more as combined snapshots from various perspectives about fraught, inscrutable figures like Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay. The boat trip is merely a device through which Woolf can open “the picture into the depths of consciousness,” i.e. James and Cam’s internal reflections about their father (Auerbach 540).
diff --git a/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html b/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html index c0506f2..fee9df0 100644 --- a/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html +++ b/public/media-log-2024-01/index.html @@ -57,8 +57,7 @@ media-log-2024-01 -Part of my resolution to blog more is to start a media consumption log for the year where I record what I’m reading, watching, and listening to. I’m going to do it monthly; expect a finalized list on the last day of each month (possibly backdated).
I have a home server (running Unraid) that I use to backup computers, as media storage, and to run various apps. It’s mostly been cobbled together from used parts I found for cheap, and it generally followed Serverbuild’s NAS Killer 4 guide. It runs like a dream, and putting it together is one of the best decisions I’ve ever made. More recently, with streaming sites like Netflix, Hulu, etc. cracking down on password sharing, it has become my pathway to shedding some monthly subscriptions and owning my own media.
For years, that server has lived in an old NZXT case that I had used when I built my first PC, primarily because I had the case laying around and because it still had bays for 3.5" drives (most modern PC cases only include one or two and instead provide storage for 2.5" drives). That bulky case has been shoved away in whatever corner of my apartments I could find, but now that I own a house, I have dreams of setting up a proper server rack in a closet somewhere. My home’s basement has a strange little room that housed only the oil tank and is conveniently right below my office space, so that’s the intended home. We replaced and relocated the tank and ran electrical to it, so it’s now good to go.
diff --git a/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html b/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html index 75f17e5..48ed283 100644 --- a/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html +++ b/public/moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup/index.html @@ -57,8 +57,7 @@ moving-to-a-rack-mount-setup -I wrote a post a few months ago cataloguing moving my home server from the old NZXT case I had leftover from my old PC into a Rosewill chassis that would let me, eventually, move to a proper rack setup. This past Prime Day, I purchased a Riveco 15U rack and then some sliding rails to go along with it, with the hope of finally moving the loud and hot NAS into the basement where it belongs.
Putting together the rack was easy enough: there were a lot of screws, which is fine, but the assembly was straightforward.
diff --git a/public/my-year-in-lists/index.html b/public/my-year-in-lists/index.html index 7389fea..0705661 100644 --- a/public/my-year-in-lists/index.html +++ b/public/my-year-in-lists/index.html @@ -58,8 +58,7 @@ However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years my-year-in-lists -I’m not a New Years Resolution person; listening to a lot of “My Year in Lists” by Los Campesinos! as a teen made me quite cynical about the whole thing.
However, I am a very goal-oriented, reflective person. In late 2022, after years of gaining weight and developing some really negative patterns of self-talk around my body image, I decided to join a gym. Of course I’d like to see the number on the scale go down, but the main goal was just to get healthier and develop healthier habits. I started running, because that’s what I used to do (not well), and eventually convinced a friend to join with me. Together, we set the goal of running a 5K, and we did our first in May of 2023, in about 41 minutes (in our defense, it was an extremely hilly course, but also progress, progress1). We ran three more as the year went by; my most recent was November, where I finished in around 36 minutes.
diff --git a/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html b/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html index 084e620..7f4f0b7 100644 --- a/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html +++ b/public/old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud/index.html @@ -57,8 +57,7 @@ old-woman-yells-at-the-cloud -I recently listened to an episode of Never Been a Better Podcast in which Austin Walker, referencing a Twitter thread by @v21, posited that we are moving into a new era of the internet where content is generated by machines rather than people; where once the internet was used by people to access large bodies of information and to connect with other people, we now use it to connect with machines that regurgitate photocopies of photocopies of information.
The transformation of the internet from a database of (somewhat) reliable information into a long game of telephone is troubling; as they discuss on that same podcast, no video game walkthrough site that ranks at the top of Google today is ever more reliable than the GameFAQs txt files filled with ASCII art that were painstakingly written by fourteen year olds, peer reviewed, and continuously revised.
diff --git a/public/on-teaching/index.html b/public/on-teaching/index.html index c9c2d85..5a5fcc3 100644 --- a/public/on-teaching/index.html +++ b/public/on-teaching/index.html @@ -58,8 +58,7 @@ When I was a kid, I was always interested in teaching; my grandparents had an un on-teaching -This September marks the start of my fourth year teaching.
When I was a kid, I was always interested in teaching; my grandparents had an unfinished basement that, for some reason, had a little chalkboard and table. My siblings and I would play school down there, and I loved to play the role of teacher – despite being considerably younger than them.1 I loved school, too. I loved most every subject (especially grammar – I’m one of the few children who absolutely rejoiced when asked to take out my grammar workbook) and was, at the risk of conceit, good at academics. I also read voraciously in elementary school.
diff --git a/public/posts/princess-bubblegum--marceline-still-just-almost-girlfriends/index.html b/public/posts/princess-bubblegum--marceline-still-just-almost-girlfriends/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..1dcf37f --- /dev/null +++ b/public/posts/princess-bubblegum--marceline-still-just-almost-girlfriends/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ + + + + + + + + + +My thirtieth birthday party, the day before my actual turn from one decade to the next, was a beautiful night. My mom, both pre-emptively staking out her territory as an Italian-American grandmother and (past but an adverb?) fulfilling regrets at never having been able to throw me a childhood party, brought too much food and snacks and love — or staying up and out past the early afternoon, which is a kind of love for us; my friends, older than me in years and with busy families and schedules, brought wisdom and comfort in growing older gracefully; and my friends closer in age drove great distances to celebrate me — or at least, with me.
The actual day passed uneventfully, cleaning and resting from the festivities, alone and at home with Joe. As the night wore on, however, I noticed, with (something something - mixed alarm, absence, desparation, and a painful normalcy) that I hadn’t heard from my dad, and I was suddenly borne ceaselessly back into the past.
diff --git a/public/posts/untitled/index.html b/public/posts/untitled/index.html new file mode 100644 index 0000000..402d4a9 --- /dev/null +++ b/public/posts/untitled/index.html @@ -0,0 +1,110 @@ + + + + + + + + + +It’s only natural that the first post on my shiny new blog should be about these two, isn’t it?
+Let me preface this post by saying that I love Princess Bubblegum and Marceline and Bubbline and Sugarless Gum, all of that — whatever you’d like to call it, I ship it. Hard. I may not be a long-time Adventure Time fan; I have not experienced firsthand the “What Was Missing” controversy, the joy delivered when Sky Witch premiered, and so on. I jumped on-board late, binge-watched my way to this pairing, which washed over me with all its fluffy, tumultuous grace. I was vaguely aware that it was a popular ship as I made my way up to “What Was Missing”; I transcended as I witnessed Marceline’s impromptu, angst-ridden love ballad to Peebles; I immediately rewatched “Go With Me”, eager to see the pair’s first on-screen interaction; I stormed ahead to “Sky Witch”. I filled my tumblr with all the lovely fanart in existence for the couple, bemusing my followers who already taunted me for my FemShep/Liara obsession; I formed headcanons, all of it.
+In that same vein, I would love to see the two become canon — not just because I ship them as I do, but because representing bi or pan1 people2 and relationships on television — children’s television, no less! — is top priority here.
+That being established, I think we need to rewind a little bit and go through the history (which, if you’re reading this post, probably isn’t any kind of news… but bear with me).
+Following the première of “What Was Missing” — essentially, Bubbline gospel — a promotional video series titled Mathematical! posted a recap of the episode, as they were wont to do. In it, they commented on the “possible subtext” within the episode, using some of Natasha Allegri’s more suggestive art. The video was pulled, Mathematical! was discontinued, and Dan Rickmers lost his job. Since, “Sky Witch” and the Adventure Time comics have tantalized fans waiting for the ship to become canon, but not much more. Oh, and Marceline made good on her promise to drink the red from Bubblegum’s “pretty pink face” in Red Starved.
+Back into the (almost) present, Olivia Olson — the voice actress for Marceline — appeared at a Barnes & Noble panel, where a fan asked her about the relationship between PB and the Vampire Queen…
+++[Pendleton Ward] said “Oh, you know they dated right?” And I said “That’s what I figured from all the creepy fanart… are they going to do it on the show? Or can we say anything about it in the book?” and he’s like “I don’t know about the book but in some countries where the show airs that sort of thing is illegal,” so that’s why they’re not putting it in the show. So who knows, maybe there will be something about it in the new episodes that we’re not supposed to talk about…
See the video here, which, as you might have guessed, was shared almost instantly. A day later, Olivia Olson tweeted:
+++I like to make things up at panels. Ya’ll [sic] take my stories way too seriously…
The tweet was subsequently deleted, but is preserved by the TweetPoster bot on reddit. Sounds a lot like damage control, to me — if I had to guess, Olson was relaying genuine information, realized the video had blown up, attempted to cover up her tracks — albeit gracelessly — and then deleted the tweet for some reason (likely because it was so sloppy).
+Six days later, Buzzfeed picked up the news, and HuffPo not long after that, both assuring readers that the couple was confirmed.
+And don’t get me wrong — I’m thrilled. Absolutely jazzed, not just because this has given the Bubbline tag new life on tumblr (even if it’s just excited gifs from even more excited fans, which is precious in its own right). But we haven’t reached canon yet. Of course, the very definition of canon is complex. One needs only scratch the surface of the multiple levels of canon within the Star Wars universe to understand just how complicated it can be, but absolute canon strictly adheres to only the source material — that is, the _Adventure Time_show — and official, “word of God” statements (which a paraphrased account from a voice actress is not).
+++ +Yo people need to quit saying that Bubbeline is canon because the Marceline voice actress said so. Unless it’s on the show it’s not canon!
+It’s cute and sweet and she’s a delight but it isn’t canon
+I wish!
+They won’t let me put it in the books
I’m not harboring any delusions of Prubs and Marceline making out on-screen, of course — I acknowledge that this is a children’s show, though light kissing has become commonplace since Finn’s relationship with Flame Princess, and mature subject matter isn’t exactly excluded either. Until we have that in-show confirmation, though, I’m dubious about dubbing the two “canon.” I can’t blame those who do, though — with the extremely limited representation of queer romances in the media, and the few being shown often being problematic, fans have to take what they can get. It’s a time to celebrate, certainly. But we’re not out of the closet yet — and that’s not just my preferences on what is and isn’t canon speaking.
+Given all the wonderful, beautiful qualities and nuances of the show, I have faith in them to do it. Adventure Time is one of the most popular children’s shows out there today because it doesn’t underestimate its audience; it doesn’t shy away from subject matter because it might be controversial or uncomfortable, even if often done allegorically (I’m looking at you, “Lemonhope”). I want the Adventure Time crew, and Cartoon Network by extension, to have the bravery to stick their necks out and stand up for the cause of representation. To have such a popular show openly come forward with two of its major characters in a bi/pan relationship would be earth-shattering. Little steps are great, but we should not satisfy ourselves with less than what the show is capable of and what fans — and children, and queer people, — deserve.
+It’s unclear which. Many people — including myself, in the past — have labelled the two and/or the relationship as lesbian, incorrectly as both have dated or otherwise been romantically involved with men (Marceline with Ash, PB with Mr. Creampuff, Braco, and Finn, the latter two arguable). Furthermore, I think it would be most important to allow the characters — and therefore, the creators, — to choose whichever term they sexually identify with, if any. But I digress, and find bi or pan most accurate. ↩︎
+Also they’re not exactly people. One is made out of candy and the other is a demon/human/vampire hybrid. ↩︎
+2016 was the first year I was eligible to vote in a presidential election. I was away at college, so I completed an absentee ballot, and, like most, felt confident in what I thought would be the result. I was no big fan of Clinton’s — I voted for Bernie in the primaries — but the other option was laughable: I couldn’t believe that a major political party put such a clown up as their candidate, and I thought the electorate was smart enough to see him for the fraud (and fascist) he was.
On the night of Tuesday, November 8th, I had a Diversity in Education class at 5:30pm. I enjoyed the class; it was mostly discussion-based, encouraging future educators to consider how they might be more inclusive and equitable in their practices. The curriculum was not as aggressive as I might have liked — I had cut my teeth as a teen on leftist circles of tumblr, so by comparison, the concept of considering diversity beyond celebrating and recognizing Black History Month was pretty banal. Even so, I was glad to be in a room with (mostly) like-minded people eager to make kids feel seen and hard.
diff --git a/public/smooth-runs-the-water-where-the-brook-is-deep/index.html b/public/smooth-runs-the-water-where-the-brook-is-deep/index.html index 1ccc7a2..63ae14a 100644 --- a/public/smooth-runs-the-water-where-the-brook-is-deep/index.html +++ b/public/smooth-runs-the-water-where-the-brook-is-deep/index.html @@ -60,8 +60,7 @@ The first is from “Banshee Beat” by Animal Collective, which I first smooth-runs-the-water-where-the-brook-is-deep -