Roxie's World

You Can't Stop Us

2012-01-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

Or, Another Damn Post on Marriage Equality. We'll stop writin' 'em when the homophobes give up the hate and extend ~~the ball and chain~~ the right to wed to all citizens.

Moose encountered and shared the vid below on Facebook the other day. It's of our Maryland state delegate (and pal!) Heather Mizeur, speaking on the floor of the General Assembly during last March's debate on a bill that would have brought marriage equality to the Free State. The bill passed in the Senate but was pulled in the House when it was clear there weren't enough votes to pass it. Gov. Martin O'Malley introduced a similar bill this week, so the whole battle is about to play out again. (Oh, goody -- Reruns!) The hope is that the bill will fare better this time around with O'Malley taking on more of a leadership role and in the wake of the passage of marriage equality in the New York state legislature. We shall see, kids. Y'all know we've been skeptical of O'Malley, pretty as he is, and now his equally lovely wife, Judge Catherine O'Malley, has ruffled feathers by speaking the truth, publicly declaring that the bill failed last year because "some cowards . . . prevented it from passing." Judge O'Malley quickly and predictably announced that she regretted her choice of words, though we happen to think she was right. Some delegates who had signed on as cosponsors of the bill ended up voting against it once churches in more conservative districts whipped up opposition. Because, you know, God Hates Fags.

In any case, watch the vid:

We like the rhetorical moves Mizeur makes in this brief clip, the calm yet righteous eloquence of her assertion that the bill's opponents cannot stop LGBT people from establishing marriages and families, from loving each other and declaring their love before the divine entity referred to around here as Dog. The repeated "you can't stop us from . . . " serves as a powerful anaphora that reminds listeners of how dramatically social and legal conditions for same-sex relationships have changed in the decades since Stonewall. It taunts those who would vote against the bill by suggesting that the war is in some sense already over and queers have won -- but then it pivots back to the painful reality of what the lack of full legal equality can mean for same-sex couples: "You can't stop us from loving each other," Mizeur intones. "You can't stop us from getting married. You can't stop us from pledging to forever to our God and to each other and to support each other in the toughest of times. You can't stop that. All you can do is make it really, really, really difficult for us in the worst, most challenging times."

Goose has long maintained that what fuels the right-wing hysteria about marriage equality is the recognition that teh Gayz Agenda has already captured the hearts and minds of the vast majority of Americans. As a generation of kids raised in and around and on Modern Family comes of age, the idea that civil marriage has to be protected from the assaults of creepy scary queers is losing whatever power it has left as a wedge issue. A November, 2011 Pew poll found that support for marriage equality was strongest among Millennial generation voters (born from 1981 to 1993), at an impressive 59%. Of course, Millennials seem far less invested in marriage than previous generations have been. The same poll shows that they are far less likely than earlier generations to marry when young. Currently, just 23% of 18- to-30-year-olds are married. By contrast, 49% of the Baby Boomers were married at that age. There is considerable irony in gays clamoring for access to marriage in a period when its power as a social institution seems to be declining precipitously. If conservatives had a lick of sense or objectivity, they'd realize that modernizing marriage and expanding access to it will do more good than harm. David Brooks, who has such sense, has been making that case since 2003.

As the Moms approach the 28th anniversary of their commitment to love without marriage, they are keeping a close eye on what's going on in Annapolis. They are still not chomping at the bit to run down to the courthouse and get legally hitched, but they respect the desires of those who are and they believe right down to the bottom of their ornery radical hearts that queers should have the same rights to legally wedded bliss or catastrophe that everybody else has. Mizeur is right: You can't stop us from loving each other and building lives together. You could if you wanted to build other ways to grant legal protection to relationships and to distribute the 1038 rights and benefits currently available only through marriage, but until that day comes, a lot of us want and need marriage. You can't stop us, but you can hurt us and slow us down and make the darkest days of our lives darker still by setting up legal obstacles that make us vulnerable at moments of illness, injury, or death. You can't stop us, because the genie is out of the ~~bottle~~ closet. You can only make us continue to pay the price for your bigotry. Don't kid yourself that the creator of the universe is on your side in this fight. Whatever S/He is, Dog is assuredly on the side of love. Why aren't you?

Oh, we know you are on the side of love, my pretties, and we reckon some of you might also be interested in the drama unfolding in Annapolis. Want to help? We've got some ideas.

Make a donation to Equality Maryland, the state's largest LGBT civil rights organization, which is working hard under new leadership to pass the marriage bill and a gender-identity protection bill during this session. Full disclosure: Moose is on the Board of Directors of the Equality Maryland Foundation, but if you contribute there your donation is tax-deductible. Do it -- and tell 'em Moose sent you!
Get on the phone. Marylanders for Marriage Equality (a coalition, which includes Equality Maryland, set up to work for passage of the marriage bill) is holding weekly phone banks throughout the state to rally support. Find one near you, and start practicing your very best phone manners.
Sign up for Lobby Day in Annapolis. It's Feb. 13. Go march around in the cold, then head indoors to give your representative an earful or a pat on the back. The Moms can't be there, because Moose is hosting a shindig on campus that day (which you should totally attend if you are not able to go to Annapolis).

All right, rabble rousers, it's time to step away from the laptop and go enjoy what's left of this lovely afternoon. We hope it's pretty in your neck of the woods and that you'll do some fighting for joy as well as justice on this last weekend of January 2012. Peace out, and play fair.

(Image Credit: Via.)

Outlook: Hazy

2012-01-23T23:57:00.000-05:00

(Photo Credit: Moose, 1/23/12)

Moose snapped this moody shot on her way off campus this evening. (No, it only looks like she was the last person to leave the joint.) Campus was enveloped in a thick mist all day today, which deepened the quiet of the still largely student-free zone. Spring classes begin on Wednesday. (Yes, that's ridiculously late. You won't hate us so much when we're wrapping up the semester around, you know, the Fourth of July.) There is still a lot to do because Moose has got a lot going on this term and still hasn't finished tweaking her syllabus for the third iteration of her blogging class.

Which means, darlings, that we don't have time to linger here with you right now, much as we'd like to. Forgive us, will you? You know we love you and will return as soon as we can. In the meantime, click on over to Arcade and read Natalia Cecire's thoughtful piece on academic blogging, which kindly invokes Moose's riff on pseudonymity in The Journal of Women's History roundtable on academic feminist blogging. Or, speaking of Tenured Radical (who edited that JWH roundtable), go read her latest post on her midlife transition to a new job. Show her some love, kids, and, if you see her wandering aimlessly in a hallway near you, show her her classroom, too, will ya? Or, if you still read books but prefer books with colorful pictures, pick up Brooke Gladstone's The Influencing Machine. Moose just read it as part of her work for the Committee to Assure That All Incoming Students Read At Least One Fracking Book in Their First Year of College and enjoyed it immensely. It's smart and witty, but it also brings an impressive historical perspective to bear on questions about media and technology that are far too often discussed in completely presentist (and often alarmist) terms. And did we mention that it has lots and lots of pictures?

Off you go, my pretties. It's a great big interweb. Somebody out there is saying something terribly clever right now. Click away or you'll miss it!

Please Pass the, Um, Wite-Out?

2012-01-16T12:26:00.000-05:00

(Photo Credit: Nikki Kahn, Washington Post, via)

Happy MLK Day, you lovely fighters for justice and accuracy in stone carving. We celebrate the occasion by noting that the department of the Interior recently announced that the badly truncated quotation chiseled into the side of the Martin Luther King memorial is going to be corrected. That is excellent news, because it suggests that some things actually are sacred and that government still can do -- and re-do -- big things when the occasion demands it. And, really, fixing a quotation so radically decontextualized that it made one of history's more modest men sound like "an arrogant twit," as Maya Angelou put it, is a big thing definitely worth doing. Raise the debt ceiling again if you have to, but please don't let generations of pilgrims to Washington walk away with the impression that Martin Luther King was a braggart.

Strike up the band, kids. On this day, let us all be drum majors for the exercise of bureaucratic common sense and the sanctity of public words. Here's to public history done -- or re-done -- right.

A Woman of (Less) Substance

2012-01-12T14:50:00.000-05:00

We pause briefly to note that it was one year ago today that Moose stepped on the scales at her first Lifestyle Adjustment Program meeting. By all means click away if celebrations of such things bore you senseless. Stick around, though, if you're willing to let a middle-aged broad indulge in a virtual happy dance. Take it away, Moose.

* * *

Thanks, Rox. Wow, what a difference a year makes, huh? Pound-wise, I am three-quarters of the woman I was on January 12, 2011. Fitness-wise, I am in dramatically better shape than I was a year ago. I can run four miles comfortably (if slowly) and could hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day if I had to. (And wouldn't life be cool if a girl were called upon to hang out in plank pose for the better part of a day? I mean, srsly. Think about it.) Attitude-wise, I feel sharper, calmer, and more resilient. I feel happier, more able to cope with whatever comes at me. Losing weight doesn't make life perfect by any means, but it can make the stresses and strains easier to manage.

I've been on maintenance since mid-July, though I actually continued to lose weight through August. My weight has now stabilized smack dab in the middle of the "normal" BMI range for my height. (Insert standard qualifiers about the limitations of BMI here.) What's working? you might ask. If you've been following my adventures in middle-aged embodiment, you already know the answer to this question, because what's working now is what has been working all along: Mindful eating, moderate exercise, and a supportive social network. (Thank you, Goose. Thank you, awesome LAP at Work group. Thank you, Facebook friends. Thank you, sisters [literal and figurative] and yogis.)

Is it really that simple? I feel sheepish and a little surprised to be saying this, but, yes, for me it has been that simple. I didn't need to radically change my diet. I just needed to eat less, drink less, and move more. My life now is not about deprivation and sacrifice. My meals aren't sad little piles of lettuce covered with fake cheese and fat-free dressing, and my workouts aren't daily forced marches. Over the holidays, I feasted on all of my favorites: my grandmother's olives, pecan pie, lobster casserole, chateaubriand (!). My feasting was a little more restrained than it was in years past, however, and I was pretty careful to eat light on non-feasting days to keep things in balance. I was also willing to spend 45 minutes on a treadmill on Christmas day so that I would actually feel hungry when it came time to tuck into that chateaubriand. My rule on exercise continues to be a firm yet flexible commitment to doing what I can when I can. I try to get in two or three cardiovascular workouts a week plus a 90-minute yoga class. Keep it simple. Keep it fun. Make exercise a priority, but don't beat up on yourself if you miss a day. As noted fitness guru Scarlett O'Hara once said, "Tomorrow is another day."

So, yes, the new normal for me is about balance and moderation, but it is also about joy and pleasure. I am not exaggerating when I say that the hardest part of this whole process was stepping on that scale one year ago today. Everything I've done since then has felt easy because I knew it was contributing to my sense of well-being. I hope I never forget the flood of relief I experienced in that moment, as I realized that I had finally formulated the intention to rework my relationships to food, movement, and body. I will do a happy dance today to celebrate this milestone, but in a way I've been happy dancing all along. Thanks to all of you for dancing with me!

***

In other news, Hostess Brands, makers of Wonder bread, Twinkies, and the fruit pies Moose regularly devoured over the course of her misspent Midwestern youth, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, for the second time this decade. Are we alone in thinking the world would spin just fine on its axis without Ding Dongs and Donettes? Yeah, we didn't think so.

For other posts on the emergence of Moose 2.0: A Less Portly Dyke Than She Used to Be, go here, here, here, and here.

It would be wrong to end without an actual happy dance, wouldn't it? Hells to the yeah! Let's bring in a little Beyoncé, shall we? Move your body, baby -- and love it, no matter what. Peace out.

The Quiet Season

2012-01-09T18:37:00.000-05:00

Or, Things We Did While Not Attending MLA 2012

Dr. Crazy went and so did Undine, but for the first time since 1995 neither of the English profs of Roxie's World attended the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, which concluded yesterday in the highly caffeinated city of Seattle. We're huge fans of the organization and its annual shindig but opted out this year because we weren't giving papers or shopping book manuscripts or serving on search committees and therefore couldn't quite justify the time and expense of a cross-country trip. So, what'd we do instead?

We burrowed in. Hunkered down. Laid low.

We decluttered. Depilated. Decompressed.

We ran a little. Walked a little. Finally tried Zumba. (Verdict? Not sure yet. Further research will be necessary, but Moose is not convinced her cardiovascular health requires quite that much hip action. She also recalls, however, that she felt similarly skeptical after her first aerobics class, once upon a time in the 80s.)

We toiled happily away on the kind of work that is hard to do when classes are in session and the calendar is a multicolored vortex of obligations. Goose had a 2-day team meeting for one of her electronic projects. Moose shifted into cruise-director mode to hammer out the details for the upcoming celebrations of her queer studies program's tenth anniversary. (I know: ten years of queering the turtle! Can you stand it? Click here for some of the scoop on what's in store. Details coming soon.)

Oh, and we watched us some basketball, because our fifth-ranked Lady Terps needed us to make sure they got through the weekend with their perfect record in tact. Fine, sophomore forward Alyssa Thomas helped, too, with her 24 points in Friday's heart-stopping comeback against Georgia Tech and her buzzer-beater that put Sunday's road game against Carolina into overtime, but we know that our passionate devotion helped carry the mighty women of Maryland to 16-0. 16-0!!!

After the haircut (the aforementioned depilation), Moose was hungry and so took herself to lunch. She had tapas. And a glass of white wine. It was Friday. She had gone for a run. Tapas is the perfect way for Lifestyle Adjusters to dine well without having to declare PointsPlus bankruptcy. She had a shredded cod salad, because a friend whose judgment she trusts says that if cod is on the menu you should always order it. She was not disappointed.

Then she went to a museum, because it was there. And there is a Gertrude Stein show she's been meaning to see for months but hadn't yet and now it's about to leave town, so she finally popped in. It's not the bestest exhibit ever, despite the forthright documenting of Stein's sexuality and her relationship with Alice B. Toklas and some marvelous images of the two women and their dog Basket, but it's well worth seeing. Moose was pleased to be able to snatch a pic of Jo Davidson's massive terra cotta sculpture of Stein, which she likes to think of as the precursor to the bronze Thinking Woman she brought home with her from New Mexico a couple of years ago.

What else did we do while not schmoozing, boozing, and cruising at the MLA? We watched Homeland, all 12 white-knuckle, Claire Danes-ilicious episodes. The show strains credulity in precisely the ways our pal Jill Dolan blogged about in November (before the season had ended) and its finale is vexing in all the ways David Haglund and June Thomas discuss in Slate. Nonetheless, the writing (if not the plotting) and the performances make Homeland riveting to watch. It's a fraught and fascinating piece of post-9/11 cultural work that deftly probes the psychic costs of living with and in the massive state (in)security apparatus that took hold in the United States in the wake of the fall 2001 attacks. Danes plays Carrie Mathison, a CIA officer haunted by the feeling that she missed something on 9/11 that might have thwarted the attacks. Damian Lewis plays Nicholas Brody, a Marine sergeant who was held captive by Al-Qaeda for eight years and has just been released and returned home. Carrie believes he was turned while in captivity and is now part of a plot to attack the U. S. Much of the thrill of this taut, smart thriller is in watching the dynamics of the Mathison-Brody relationship and trying to figure out who is manipulating whom and to what end. How much of what happens between them is personal and how much is a matter of each working to advance the goals of their competing missions? We don't want to give anything away. Go watch the show if you can. Then come back here prepared to discuss Homeland's complex racial/sexual/religious politics and the burning question of whether Claire's electroshock therapy will erase the crucial piece of evidence she recognized in that last moment before the big buzz jolted her brain. Hurry! We are dying to have this conversation with you!

One more thing we did while not attending the MLA? Moose took a lot of pictures with her new iPhone 4S, which is, as the hype suggests, equipped with a camera so good you might be tempted to stuff all your old point-and-shoots in the back of some closet. Both photos above were taken with her fun new toy, as was the one below, which we offer by way of returning to the theme of quietness and winter rest with which this post began. Here's hoping you've found such time at the beginning of this brave new year. Peace out, my pretties, and, again, a very happy new year to you and yours.

2012: One Slate Wiped Clean

2012-01-02T20:09:00.001-05:00

Here is how the refrigerator door in Roxie's World looked on New Year's Eve:

And here is how it looked on New Year's Day:

Why? The Moms decided some de-cluttering was in order. Fear not, friends. Every item taken down was lovingly saved for posterity -- all the magnets, all the Hillary-porn, all the artwork and school photos in what Moose lovingly called the galerie des garçons. It may all enjoy a new life in some other location, but for now the Moms are grooving on the pleasing emptiness of the blank slate that greets them every time they catch a glimpse of the fridge. It's calming somehow and vaguely encouraging, which is a nice way to feel in the first week of a brand new year.

We hope 2012 is off to a calm, happy start for you and yours. We look forward to reconnecting with everybody soon. In the meantime, here's a pic of the yummy lobster-artichoke casserole the Moms served for a gathering of friends on New Year's Eve:

Goose (the chef/artist traditionally tasked with writing out the number of the new year in mashed potatoes on top of the casserole) got a little overly zealous with the paprika, which is why the dish has kind of a rusty look, but it was tasty as heck and supplied the touch of decadence that Moose believes New Year's Eve deserves. And, yes, the resident poster girl for health and fitness got up the next morning and went for the first run of the new year, a sweet little three-miler that knocked the champagne out of her system and left her with a smile on her face. Apparently, the virtue binge will continue in 2012.

Wevs, kids. Happy New Year!

2011: A Brief, Backward Glance

2011-12-31T16:37:00.002-05:00

Want a proper End of Year List? Go elsewhere, darlings. A humble dog blog cannot be expected to wrap its paws around a year as epic in scale as 2011 turned out to be. Our focus this year has been largely personal and our productivity has been significantly lower than in years past. (This is just our 89th post of the year, making 2011 our lightest year of blogging since RW's barbaric yawp was first heard in 2006. We would apologize for slacking, but, hey, you get this stuff for free, so, you know, deal with it. We love you, but we gotta pay the bills somehow.)

Anyhoo, here, in no particular order, is an unabashedly partial and idiosyncratic list of some of what mattered to us this year. We invite you to share your highlights and lowlights in comments as a way of preparing for the transition into 2012. Retrospection is good for the soul, especially as we move into the unpredictability and intensity of a Year of the Dragon.

Number of the Year:

-- That's the number of pounds Moose lost on the Lifestyle Adjustment Program she began in January. Which just goes to show you that sometimes New Year's resolutions work. Also: You can teach old dogs new tricks. Oh: And self-improvement arises not from self-loathing but from compassion. Just saying. Finally: It's possible to eat well and lose weight. Go here and here for recipes and inspiration.

Happiest Day of the Year: March 6 -- That's the day Ms. Ruby arrived in Roxie's World to assume the role of Embodied Dog. It was a cold, dark, rainy day that became sunny and bright the moment the good people of American Fox Terrier Rescue brought the sweetest critter on dog's earth across the threshold.

Photo of the Year: Pepper-Spraying Cop -- The image that launched one of the best memes ever and, more importantly, briefly focused attention not only on funding crisis in higher education but on the overly zealous policing of nonviolent student protest on campuses throughout the country. One of our major hopes for 2012 is that "Occupy Education" becomes a sustained and viable challenge to the way of doing business in higher ed.

Best Art We Saw: The Steins Collect, at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Thrilling.

Best TV We Saw: The Good Wife, but that may only be because we missed Homeland. We started watching it on the penultimate day of 2011 and are impressed. Good lord, Claire Danes can act!

Most Hyper-Inflated Ticket Price We Didn't Mind Paying: For The Book of Mormon on Broadway in September. Oh, sweet-voiced boys in short-sleeved shirts, you truly had us at "Hello!"

Most Culinary Fun We Had in the DC Area This Year: The several times we dined at José Andrés' delightful pop-up restaurant, America Eats. We blogged about this rollicking good tour through the culinary history of the United States after Moose first visited it in July. It has held up well through several repeat visits. Go. Now. Before it disappears!

Losses That Stung/Struck Us: Death, as usual, had a banner year in 2011. Of the biggies, the death of Apple CEO Steve Jobs in October particularly struck us, but we were more personally touched by the deaths of Texas music impresario Joe Gracey, poet Ruth Stone, and retired teacher Ida Pinkney, our next-door neighbor for 17 years who literally died laughing on the day before Thanksgiving. Ida was talking on the phone with a dear friend and suffered a massive heart attack. The Moms were terribly sad to lose someone who taught them so much of what it meant to be a good neighbor -- the exchange of pleasantries across the driveways, the check-in phone calls during snowstorms and other local dramas -- but they also kind of love the idea that a woman with Ida's gift for friendship and immense joie de vivre left the world laughing. Some endings, though sad, are fitting. Dogspeed, Ida.

Best Posts We Managed to Get Up in This Not Especially Bloggy Year: We'll choose two, one in the category of Meditations on Social Media and the other in the category of Inter-Species Romance. For the first, we'll award our post-MLA post, "The Great Untweeted," which set records in Roxie's World for volume of traffic and number of comments. We're proud of that one and thinks its reflections on what does and does not get tweeted at academic conferences hold up pretty well. For the second category, we are willing to pat ourselves on the back for "The Day I Became a Dog," the September post in which readers heard Ms. Ruby's voice for the first time. We agonized over that one for ages and were pleased that readers seemed to enjoy it so much when we finally pressed publish.

Thanks to all of you for hanging out with us for another wacky year in the blogosphere. We promise to try to be a little more prolific in 2012, as the presidential campaign heats up and the Republican ship of fools sails on. In the meantime, we wish you all a safe and happy new year. Peace out, my pretties, and may none of your dear acquaintances ever be forgot.

Ruby's First Christmas

2011-12-26T19:56:00.000-05:00

'Tis the season for making a fool out of oneself by publicly sharing low-rent videos made by techno-challenged iMovie illiterates. Pardon the indulgence, kids, but there are at least two good reasons to give Moose's latest film a click: It features the jazzy piano song that simply is Christmas for several generations of Peanuts-raised Americans, and it stars a really cute dog appearing in her first non-major motion picture. Yes, Santa found Ms. Ruby all the way out in chilly Michigan and brought her some presents. Plus, her cousin Scooter proved to be remarkably generous in sharing his presents and his astonishingly large stash of toys. Like spoiled children everywhere, Ms. Ruby now believes that every day should be Christmas.

She has a point, of course. Gather 'round the laptop for this heartwarming holiday non-classic, while we pack up and get ready to head back to Roxie's World tomorrow. See you soon, my pretties. Whatever you are celebrating this season, we hope you are feeling nurtured in body and spirit and that some sweet soul is genially sharing his or her toys with you. Peace out.

Respite and Rescue

2011-12-23T09:34:00.000-05:00

The Moms and sweet Ruby-doo are about to hit the road for a brief holiday visit to the Land of the Moosians (Motor City division). Grades are done. The car is tuned up. Not one single gift has been purchased, but, hey, Republicans caved on the payroll tax cut extension, so at least we'll have more moolah to shop with after Christmas. We hope that you, too, are gearing up for some quality time with loved ones.

Here's the image that festooned the front page of WaPo this morning, by way of reminding readers that, with yesterday's winter solstice, light is finding its way back to the national capital region. (That news will disappoint the Dark Ages caucus of the GOP, but they are accustomed to disappointment.)

(Photo Credit: Bill O'Leary, Washington Post. WaPo caption: "The Capitol and its Christmas tree gleam amid first light Thursday as the sun rises after the longest night of the year; the winter solstice was marked at 12:30 a.m. This HDR [high dynamic range] composite image was created by software that combines several images of the same scene to enhance clarity and color saturation.")

Meanwhile, here's a little image Moose snapped at dinner the other night that captures the spirit of the season in Roxie's World:

Finally, if you need a heartwarming animal story to lift your holiday spirits, Ms. Ruby urges you to click over to this tale of 100 dogs who arrived at the Washington Animal Rescue League just in time for Christmas. They were rescued from an Arkansas puppy mill. There's a whole set of ridiculously adorable photos of the survivors up on flickr, but unless your heart is made of stone you'd better be prepared to adopt a dog before you subject yourselves to images like, uh, this:

(Photo Credit: Washington Animal Rescue League)

Happy holidays, darlings. May you find refuge in love this season. Be warm, be kind, be rescued.

Upward-Facing Moose

2011-12-17T18:30:00.000-05:00

Time for an exciting round of Complete the Caption! The above photo depicts Moose:

a) working on her tennis serve, which, she insists, does not actually require a ball or racket;
b) looking good but seriously underdressed for holiday caroling in the neighborhood;
c) smiling with gratitude because the pile of ungraded papers is not quite as high as her outstretched arm.

The answer of course is d) posing for a photographer at her local yoga studio to illustrate a little piece she wrote for the Willow Street Yoga Center Newsletter. (Yeah, it ain't Critical Inquiry or glq, but she wouldn't get a merit raise if she published in those fancy venues this year anyway, so what the heck?) We've pasted in a slightly revised version of the essay below. You can access the original by clicking on this link and then opening the PDF for the winter 2012 newsletter.

This one goes out to all the readers and friends who have followed the adventures in embodiment of Moose 2.0 over the past year. Your support and interest have meant a lot, and your stories have inspired and delighted all of us in Roxie's World. The post is dedicated to Suzie Hurley, first teacher, with love and gratitude for all that her vision has brought into being.

* * *

Lessons from the Mat
by Moose

I recently lost fifty pounds, and yoga helped me do it. Indeed, if I were inclined to be entrepreneurial, I would probably be making infomercials for something I might call the Yoga Diet, or perhaps even the Willow Street Diet: LOSE WEIGHT AND INCREASE FLEXIBILITY, WHILE STANDING ON ONE LEG!

I know: Maybe it’s a good thing I’m not especially entrepreneurial. Besides, Google tells me someone has beaten me to the punch on the Yoga Diet. Bear with me, though, as I try to explain my infomercial impulse.

Yoga may not be a major fat-burning activity, but I am serious when I say it contributed significantly to my efforts to re-contour my middle-aged body. I returned to Willow Street in the winter of 2009 after several years away. I had taken classes for a couple of years early in the 2000s, mostly Level Is with Suzie Hurley, but I decided to take a break in 2003 during a ridiculously stressful period in my life. (Two words are all I need to explain a crazy time and a dubious decision: home renovation.)

By the time I got back from my “break,” I was seriously out of shape and significantly overweight, because I had given up not only yoga but also a commitment I had maintained for most of my adult life to regular, vigorous cardiovascular activity. On the brink of my fiftieth birthday, I was feeling out of sorts and starting to worry about the long-term consequences of having gotten so out of shape. In other words, I was starting to feel old, and I didn’t like the feeling.

Returning to Willow Street was a small but important step on my long road back to health and fitness. I didn’t realize it at the time, but I see now that getting back to the mat was a way of gently yet powerfully re-connecting with a world and a self I was afraid I had left behind. Ultimately, that re-connection helped me find the will to lose weight by giving me a way to think about weight and body issues that feels affirming and enabling rather than punitive and disabling, which, I think, is how much of our culture’s talk about bodies, especially female ones, tends to be.

Back on the mat – first in Joe Miller’s Level I classes and lately in the I/II class he and Natalie Miller co-teach on Friday evenings – I learned three lessons that were enormously helpful in what I would eventually (and only half-jokingly) term my Lifestyle Adjustment Program. The first was to approach yoga in a spirit of play. This is an aspect of Joe’s teaching that deeply resonated with me, perhaps because it’s something I strive to do in my own classrooms. I am an English professor at the University of Maryland. The intellectual discipline of reading literature in a serious way can be intimidating, so I have always tried to cultivate a light, relaxed atmosphere in the classroom in the hope that students will learn more by worrying less and not noticing how hard they are working. Similarly, Joe’s insistent playfulness helps to demystify the discipline he teaches – which can also be intimidating -- and allows students to enter into it in their own way and at their own level. “Thanks for playing,” he often says at the end of class. Those words never fail to bring a smile to my face, but they’ve also encouraged me to feel comfortable trying to learn new and challenging skills. Fall out of a pose? No big deal! We’re just playing! Try it again!

That spirit of play guided me toward a second and equally valuable lesson, which was to love and honor the body I have, to appreciate what it can do now, and to stop berating myself for what it can’t (yet) do. My prolonged sedentary period had left me feeling alienated from a body I didn’t like or recognize. Yoga helped me let go of self-loathing and treat myself with a compassion that had eluded me for many years. Love and compassion, not disgust, were what finally got me, in January of 2011, to go to a meeting, step on a scale, and say, “OK, I am ready to do something different.”

Finally and perhaps most importantly, yoga gave me practice in mindfulness, which proved to be invaluable as I worked to cultivate and sustain new and better habits in relation to food and activity. I realized that my weight gain had a lot to do with the fact that I had just stopped paying attention to how much I was eating and how little I was moving. Food tastes better and is more satisfying when you pay attention to every bite, no matter how simply or sensibly it’s prepared. Mindfulness has meant that I experience my new way of eating as the opposite of the deprivations we associate with dieting. I have been cooking up a storm since I started losing weight, and I’ve enjoyed every moment in the kitchen and at the table – as has my well-fed partner, by the way!

Playfulness, compassion, and mindfulness: These are three lessons I learned on the mat that have helped me transform my body and my attitude fairly dramatically in the past year. You may not see me in an infomercial, but you will definitely see me in the studio, working hard but happily and with deep gratitude to continue this extraordinary process of learning. Thanks to everyone at Willow Street for playing with me and teaching me so well.

Rat Empathy

2011-12-09T17:22:00.001-05:00

This story caught my typist's eye this morning. A new study shows evidence of empathy existing "in a robust way" among rats. Here's how the experiment works: Two rats are hanging out in the rat lab. One is free and the other is in an "unpleasantly restrictive cage" that the other rat can learn to open if he wants to release his compatriot. The study indicated that, not only would the free rat liberate the caged rat, he would also save a treat from a horde of chocolate chips to share with the captive. Wait, dude: Liberty and chocolate? What planet are these critters from and how do we get there?

Wa Po summarizes the implications of the study:

The researchers came to the unavoidable conclusion that what they were seeing was empathy — and apparently selfless behavior driven by that mental state.

“There is nothing in it for them except for whatever feeling they get from helping another individual,” said Peggy Mason, the neurobiologist who conducted the experiment along with graduate student Inbal Ben-Ami Bartal and fellow researcher Jean Decety.

“There is a common misconception that sharing and helping is a cultural occurrence. But this is not a cultural event. It is part of our biological inheritance,” she added.

Also: Rats are not Republicans. Revise your political name-calling accordingly. Henceforth, rats are the good guys. As in: Oh, that Hillary Clinton is such a rat, running around telling everybody that gay rights are human rights! Get that girl some chocolate!

What a world, what a world. Have a lovely, rat-filled weekend, my pretties. Here's hoping your cage door opens soon.

Dear Hillary Clinton,

2011-12-06T23:27:00.001-05:00

We love you so. No, really, we adore you and totally groove on the way you have become like the Global Queer-Affirming Good Girl. Srsly, the burly women and pretty boys of the world unite in saying that you are homolicious!

Nonetheless, with all due respect, we wish you would re-think the hair. I am sorry, Mme Secretary, but we cannot love a ponytail.

Yours sincerely,

Roxie

(Photo Credit: Anja Niedringhaus, Associated Press [via]. New York Times caption: U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, left, after her speech on human rights issues at the United Nations headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland, on Tuesday. [Video of the speech is here.])

It is a violation of human rights when people are beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave. It is a violation of human rights when governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished. It is a violation of human rights when lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments, or when people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives. And it is a violation of human rights when life-saving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay. No matter what we look like, where we come from, or who we are, we are all equally entitled to our human rights and dignity. -- US Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, "Remarks in Recognition of International Human Rights Day," Palais des Nations, Geneva, Switzerland, 12/6/11.

You go, girl. With you till the last dog dies. Or 2016, whichever comes first.

Remembering Ruth Stone

2011-12-02T08:46:00.001-05:00

Ruth Stone, who died November 19 at the age of 96, was a friend of ours. By friend we don't mean we spoke on the phone every day or spent summers at her charmingly decrepit Vermont farm house. Indeed, we hadn't spoken in several years before the National Book Award-winning poet passed away. The friendship we claim is rooted in the depth of our affections, not the amount of time we spent with a fine poet and a feisty woman who toiled in obscurity for decades. We loved Ruth, and she loved all the denizens of Roxie's World.

To Ruth, everything on earth was intensely alive -- full of meaning and worthy of recognition. Thus, in "Vegetables II," she says of an eggplant she contemplates eating, "We put our heads together. / You are so smooth and cool and purple, / I say. Which of us will it be?" In the early days of their friendship, when the Moms were cat lesbians, Ruth would inscribe copies of her books to them and their cats, Spike and Lily, illustrated with adorable little cat cartoons down by her signature. When I came on the scene in the mid-90s, Ruth laughed uproariously at the wild antics of my exuberant puppyhood, but, as the photo anchored to this paragraph shows, she could also calm me down enough to curl up and enjoy some poetry. (Ruth is reading a volume by another of our beloved poet-friends, Alicia Ostriker, in this picture.)

Goose first met Ruth at an epic lady poet-palooza held in May of 1986 to commemorate the centennial of Emily Dickinson's death. Upon that occasion, Ruth spoke movingly of Dickinson's astonishing originality and of the conditions in which her poetry was produced. Much of what she said of Dickinson might have been said of Ruth, too:

When I read her poems, these original, hard as steel poems, and I feel the intensity in every word, words used in new ways, bent to her will, then I think she was self-sufficient, an artist whose mind was never asleep, whose concentration recreated, made fresh all that she saw and felt, as though she saw through the ordinary barriers, not as a visionary, but as a laser beam. But when I think of how little recognition she received in her lifetime, and how devastated she must have felt, though her fierce pride concealed it, then I am angry and sad. Yes, a great artist knows and can work in almost total isolation, but it is a terrible thing to have to do. The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. In her cryptic inventions, she broke the tiresome mold of American poetry. We still stand among those shards and splinters.

The original mind seems eccentric, even crazy sometimes. Oh, maybe just a little. Moose's favorite Ruth story involves an afternoon in the late-80s when Goose was at school and she and Ruth were hanging out with the cats in the apartment they lived in back then. Moose was supposed to be working on her still unfinished dissertation. Ruth was supposed to be resting to get ready for an evening reading on campus. At some point, Moose tuned in to the sound of Ruth's voice. Out in the living room, she was muttering something about death. "Oh, dammit. Oh, death," or words to that effect. When Moose ventured out to see what was happening, Ruth was sitting on the couch staring at her hands. "Ruth?" Moose shyly inquired, for she barely knew her elderly houseguest. "Everything okay?" Ruth turned to her, with her large brown eyes open wide, and declared, "Death is after me. Ever since that car accident. I knew it. Dammit." "Uh, okay, Ruth. What makes you think that?"

At that point, America's most obscure great poet held out her hands so Moose could see them. They were bleeding. Not from any visible wound, mind you -- Just bleeding. Two thoughts immediately popped into Moose's dissertation-enfeebled mind. The first was something like, Cool, stigmata -- We can turn this joint into a religious shrine and retire our grad school debts by charging the pilgrims to get a look at Ruth's hands! The second was no less selfish but a little more paranoid: Oh, great. I'll be a footnote in the next edition of the Norton Anthology of Lit by Women: Stone bled to death while Moose agonized over her paradigm-shifting analysis of Sarah Orne Jewett's "An Autumn Holiday."

Then Moose got a grip. She asked Ruth a few questions and quickly ascertained that the poet, lacking health insurance, had likely been overdosing on aspirin to treat neck pain from a recent car accident. She had also been subsisting mostly on candy bars during the long bus trip from Vermont to Maryland. Moose figured the bleeding had to be a side effect of the aspirin and the diet. She fixed Ruth a sandwich and they spent the rest of the afternoon playing with the cats. That night's reading was a spectacular success. Strange postscript to the story: The Moms had a ratty old cloth couch back in those days. Ruth's hands left a couple of blood stains on the couch that never faded. Swear to dog, kids, those stains looked as fresh and bright on the day that couch was finally hauled out to the curb as they did on a sunny afternoon when America's most obscure great poet scared the bejesus out of a befuddled grad student.

Here are Ruth and Moose on a bench outside the Folger Shakespeare Library during that same visit. They had gone there with Goose to see an amazing exhibit of Marianne Moore materials from the Rosenbach Museum and Library's Moore archive:

And here are Ruth and Goose on the same bench:

Oh, dammit. Oh, death. Oh, dammit, indeed. Damn you, death, for taking those we love from our midsts. Damn you for leaving us with nothing but echoes, shadows, fading images of nearly forgotten selves.

But thank you, Ruth, for the gift of your friendship and the consolation of your far from ordinary words. Thank you and dogspeed.

OMG SHOEZ (Encore)!

2011-11-26T19:35:00.001-05:00

Everyone is doing post-Thanksgiving posts to announce that they survived the holiday and are back on the grid. Here's ours.

The Moms and the Carolina branch of the Moosians avoided the malls by watching movies yesterday. They caught a late-afternoon showing of George Clooney's new Hawaii-is-not-paradise-because-there-are-people-in-it flick, The Descendants, which you should totally see because Clooney does middle-aged learning through suffering better than anybody. The rest of the cast is splendiferous, too. Later, after a supper of yummy leftovers, the crew collapsed on the couch to watch (or re-watch) The Devil Wears Prada, because no holiday is complete without a Meryl Streep film, is it?

Anyway, you may recall that The Devil Wears Prada co-stars a lot of fairly impressive footwear. We mention this detail because today the Moms and the Older Sister of the Moosians went downtown to catch the lovely Degas show at the Phillips Collection (which we highly recommend for DC-area readers and visitors). Afterward, at Moose's behest, they popped over to Dupont Circle to do a little -- you guessed it! -- shoe shopping. Oh, dear. We think it may not have been fiscally prudent to turn Moose loose in a shoe store with visions of Miranda Priestly's contemptuous stare still dancing in her impressionable head. She came out with a pair of little black boots that are, by a long, long shot, the most expensive shoes she has ever owned. And yet, she tells herself, they are expensive, pretty, sensible shoes that I will wear for decades with pleasure and in comfort.

Of course you will, Moose. And you will be at the gym at sun up tomorrow, burning off all that pecan pie and the half dozen of your grandmother's glorious olives you couldn't resist over the course of the holiday. Whatever, Moose. A girl is entitled to her illusions. And every woman needs at least one pair of truly decadent little black boots in her life. Don't you agree, my pretties? Don't you and your inner Miranda Priestly emphatically agree?

(Photo Credit: Goose, 11/26/11)

[For previous shoe-related posts, go here and here. Yes, we know that shoe-blogging probably means we will never end up in The Chronicle of Higher Education blog network, but, well, we don't see too many dead dog blogs in that network anyway. Screw them, darlings -- We are here for you! Peace out.]

Happy Thanksgiving!

2011-11-24T09:23:00.001-05:00

Everyone in Roxie's World wishes you and yours the happiest Thanksgiving ever. This year, we are calling Thanksgiving "the Feast of the Liberation" to celebrate the fact that it was just about a year ago (November 30, 2010) that sweet little Ruby, the embodied dog of Roxie's World, was delivered from bondage in a puppy mill in Missouri and embarked on the course that would eventually lead to a posh, happy life with a couple of dog-crazy English profs. We've got a lot to be grateful for -- like you, for example! -- but this year, we are especially grateful to be dogg-ed again.

May your feasting be fabulous and not interrupted by waddling, pepper-spray-wielding cops. May you run out of fingers before all your blessings are counted. May you successfully avoid traffic and bad weather and the verb to shop in all its forms. May you dine on something as sumptuous as this and as sensible yet yummy as this.

Peace out, darlings. Enjoy your day. And don't take your -- or anyone's -- liberation for granted.

Image Doctoring, Without Photoshop

2011-11-22T09:25:00.001-05:00

Screen Caps of Actual University of California, Davis websites on the morning of November 22, 2011:

(The university's home page)

(The English department's home page)

The image mavens of Roxie's World have a healthy respect for the work of universities' marketing and communications divisions. For all our snarking about doublespeak and gutlessness on campus, we appreciate the challenges of creating identities for institutions of higher education and promoting them like crazy in the marketplace. (Seriously, kids -- The Moms have drawers full of QTU tee-shirts, and Moose has a Queer the Turtle sticker on her laptop. She came up with that slogan and fought hard for the right to use it. Don Draper's got nothing on Moose.)

Truth be told, we even respect the need to protect the brand/reputation of an institution during a moment of crisis -- which explains why my typist was frantically screen-capping these images of UC Davis websites this morning before they disappear. They strike us as particularly compelling examples of institutional communication in a context of crisis. A click on that "I'm Here to Apologize" bubble superimposed on the photo of Davis Chancellor Linda P. B. Katehi speaking yesterday at an assembly on the Quad takes you to an information-rich page that includes a gallery of high-quality photos from the rally as well as links to reports on the latest developments in the unfolding story (e.g., reaction from UC President Mark Yudof, announcement that campus police chief Annette Spicuzza has been placed on administrative leave while the pepper-spraying incident is being investigated). Sure, it's all butt-covering and strategery, but to our eyes the whole package does a decent job of reporting on events in a fairly neutral fashion. We give Davis credit for giving such prominence on the home page to Katehi's apology with a strong image that bumps all the happy talk off the screen. We're not sure the effort will save Katehi's job -- but then again that's probably not the goal. The aim here is to show that the institution is making a sincere effort to make amends for an outrageously over-the-top response to student protest. Katehi is, for the moment, the face of that institutional response. It seems appropriate to feature her in this fashion.

The English profs, dog love them, take a different tack, using the home page of the department's website to echo demands for Katehi's resignation and the disbanding of the campus police department. It's astonishing, really, in the age of top-down message management, to see such a powerful example of off-the-reservation communication. Paws up to you, lit critters, for using your website to go all righteous and truth-to-power-y in the midst of crisis. We appreciate your candor, and we wish we had time to go trolling around to see what other Davis departments are doing with their websites. But we don't, alas.

We also sincerely regret that we didn't screen cap Penn State's home page at the height of the Jerry Sandusky/Joe Pa nightmare, but if you look at that (badly designed) site now you'll see a lot of tepid gobbledygook about "moving forward." It may be harder to talk about allegations of child sex abuse than a rogue cop with a spray can, but we think Davis kicks Penn State's a$$ communications-wise in this instance. What do you think, darlings?

Oh, and if you still haven't gotten your fill of Photoshopped images of the Man With the Can, go here, where you will find things like this to brighten up your day:

Don't say we never gave you nothin', my pretties. Peace out.

The Man With the Can Goes Viral

2011-11-21T09:43:00.001-05:00

Quote of the Day:

A meme is born. Lieutenant John Pike is suddenly everywhere at once -- waddling through time and space with his little red can of pepper-spray.

Ridicule can be an effective revolutionary tool. But the cops still have the firepower so we can’t stop taking them seriously. But for the time being, this is some hilarious shit. -- Marc Campbell, Dangerous Minds

Every day, my typist wakes up and asks herself the same question: Are parody and pants-wetting laughter really adequate responses to the urgencies of our time?

Every night, she goes to sleep with essentially the same answer: Yes.

In that spirit of revolutionary ridicule, we pass along some more brilliantly doctored images of the (now suspended) UC Davis police officer whose creepily casual pepper spraying of peaceful student demonstrators has become fodder for a million intrepid Photoshoppers. (See yesterday's post for the image of Lieutenant Pike on a wickedly clever remake of the Davis website.) We regret that we are unable to give credit where it is due, because we picked most of these images up on Facebook, where things tend to circulate without attribution. Marc Campbell has been collecting and commenting on images on Dangerous Minds. Go here and here.

What's your favorite? Have you seen others? Send 'em our way, and we will update as we can. Busy day here in Roxie's World, but we'll do our best. Peace out.

Update (Noon): Of course, there's a Tumblr. Check it out.)

UC Davis Link Farm

2011-11-20T14:20:00.001-05:00

Offered Without an Iota of Schadenfreude. Not Even a Whiff. OK, Maybe the Tiniest Scintilla, From the Department of There But for the Grace of Photoshop Goes You:

(Image via.)

November 2011 seems on track to be the Worst Month Evah for higher ed administrators in the age of Excellence Without Money -- Or Decency. Or, It Appears, a Lick of Sense. First we had the catastrophic failure of leadership in the Penn State intergenerational "horseplay" in the shower scandal. Now the interwebs are on fire with video and commentary on an incident Friday at the University of California, Davis in which campus police in riot gear used pepper spray on students who were peacefully demonstrating in solidarity with Occupy Wall Street. The police were there on orders from Chancellor Linda Katehi, an engineer with impressive hair and, it seems, a bias against tents. No, wait, she has a bias against really bad publicity. Wevs, kids, she does have great hair. We're hoping she also has an up to date CV and a moving van on speed dial, just in case the chorus of calls for her resignation doesn't subside with news of investigations of the incident and suspensions of the spray-happy cops.

As a public service to our readers, we've collected some awesome bits of instant analysis by folks who are much better than we are at figuring things out while they are happening. We consider all of these must-reads for anyone who is wondering if Occupy Education has a serious shot at challenging the profoundly destructive set of values and management principles that have dominated campus administrations in recent years. And isn't that, like, everybody? Click away, dears, and get ready for the revolution. Here's hoping your campus is next -- and that your administrators will rise to rather than fall down upon the occasion.

Nathan Brown, "Open Letter to Chancellor Linda P.B. Katehi" (an untenured English prof calls on the chancellor of his campus to resign)
Michael Chorost, "The Turning Point: The Moral Example of UC Davis Students, and Occupy Wall Street" (a powerful reading of the video of the students being pepper sprayed and what it shows about "contempt from those in power and the wanton use of force against the powerless")
Cathy Davidson, "Why This is a Gettysburg Address Moment for Higher Education" (a passionate call upon university administrators to find the moral high ground and side with students fighting for their future and the future of higher ed)
Angus Johnston, "Ten Things You Should Know About Friday’s UC Davis Police Violence" (from a historian of American student activism)
Chris Newfield, "Links -- Special Sunday Edition" (fallout from the pepper spraying incident)
Bob Ostertag, "Militarization of Campus Police" (from another member of the Davis faculty)
Comment passed along but not authored by Gayatri Spivak, "On the UC Davis Mobilizations" (a brilliant reading of Chancellor Katehi's "Walk of Shame" after Saturday's news conference)
Kristin Stoneking, "Why I Walked Chancellor Katehi Out of Surge II Tonight" (a beautiful reflection from a campus minister who was called in to mediate between the students and the chancellor and who escorted Katehi from the building to her car [link is to a Facebook note -- not sure if non-FB folk will be able to access])

Below is the video of that long, silent walk, which is as powerful, eerie, and inspiring as others have said it is. Watching it, it's hard not to feel that something truly extraordinary is happening. Young people, who have such cause to lash out in anger, choose instead to summon the righteous power of nonviolence and silence. Katehi walks slowly past them with her elegant coif and her perfectly arranged scarf, her hands gracefully interlocked in front of her, giving her walk of shame something of the look of a perp walk. To her credit, Katehi does not avoid the gazes of the students seated along the edges of the sidewalk. She looks at them. You can imagine them, in the darkness, looking back at her. And in the mutuality of those gazes, you may dare to suppose that something decent might be born: the chance for genuine dialogue, collaboration, and transformation.

At least, that's the way it looks to us, from a few thousand miles away, on the Sunday night before Chancellor Katehi and all those students meet again, in the different light of Monday. Watch the vid and tell us what you see and think and imagine, my darlings. As always, we long to know.

(Here is a longer version of the vid that shows the couple of minutes before Katehi exited the building. The students use the human microphone to arrange the scene and clarify the plan. As the comment passed along by Spivak notes, this version "shows how deliberate and well orchestrated the silence was.")

[Post corrected to reflect that Gayatri Spivak was not the author of a letter previously attributed to her and published on trinketization.]

Seasonal Musings

2011-11-18T09:33:00.001-05:00

Are all gourds merely decorative, mother f_ckers? We ask, knowing full well that a butternut squash is not, technically speaking, a gourd, but, well, still, gourds and squashes are in the same family, according to noted botanical expert Wik E. Pedia, and we've had this butternut squash sitting out on the counter for weeks now, and Moose chortles to herself every time she catches a glimpse of it because it seems not terribly useful from a culinary standpoint, its thin neck not offering much in the way of squashy stuff, yet not entirely useless from other possible standpoints that one might imagine if, say, one's brain had been warped by overexposure to psychoanalytic theory in the course of one's training as a professional reader of texts -- or if one happened, on some long ago and probably drunken evening, to have heard a hilarious parody of "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" that culminated in the declaration that, "A thing's a phallic symbol if it's longer than it's wide, / As the id goes marching on!" (Melanie performs it here. Go on. We'll wait for you to listen.)

Anyhoo, darlings, it's the Friday before Thanksgiving, which means that my typist has a scholarly article to finish and 37 tabs open in her browser as she cruises the interwebs in search of just the right combination of decadence and point value for this year's Lifestyle-Adjusted holiday table. We'll close, therefore, by wishing you well on your own holiday planning, inviting you to let us know what you will be serving up this year, and showing you a picture of the aforementioned butternut squash so that you can help us to answer the burning question with which this post began:

Are all gourds merely decorative, mother f_ckers? Inquiring minds want to know. Peace out, and have a, um, stimulating Friday.

(Photo Credit: Moose, 11/18/11)

Half-Naked or Half-Dressed?

2011-11-17T09:08:00.000-05:00

Hillary Clinton burst out laughing the other day when a scantily clad fellow bearing a torch streaked behind her and Hong Kong Chief Executive Donald Tsang as they were posing for photos together in Hawaii. Her reaction is priceless -- an utterly spontaneous hearty guffaw, complete with a delighted clapping of hands. Ah, Madame Secretary, we still carry a torch for you. Thanks for lightening up a dull, gray, overloaded Thursday.

Watch the vid, kids. We bet your Thursday could use a little levity, too. Hang in there, and maybe we'll all get treated to a glimpse of a scantily clad something or other before the day is over. Peace out.

Penn State Link Farm

2011-11-11T13:21:00.001-05:00

(NB: If catching up on the Penn State scandal is part of your weekend plans, WaPo has a handy tick-tock story in today's paper that summarizes events since the release of the grand jury's indictments last Friday afternoon. The grand jury's report is here, but it is not for the faint of heart. Trigger warning for graphic details of child sexual abuse and men in positions of authority behaving badly.)

What can a humble dog blog say that hasn't already been said about the sordid news out of Penn State University this week about an alleged sexual predator protected and enabled for years by an athletics department and a university administration in thrall to a legendary coach and the economic power of big-time football? What do we see when we gaze at the seal of the neighboring school a few hours to the north and take American culture's latest Rorschach test?

Mostly, we see what others have seen:

Disturbing evidence that universities do a terrible job of handling sexual violence and harassment by responding to them as private, internal matters, as Tenured Radical points out in her excellent post on the scandal. Lesboprof also focuses on the administration's failure to notify police of what was obviously a criminal matter in a post that every college administrator on earth ought to read. Historiann weighs in briefly but generates a long and lively discussion thread full of thoughtful comments and good links in response to her point that the administrative failure in this case was gendered male, as all of the coaches, directors, university lawyers, and presidents whose actions protected the alleged predator rather than his young victims were men. Jennifer Doyle points out that laws that require universities to investigate and act upon allegations of sexual abuse or harassment have done little to change "the culture of silence" that serves to shame victims and enable perpetrators on campus.

Possible evidence, particularly in the pro-Paterno riots that occurred on the Penn State campus Wednesday night, of uniquely American forms of idiocy having to do with sports, idol worship, and other vulgar things. For that perspective, see Eric Wilbur, Jon Stewart, and Margaret Soltan, who focuses not on the riots but on the "stupidity" that overtakes a campus dominated by football. Of course, QTU is a school where "rioting" is as commonplace as plagiarism, so the Moms are a little less horrified by this particular behavior than others are. Gather a bunch of kids stirred up about something, bring in a few cops decked out in their Darth Vader costumes, get a couple of cameras rolling, and -- presto! -- you've got a riot on your hands. Still, we doubled over laughing at Andy Borowitz's somber announcement that the board of trustees at Penn State had responded to the rioting by replacing the entire 40,000-member student body with an interim student body: “After careful consideration, we decided we had to make a change,” said trustee Harley Manvers. “Hopefully, these interim students won’t be such jackasses.”

Y'all know we are fans of college sports here in Roxie's World. (Indeed, the Moms are washing tee-shirts and polishing up the pom-poms in preparation for the season's first trip to the Comcastle tomorrow, where they'll see if their beloved [and 11th-ranked!] Lady Terps can avenge last year's NCAA Tournament loss to Georgetown.) Nonetheless, we've grown increasingly concerned in recent years by the sense that the athletics sides of the campus in Division I schools are worlds unto themselves, operating by a different set of rules than the rest of us and not really accountable to anyone. To us, one of the most telling details in the Penn State saga is that President Graham Spanier and some members of the board had tried to get Joe Paterno to retire at the end of the 2004 season, and he refused. Joe Pa maintained a similarly arrogant "You are not the boss of me" attitude until the bitter end, as he announced Wednesday that he would retire at the end of this season and appeared to order the board of trustees not to spend "a single minute discussing my status." That seems to have been the last straw for the board, which announced his firing late that night.

Penn State's difficulty breaking up with Paterno reminded Moose of the Sturm und Drang that arose at her undergrad alma mater back in 2000 when the late Myles Brand, then president of Indiana University, fired the school's legendary basketball coach, Bob Knight. Sports Illustrated columnist Stewart Mandel noted that parallel in a post on the dangers of turning coaches into idols who answer to no one. Mandel argues that fans are partly to blame for what happened at Penn State, their worship encouraging Paterno's arrogance and his bosses' diffidence. Richard Vedder, in The Chronicle of Higher Education, considers possible solutions for the lack of accountability, including the radical yet intriguing idea that universities might "get out of the commercial intercollegiate business, perhaps by spinning off their athletic operations to separate for-profit companies (which could be sold to the public), largely erasing the fiction of the 'student athlete' that exists in the more commercial sports such as football and basketball."

We don't see big schools getting out of the sports business anytime soon, because, of course, the revenue and the brand buzz generated by athletics are desperately needed in the age of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC). In the end, for us, the many facets of this tragedy -- sexual coercion, catastrophic failures in oversight, rioting fans -- come together in a phrase that kept running through Moose's mind as she contemplated the events of this sad week. That phrase might be taken as the unspoken motto of the neoliberal university: Live by the brand, die by the brand. Jerry Sandusky was protected by his close, nearly forty-year association with Joe Paterno, who was not just a legend but the public face and foundation of the Penn State brand. Tarnish the brand, and the whole shaky financial edifice might come tumbling down. Such thinking encourages the diffidence and denial that appears to have been rampant among administrators in State College, including, it pains us to say, Graham Spanier, who has been one of the good guys of American higher ed for many years. We are sorry to see his tenure as president end on such a negative note.

Live by the brand, die by the brand: Bloomberg is reporting that Moody's Investors Service will look into downgrading Penn State's revenue-bond rating in view of the likelihood of "lawsuits, weaker student demand, decreased philanthropic support, changes in its relationship with the state, and management moves" in the wake of the scandal. Sometimes, it would appear, the most strenuous efforts to avoid reputational and financial risk end up producing precisely what they intended to avoid. That's worth keeping in mind, as we all seek to learn "the lessons of Penn State."

The Care and Feeding of Adjuncts

2011-11-04T13:45:00.001-04:00

Another Episode in the Unfolding Academic Melodrama We Call Excellence Without Money: Hard Times in Higher Ed

QTU has been in the throes of one of those periodic policy tizzies brought about when a ~~butt-covering~~ well-intentioned board of regents seeks to ~~appear to~~ address a problem by coming up with a one-size-fits-all solution and imposing it on a complex system of institutions of varying sizes and missions. (Let's call it the University System of Turtle Country.) The policy, as you might have guessed from the title of this post, has to do with the employment of adjunct faculty. The BOR approved a system-wide policy in December 2010 and charged institutions to come up with implementation plans by November 1, 2011, which explains the recent tizzy on the campus of QTU. (Oh, and the policy defines "adjunct" as a non-salaried, non-tenure-track member of the instructional faculty hired to teach specific courses and compensated on a course-by-course basis.)

Before we go any further, we will pause to remind you that this blog has a long history of opposing what our epic animated short feature, Excellence Without Money: The Movie, eloquently describes as "the wage slavery of adjunctification." We consider the slow but steady erosion of tenured and tenure-track positions and the accompanying rise of non-tenure-track and part-time positions to be one of the more disastrous results of the defunding of higher education that has occurred in recent decades. Our pal Tenured Radical describes wage stagnation and the shrinking of the tenure-eligible faculty as evidence of "the casualization of academic labor." In our view, students and institutions were better served by a system in which most of the instructional workload was shouldered by full-time, tenured or tenure-eligible faculty who had strong incentives to work hard and creatively in order to achieve job security and to be loyal to the department and school that offered it.

Nonetheless, that happy world is largely gone. (For the Modern Language Association's latest report on its disappearance, go here.) Adjunctification is not a temporary aberration but a permanent and defining feature of the brutish neoliberal university. Given that troubling yet inescapable fact, one would think that any serious effort to examine and address employment conditions for non-tenure-track faculty would be applauded by the bleeding heart tenured radicals of Roxie's World. For far too long, after all, avoidance and denial about what was happening to the academic workforce have kept us from acknowledging the explosive growth in a class of workers that are treated as the pack mules of academe. We largely ignored them, and we ignored the harsh and often humiliating conditions in which they worked.

In that respect, then, yes, the regents deserve credit for breaking an unconscionable silence and trying to set a baseline to assure that adjuncts throughout the system are treated with a modicum of professional respect. Many requirements of the new policy are laudable and, you know, humane, if you think access to a university e-mail account can be considered humane. Beyond the no-brainers (e.g., access to telephones, office supplies, and "appropriate space" for meeting with students during office hours), the policy mandates what are basically kill fees for classes that are canceled less than 30 days before the start of the semester if the adjunct contracted to teach the course can't be reassigned to a comparable course. The fee is just 10% of the contracted payment amount for the course, but that's enough to make departments think twice before canceling a class. Managing schedules and seats is a departmental responsibility, after all. Adjuncts shouldn't have to pay for someone else's poor planning.

So far, so bueno, right? How is it, then, you may be wondering, that this new policy ends up being tarred by this humble blog as an example of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC)? Easy peasy, my pretties. Aside from the kill fees, the policy delicately sidesteps the issue that makes the life of an adjunct so uniquely hellish: the shockingly low levels of compensation for work that institutions of higher education claim to value so highly. The policy's major statement on compensation is 100% weaselly: "Every effort should be made to make adjunct faculty compensation professionally appropriate and competitive to the extent allowed by available fiscal resources (emphasis added).

Curiously, the policy establishes a new class system among adjuncts, creating categories of "Adjunct Faculty I" and "Adjunct Faculty II" that sound a lot to us like the old plantation system's distinction between field slaves and house slaves. Adjunct II's (who become eligible for that category by establishing a consistent record of high-quality instruction over multiple semesters) would get priority consideration in teaching assignments (OK, so maybe it's more like a frequent flyer program than a plantation) and would be assured of making at least 10% more than the minimum per-course compensation rate at the institution. That sounds pretty decent, but, as it turns out, the Adjunct II designation would be available to almost no one on the QTU campus because of the way loads are calculated. (It's one of those boring, opaque questions of FTEs and other bureaucratic mysteries. Take our word for it, will you?)

But guess what would apply to all adjuncts, both field and house, and the units that employ them. Say it with us, darlings: PERFORMANCE EVALUATION! Yes, it's true. The new policy, in the interest, of course, of supporting professional development for adjunct faculty, requires units to develop procedures for evaluating adjunct faculty performance on a regular schedule. As QTU has moved toward implementation of the policy, the regents' somewhat vague call for procedures has been interpreted to require, not just class visits and student evaluations, but what amounts to a full-on teaching portfolio for every single adjunct. Individual instructors will be largely responsible for developing those portfolios, though the employing units will have lots of new work to do in terms of collecting documents and data and conducting/reporting on class visits. Moose is really looking forward to implementing this policy in her itsy-bitsy, teenie-weenie queer studies program, in which the turnover rate among adjuncts is so high that she fully expects to be conducting performance reviews for instructors who will likely have disappeared before she's even had a chance to read their heartfelt statement of teaching philosophy. Oh, the fun just never stops, does it?

Here's the thing, kids: We are not opposed to evaluation or professionalization of the adjunct workforce. We are, however, violently opposed to increasing the burden of work on adjuncts and the understaffed units that tend to employ them without meaningful increases in compensation or resources. New policies that create new work under the guise of assuring high quality and continuous improvement while blithely ignoring the not insignificant problem of available fiscal resources are, sadly, exactly what you would expect in the age of Excellence Without Money (™RW Enterprises, LLC). Such policies can only add to the stress and demoralization of everyone who has to hold up or jump through the new hoops established by them.

Tenured Radical recently called on her comrades in the academic blogosphere to "find a way to Occupy Education." We offer this post in support of that worthy cause. Write back and let us know what's happening on your campus with regard to the wage slavery of adjunctification. One step toward changing the world is acknowledging what's happening in your particular corner of it. So tell us what's happening ~~on your plantation~~ in your neck of the woods. We are eager, as always, to hear from you.

Ruby's First Halloween

2011-10-31T12:04:00.000-04:00

Miss Ruby tries on her hand-me-down wizard costume in preparation for her first night of greeting trick or treaters in Roxie's World:

Fits perfectly, don't you think? She has studied previous Halloween posts to get a sense of what this peculiar holiday is all about and why it requires her to cover up her pretty new haircut with a long cape that she will inevitably step on or wag off with her tail in the excitement of meeting throngs of young chocolate-seeking zombies and ghosts. She has taken my words to heart, though, and is ready to play her part in the festivities. "I love the little princesses and the animals and the girls with fangs and the one who explains she is 'the spirit of music,'" I declared in 2008, the last Halloween I was physically able to greet visitors. I went on to explain:

I love a festival of pretending to be something other than what you "are." I think that is a healthy exercise in stepping outside the usual order of things. I think it is good to try to know oneself in one's apart-ment, as Dickinson might have said.

As it was then, so it is now and ever shall be. Happy Halloween, darlings. Enjoy the dark side. Revel in your apart-ment. Just don't let your dogs eat chocolate. We'll be back soon with a blockbuster post on the theme of Excellence Without Money, but my typist, like all the other profs in the blogosphere, has a mountain of papers to grade and letters to write at the moment. Pray for her, please, as she endeavors to rid the world of comma-splices and mushy prose. Peace out.

Cocktails and Queries

2011-10-28T00:42:00.000-04:00

Oh, Googles, what would we do without you? Especially at the tail end of an exhausting teaching week, when brains are so scrambled you begin to worry that someone will mistake you for the latest entrant into the Republican presidential field. The Moms gave up on coherent thought early in the evening and headed over to a favorite local eatery for drinks and dinner. (That's Goose's extra dry martini in the photo on the left and Moose's kicky combo of champagne, St. Germain, and other cute ingredients on the right). Now they're vegetating in front of the World Series. My typist is cruising the interwebs in a desultory way and starts poking around in the keyword data on this blog's hit counter. Yeah, she finally says with a yawn, let's steal a page out of Nicole and Maggie's play book and do a Google Q&A post. I think I have enough brain power left to manage that. Boy, searchers are strange, but let's take a stab at answering some of the actual queries that have recently led readers to Roxie's World.

Q: how long does it take to get roxys out of your system

A: Oh, sweet pea, we don't know, but we don't think you should mess around with that $hit at all. You might consult this guy for advice. Or, if you are convinced Roxie's World is where you want to be, you might do a search here on the phrase "lifestyle adjustment" to get sensible but not obnoxious advice about healthy eating and nice things you can do to and with your body. Hint: Abusing Roxicodone is not on the list.

Q: which side of the army uniform does the name type go

A: Not sure, but I'll go out on a limb and say it's either the right or the left. (OK, it's right, but I bet the gayz will change that, don't you?)

Q: Picture of a white person hugging a asian tranny

A: Incredibly, somehow in the nearly 6-year history of this humble dog blog devoted to politics, pop culture, and basketball, we have failed to publish a single photograph of a white person hugging an Asian tranny. We apologize for the oversight and wish to assure readers that our crack team of interweb image trollers will seek to rectify the situation as quickly as possible. But, you know, it may not be easy. Please bear with us.

Q: refrigerator eats socks

A: Of course it does, darling, and our microwave belches occasionally. You worry about a refrigerator if and only if something smells or there's a puddle of water on the floor. Otherwise, close the door and walk away.

Q: yes we can parody

A: Yes, you can -- and you should. Parody makes life better.

Q: gay stupid album covers

A: Oh, so many to choose from, but start here.

Q: expression of people being kind

A: Not quite sure what you're getting at here, but I've always thought this guy's face had just about the kindest expression I've ever seen. Kindness, compassion, and a playfulness that always makes my typist smile. Even if he isn't what you were searching for, you probably won't mind stumbling across him in the overcrowded emptiness of cyberspace.

Sweet dreams, my pretties. Game 6 is finally over, so it's time for bed. Peace out.

Impossible Demands

2011-10-23T22:08:00.002-04:00

Judith Butler speaks at Occupy Wall Street, her voice amplified by the human microphone of the assembled crowd. On the one hand, it's an academic wet dream: We all wish the masses sounded as smart and decent as Judith Butler, and it's intoxicating to see that fantasy actualized for three minutes and forty seconds. On the other hand, in desperate times, a wet dream is at least a dream, and perhaps a dream is what is needed to begin to move the 99% out of sleep, silence, paralysis, despair -- or whatever it is that has kept us so passive so long in the face of so many urgencies and obscenities, so much inequality, so little courage or kindness on the part of our leaders, even those who have claimed to be on the side of hope.

If hope is an impossible demand, Butler declares, then we demand the impossible. Amen. Watch the vid.

Funny how Butler takes that word hope, so drained of meaning by its overuse in the last presidential election, and makes it the linchpin of her response to those who have complained that OWS has no clear or reasonable set of goals, isn't it? And by funny we mean of course genius. Hope is a demand, not a slogan, and it arises from bodies in the street, voices on the square, in an eruption of popular will. David Axelrod wouldn't recognize it if he tripped over it.

To be honest, we don't know what we think of OWS yet. We haven't watched it closely enough to have a very clear sense of what it really means or where it might go. We passed a small Occupy Baltimore encampment when we were in town for the American Studies Association convention this weekend, but we didn't stop to check it out or get especially excited by the organization's statement of solidarity with the movement. (Sorry -- We've seen too many feel-good resolutions passed by academic orgs over the years to put much stock in such gestures.) On the other hand, we were moved and inspired by our dear friend Priscilla Wald's presidential address at the convention, which wove a brilliant tapestry of disciplinary, organizational, and cultural history into a passionate call for new stories that would more accurately and compellingly capture the realities of twenty-first century American life.

Another impossible demand? Perhaps, but again: Amen. Sometimes, you demand the impossible just in getting your a$$ out of bed in the morning, but you have to get up in order to make anything happen, don't you, darling? So do it, OK? Demand the impossible. Judith Butler wants you to, and you don't want to disappoint Judith. Peace out.

Weighty Matters, Again

2011-10-21T09:43:00.001-04:00

Suddenly this whole body politic thing has gotten kind of literal. A couple of weeks ago, the nation's pundits briefly obsessed over whether New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie was too fat to be president, for which they were roundly -- get it? -- chastised by this here. blog. Now, Missouri Sen. Claire McCaskill is getting body-policed from the other direction. McCaskill recently took off fifty pounds and used Twitter -- cleverly, in our opinion -- as part of her weight-loss plan. She announced to her nearly 60,000 followers in May what her goals were and used the social media tool as a means of holding herself publicly accountable to them. On October 8, McCaskill proudly tweeted that she had reached her goal weight. Thursday in Jezebel, Erin Gloria Ryan declares herself "happy for [McCaskill] for doing what she set out to do," but says that she finds it "depressing that the standard by which women measure our fitness is still the number on a scale." Ryan continues:

It's dismaying that we still feel like we need to announce shamefully to the world when we believe that we have become too large, and then return to proudly tell world when we become tinier, and that we reflexively feel compelled to tell other women when we've noticed that they have shrunk. Stop it, ladies. Stop it right this second.

The headline on the column is, "Can We Please Stop Setting Weight Loss Goals?"

Ryan makes a good point. "Weight alone is not an indicator of health." True. There are plenty of other numbers one ought to consider -- blood pressure, cholesterol, glucose levels -- to get an accurate picture of overall health. It's also true that the kind of public scrutiny of her body that McCaskill invited is a double-edged sword. Such scrutiny and the harsh set of judgments that goes along with it is, as Ryan notes, a major source of the pressure women feel "to become ever smaller."

As you might suspect, however, the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World does not find Sen. McCaskill's story of public, socially mediated weight loss depressing or troubling, no matter how much she might agree with aspects of Ryan's analysis. Moose, who at times has used this blog as an embarrassing or inspiring (po-tay-toh, po-tah-toh) public record of her own adventures in re-contouring a middle-aged body, had this to say in response to the story: "60,000 followers? Little Lord Jeebus, I'd kill for 60,000 followers! Apparently, senators are connectivity nodes, whereas English profs are just, um, nerds."

Here's the thing, kids: The number on the scale is one among many numbers you should consider when you are evaluating your health and fitness, but sometimes, you know, losing weight is a reasonable goal, no matter how steeped the culture is in misogyny and fat-shame. If you set your sights on losing weight, you should use whatever tools are available to help you do so. And if you are a woman and a public figure, your body is going to get scrutinized and analyzed and judged every day of your life no matter what you do. (See, for example, Clinton, Hillary Rodham: cankles, cleavage, hair, weight, wrinkles.) We admire Sen. McCaskill for using social media and her status as a public figure to help her achieve a goal and to frame proactively the story of her weight loss rather than soldiering along on her treadmill waiting for the inevitable questions and comments to start. Hers was a risky strategy that could easily have backfired if she hadn't succeeded or if she were less adept in the art of the Twitters. She'd have been labeled a fat old broad trying desperately to look cool. In comments to CBS News, McCaskill shows that she was well aware of the risks but also savvy about how Twitter fits into a postmodern pol's communications strategy -- and her Lifestyle Adjustment Program:

My Twitter account -- I look at it as a way for people in Missouri to see the whole picture. I tweet about my kids. Yesterday, I tweeted about how happy I was that my daughter said she had cleaned her apartment all day. I think it's important for people to see that I've got the same kind of problems and challenges that everybody else does and, obviously, for a woman in her 50s, figuring out how to stay in shape with a really hectic schedule is a big part of everybody's daily struggle in my state and, I think, all across the country.

Along the way, McCaskill posted clever tweets about her progress, including a dramatic announcement about having divorced bread and pasta, which inspired her legions of followers to weigh in, as it were, with menu suggestions, advice, and helpful reinforcement. The senator still hopes to rekindle her relationship with carbohydrates, thinking it might work out on an occasional rather than a daily basis as she shifts her focus to maintaining her weight loss.

To which the Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World replied, in precisely 140 characters:

@clairecmc, I recently broke up w/ potatoes, but carbs, in moderation, CAN fit into a sensible diet. Meet my new pal, butternut squash. Yum!

A hearty PAWS UP to you, Sen. McCaskill. The women of Roxie's World salute your effort, your good humor, and your smart use of social media as a way of sharing your experience and crowd-sourcing the challenges of eating well and getting fit while working hard for the fortunate citizens of the Show-Me State. We wish you well in your ongoing commitment and sincerely hope that Santa brings us a treadmill to aid in our own efforts to balance health with busyness.

What do you think, kids? Are we missing something in not being depressed or concerned by McCaskill's story, blinded by self-interest as we may be on this issue? Is Ryan fair in raining on the parade by harping on the compulsion women (and, sometimes, non-women) feel to publicly declare that they have become too large and then proudly announce that they are thinner, better, healthier people? Is there a way to acknowledge and address that problem without dissing McCaskill -- or, you know, my humble, recently overweight typist?

As always, darlings, we eagerly await and rely upon your wisdom. Meantime, someone is off for a quick run before a meeting and a trip to Baltimore to see a few thousand friends (including, at long last, Tenured Radical, with whom the Moms shall [decadently!] dine this evening). A happy Friday to you and yours. Peace out.

Better Homes?

2011-10-15T15:46:00.000-04:00

(Photo Credit: Moose, 10/8/11, in the Land of the Moosians.)

Apologies for the prolonged radio silence, kids. It's been a ridiculously busy week in Roxie's World. It's also been a stressful, emotionally draining week for Moose in particular. She spent last weekend in her native state, working with her three siblings to get the Mother of the Moosians ready to transition from independent living in Indiana to assisted living in Michigan, close to the Little Sister of the Moosians. MOTM turned 80 this summer and outfoxed lung cancer earlier this year, but she has short-term memory impairments that make it hard for her to remember little things like when the movers are coming and bigger things like, oh, participating in the decision to move to Michigan.

We'll pause briefly while you apply your considerable brain power to imagining some of what we are not saying here about time, change, the delicate dance of family relationships, the terror in the eyes of someone increasingly trapped in an archipelago of disconnected moments. When are they coming? Who will take me? Where is my medicine? Would you like that necklace? Why are you packing the silver away? When are they coming? Who will take me . . . ?

Perhaps a longer pause is in order. My typist is weary. Her heart is full. In her head, she hears the aching tenderness of Chris Colfer's cover of "I Want to Hold Your Hand," which Glee's Kurt sang last season when his father, his only surviving parent, had a heart attack.

When are they coming?

The cookbook in the photo above transitioned, too, making its way from a shelf in MOTM's kitchen to one in Roxie's World. This was the cookbook of Moose's childhood, the battered tome that figured into a 2009 post on the culinary history of the Moms and the United States. A close look at the book's helpful guide to meal planning perhaps explains why Moose found it necessary to break up with potatoes as part of her recent Lifestyle Adjustment Program. You'll notice there ain't a lot of whole-grain variety in the list of starchy foods in that third column in from the left:

Moose has agreed to take on the role of family archivist, because that is what English profs and history geeks do in their families, being useless when it comes to things like managing finances and figuring out which asthma inhalers are full and which are empty. She came home with several recipe boxes and books, including one from her maternal grandmother that goes back to at least 1937. She also is getting custody of file boxes full of family photos, letters, and documents. She already has her parents' college yearbooks, her grandmother's high school diploma, and her father's certificate of baptism. Still to come are the scrapbooks she loved to look at as a child, mostly because they included the earliest photographs of her own tiny self, cradled in the fleshy arms of that same grandmother who graduated from high school in 1923 for "intellectual attainments and correct deportment."

Having spent part of the winter of 2010 digitizing me after my untimely demise, Moose now seems on track to digitize the entire famille Moosianne. Assuming she isn't overcome by the dust or doesn't end up lost in a labyrinth of words, images, and memories. Which is, you know, pretty likely. Stay tuned.

When are they coming? When are they coming? Soon, Mama, soon, and I promise it will be all right. I know it's scary, but we've taken care of everything. Before you know it, you'll be settled into the new place, and everything will be fine.

When . . . ?

On the Death of Steve Jobs

2011-10-07T09:50:00.000-04:00

When news broke the other evening that ~~computer overlord~~ Apple visionary Steve Jobs had died, Moose quickly posted to Facebook:

RIP Steve Jobs. I think we should all go out on our porches and hold our iPhones up to the sky.

Thus, she was pleased to stumble across this photo on the New York Times website:

(Photo Credit: Tomohiro Ohsumi, Bloomberg News, via.)

She was also for some reason deeply moved to read that among the memorial tributes being left to Jobs outside his Palo Alto, CA home were a pile of apples with one strategically removed bite. Sometimes, only metonymy will do. (At least we think that's what the gesture is, rhetorically speaking. That part of our brains is a little rusty, but our highly capable research assistant Wik E. Pedia seems to agree with us on this point.) Bonus bit of poignancy: Jobs died at the height of apple season. There's a lot of apple eating going on. Every crunchy bite is, by a postmodern logic of transubstantiation through branding, a way of remembering Him.

Please note: We're not being sacrilegious or snarky, kids. This post is being typed on a MacBook Pro. This humble blog is full of images snapped on an iPhone 3G that will soon be replaced by an iPhone 4S that Moose has decided to buy as a way of saying, "Apple, we still believe. Also, dammit, we want to have a voice assistant and a video camera in our back pockets at all times."

My typist suspects she might never have become a blogger had Apple products not totally transformed her relationship to technology. The computer was nothing more than a glorified and often baffling typewriter until the day Goose brought a new Mac home from school and gave Moose permission to play with it while she went off to take a shower. Twenty minutes later, Moose had made her first iPhoto slideshow. That was the day she became a Mac person, having experienced for herself what folks meant when they rhapsodized about how intuitive the machines were and how perfect they were for working with images. In less than twenty minutes, she got it and has never looked back.

Our good friend Cathy Davidson offers a marvelous tribute to Jobs that also acknowledges the dark side of the company he built: the shut-down nature of its products, its dependence on sweatshop labor to produce all those shiny, happy toys. It's important to acknowledge that dark side, even as we celebrate the creativity and connectivity Jobs both embodied and enabled. Davidson ends her post with a quotation from Jobs' famous Stanford commencement address. There's a reason the 2005 speech is famous, and we can't think of a better way to conclude these too brief remarks on a guy who transformed the world and left it far too soon:

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure -- these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

You are already naked: Indeed, you are, my pretties, and time is short. Carpe diem -- and, for dog's sake, have an Apple today.

The Apparently Unbearable Un-Lightness of Chris Christie

2011-10-02T21:23:00.000-04:00

Newsflash: NJ Gov. Chris Christie is still fat -- and it is driving some people right over the edge of decency and sense.

Consider this a postscript or an update to the post we did Friday on the heaping helping of fat hatred the Washington Post dished up in its coverage of speculation about whether Christie would enter the 2012 presidential race. Somehow, in our careful research for that post, we managed to overlook the truly appalling display of fat eliminationism posted on Bloomberg earlier in the week by Michael Kinsley (H/T). I kinda hate linking to the Kinsley piece, but it seems important to let you see for yourselves just how comfortable he is asserting that a public servant's size is in and of itself disqualifying for higher office. Why? Well, Kinsley says, because being overweight shows a lack of discipline, and "a presidential candidate should be judged on behavior and character, not just on policies." Also, presidents set an example for the people they lead and serve as a symbol for the U.S. around the world. Fat people make bad symbols -- unlike, you know, torturers and obstructors of justice.

Here's the thing, kids: We're not wild about the term "fat eliminationism," which feels designed to shut down any kind of conversation about weight's relationship to overall health. We think those conversations need to occur. In this instance, however, the term is appropriate, because Kinsley is so unbelievably harsh and unabashed in his judgments. He has no qualms about insisting that fatness is disqualifying at the presidential level, blithely asserting that even fat people hate fat people ("Most overweight people hope to be thin eventually.") and that Christie could lose weight if he put his mind to it ("Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction.").

The Recently Overweight Person of Roxie's World has a message for Michael Kinsley: Shut the frack up. What in dog's name made you think this was a column worth posting? It is worse than worthless as political analysis, dripping as it is with a mean-spiritedness, condescension, and -- there is no other word for it -- hatred toward those whose size you deem to be excessive. It offers nothing of value to our understanding of either politics or health. You are not a doctor, and you don't seem to have direct knowledge of Chris Christie's metabolism or genetic makeup. The last thing fat people need is one more finger-wagging thin person telling them that if they are not willing to lose weight they should just get their fat bodies out of sight. Mr. Kinsley, you are so not helping people of any size with this kind of clap-trap. So, well, you know . . .

(Image via.)

Weighty Matters

2011-09-30T13:16:00.000-04:00

Funny:

(Stephan Pastis, Pearls Before Swine, 9/30/11, via)

Unfunny:

(Washington Post, 9/30/11, A19)

Double Plus Unfunny:

(Washington Post, 9/30/11, A16)

Look, kids, we're no fans of NJ Gov. Chris Christie, the tough-talking Republican who may or may not enter the presidential race. (That sad, squeaky sound you hear is the air going out of Texas Gov. Rick Perry's balloon.) We agree with esteemed Garden State political pundit Bruce Springsteen that Christie's tax cuts have had a devastating impact on the poor and the lower middle class, and we think the last thing the country needs is one more foaming-at-the-mouth tax hater.

Nonetheless, shame on WaPo for the double dose of fat hatred in this morning's coverage of Christie. Yes, the governor's size is notable and possibly newsworthy, in that his obesity could create health problems that would interfere with his ability to serve. Eugene Robinson notes in the column we screen-capped above that Christie was hospitalized this summer for asthma, a condition that can be worsened by obesity, and that the governor himself has acknowledged that his "weight exacerbates everything." A candidate's health is a legitimate issue, and Robinson is generally careful to frame his remarks in those terms. However, his snarky ending -- "I’d just like to offer [Christie] a bit of unsolicited, nonpartisan, sincere advice: Eat a salad and take a walk." -- along with the punny headline and the photo of the portly gov and the skinny-as-a-rail prez, tips the scales, as it were, in the direction of fat hatred. Especially when you consider that just three pages earlier Al Kamen's "In the Loop" column had run a very similar Christie/Obama photo to illustrate a few short pun-filled paragraphs aimed at "sizing up Gov. Christie's chances," as the headline on the web version of the story put it.

Sizing up: Get it? Belt-tightening: Hilarious, yes? A fitting time: Harharharharhar! The biggest loser: OMG, I am ROFL!

OK, technically, I am not ROFL. I am dead, and my typist is banging her head on the laptop screen thinking it's probably not just fat-hating and mean but also politically unwise of Dems and the so-called liberal media to start chortling and finger-pointing and making fun of the Wide Man who might want the Thin Man's job. A broad -- get it? -- section of the electorate is overweight, underpaid, and hopping mad right now. And lots of folks seem to be under the impression that the Thin Man may be something of a lightweight -- get it? -- when it comes to the brutal business of running the country. If this election turns on questions of physique, Obama's thinness may not be as much of an asset as the salad-eating media seem to imagine it will be.

Our advice and fervent hope? We wish good health to the governor of New Jersey, and we dream of a media mature enough to keep the focus on the truly weighty -- get it? -- matters facing the country.

Because, you know, their track record in that regard is. so. impressive.

OMG SHOEZ!

2011-09-27T18:26:00.000-04:00

File this one under, It Isn't Even October Yet, and I Know It's Going to Be One of Those Semesters:

(Photo Credit: Moose, on the campus of QTU, 9/27/11)

Moose had an 11 o'clock meeting this morning down in the Main Administration building at QTU -- you know, where such lofty personages as the president, the provost, and several dozen vice presidents of this or that extremely important thing ~~nibble away at what's left of the soul of the institution~~ do their extremely important work. Per usual, Moose was just a teensy bit late because she had spent the morning ~~trying for the eleventy billionth time to figure out the new Facebook feed system~~ rereading the beginning of Orlando for today's trans lit class. While getting dressed, she pulled an old pair of shoes out of the back of the closet, thinking they might look nicer with today's snazzy new outfit than her default work shoes. (Moose 2.0: She eats less and shops more.) She put them on and thought, "Oh, yes, much better than the clogs, comfy as those are." Away she went, feeling that extra little bounce a girl gets in her step when clothes and shoes are in happy harmony and every hair is more or less in place.

You know where this is going, don't you? Walk with Moose, as she makes her way down the long mall that comprises the bucolic heart of the QTU campus. It's a humid morning, so within a few minutes the good hair begins to wilt. Much more distressing, however, is that by the time she reached the bottom of the hill leading to the administration building, the bounce in Moose's step had become an awkward flap, flap, thud. She looked down and realized with horror that the heel of one of her shoes had come off. A small light flicked on in the back of her middle-aged mind. Oh, she thought, perhaps those shoes had been shoved to the back of the closet for a reason. Well, crap, now what? I still have to get to this %$&*#($ meeting! She picked up the broken heel, stuffed it in a bag, and hobbled into the meeting several minutes late. She greeted her assembled colleagues, pulled her phone and reading glasses out of her bag, and began -- surreptitiously yet frantically -- texting Goose, who, she hoped, was still at home. URGENT! she typed, hoping to grab her busy partner's attention.

Long story short: An hour or so later, as Moose trudged unevenly back up toward the English department, the heel on her other shoe started to come away from her shoe. Happily, halfway up the hill, she met Goose, who grinned and handed her the comfy and exceptionally durable clogs she should have put on in the first place. They chatted briefly, then Goose went down the hill to teach her class and Moose went up it to finish preparing for hers. Crisis averted, thanks to the miracle of modern communications technology and the incredible convenience of being a dual-career couple with the good fortune to be employed at the same institution.

Moral of the story? We believe Mr. David Cassidy put it best when he sang, in 1971, "I'll meet you halfway, that's better than no way." So true, Mr. Cassidy, so true. In life, love, and, um, footwear. Thank you, Goose, for saving the day. And you, my pretties? What's the takeaway for you in this amusing little slice of domestic/professional life? Wear sensible shoes, of course, and recognize that being well-heeled is not just a figure of speech. Peace out, darlings, and have a pleasant, meeting-free tomorrow.

Empire State of Love

2011-09-23T11:33:00.000-04:00

The Moms are about to catch a train for a big gay wedding up in the Big Apple this weekend. They also managed to snag a pair of tix to the hottest show in town, The Book of Mormon, so Moose is, like, you know, over the moon with excitement.

Our pal Julie, who's getting hitched, confessed on Facebook to having some difficulty writing her vows. Let's help her out, kids. What should a girl promise her girl as she publicly, legally commits to hanging in with her until the last dog dies? When the Moms stood up together in 1989 for their (not legal in any state) practically a wedding ceremony, Moose promised Goose a joke a day for the rest of her life. That's worked out pretty well, and it totally avoided all that pesky, bummer-inducing crap about sickness and death.

Leave your suggestions for Julie's vows in comments, darlings, and have a lovely, if soggy, weekend. Meanwhile, we'll play the girls off with a bit of relationship advice from Mr. Bruce Springsteen (who turns 62 today!) and the E Street Band. Here's a lovely version of "If I Should Fall Behind," which really tells you everything you need to know about what it takes to hang in with someone over the long haul. It all boils down to patience and compassion, doesn't it? If I mess up -- and I will -- bear with me. If I lose my way, don't lose faith. I will find my way home -- to you, to me, to us.

Should we lose each other in the shadow of the evening trees
I'll wait for you
And should I fall behind
Wait for me

Peace out, lovebirds.

Monday Night Link-O-Rama

2011-09-19T23:22:00.000-04:00

Quote of the Day: "Being an English major prepares you for impersonating authority" -- Garrison Keillor. Yes, it was that kind of day.

Latest Indication That Our Children Is Not Learning: SAT reading scores reach record low. Is kids to blame? Um, no.

Funnest Thing the Teacher Has Picked Up So Far in This Semester's Trans Lit Course: CISSEXUAL Prince Harry plans to be the first Royal to boldly go into space -- and even wants to enter NASA training. Trannies do too have a sense of humor!

Oh, So That's Why All Our Pals in the Midwest Are Switching to G-Mail: Proposed e-mail policy at U of Illinois gets knickers in wad.

Latest Proof That Eating Conscientiously Does Not Mean Giving Up Comfort Food: Cooking Light's makeover of Mac & Cheese -- with butternut squash. It's the meal you will make every time the forecast calls for snow this winter. It's the reason you will tune into the weather every evening praying there will be snow in the forecast. It's the reason you will soon regret every meal you ever ate that did not include butternut squash. And, you know, moderate amounts of gruyère, pecorino, and parmesan cheese.

Most Amusing Search Phrase That Led More Than One Reader to This Blog Recently: "what to wear in new york during summer for a wedding in city hall same sex." I know, I know, darlings: Social change is discombobulating. Aim for comfort and style. Even the dykes have gone snazzy now that we've all figured out we could end up hosting the Emmys. You will just have to cope.

That's all for now, kids. Both moms are already howling about what a crazy week it is, and the teaching part of it hasn't even started yet. Wevs. No matter how busy you are, don't forget to raise a paw to the long overdue demise of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, which officially lapses at midnight tonight. Let us know if you run out and join the Army, will ya? We love a girl -- or guy! -- in uniform. Peace out, y'all, and, you know, Semper Fi.

Here's a shot of that yummy casserole to help ease the pain of your work week.

(Photo Credit: Moose, 9/18/11)

Ten Years and a Day (or Two)

2011-09-13T18:47:00.000-04:00

Or, Why We Failed to Blog the Tenth Anniversary of 9/11

Like our good friend Keguro, we have been "trying not to write" about what happened in the United States and in our neighborhood ten years ago Sunday. (Go read that post. Keguro is in Kenya right now and reflects eloquently on how location affects memory and on how the events of that day transformed foreignness in the U.S.) Tenured Radical kindly invited us to participate in creating a bloggy archive of 9/11 posts that she set up over at her place, but we failed to produce anything for the actual day.

A major factor in our muteness was simply shortage of time. The Moms were on the road this past weekend at a family wedding and didn't get settled back to home, hearth, and happy dog until late Sunday evening. The 9/11 anniversary was a focus of some conversation during the festivities, part of the way that long lost cousins reestablished bonds and a sense of what time and adulthood had made of folks once known primarily as fellow occupants of the kids' table at holiday gatherings. Still, most of the talk was happy, as suited the occasion: How's that brother of yours? . . . . I'd like you to meet my second husband. . . . . Holy crap, Mom's on the dance floor! . . . . Do come by for breakfast tomorrow before you take off, OK? We'd love to spend some more time with you. Oh, and there was a certain amount of commentary on Moose's weight loss and the girlie-girl ensemble she wore to the wedding. We'll give you just the smallest peek and trust you to imagine the rest:

(Photo Credit and Pedicure: Baby Sister of the Moosians, 9/10/11)

(Yes, we feel a little weird about putting that photo in a post even tangentially related to 9/11, but, well, some of the most serious bloggers we know post regularly about shoez, darn it, so indulge us just this once, will you?)

Another reason for our muteness in regard to the anniversary is that we did a commemoration post in 2008 that recounted the story of 9/11/01 in Roxie's World -- Moose at home, watching the horror unfold on TV, convinced when the Pentagon was hit that World War III had started and was practically in our ridiculously large backyard; Goose on campus, responsible for a work group comprised chiefly of students, ordered by the campus administration not to leave until the students were gone. That story and the feelings it elicits in us have not changed. It remains true that "the unimaginable can happen on an achingly beautiful autumn morning. The world can change in an instant. Individual lives can be lost, shattered, or merely transformed. And all you can say [by way of comfort] is, 'I know.'" What more needs to be said by a humble dog blog typed by a distracted English prof? Nothing, perhaps, but indulge us a little longer.

Moose could not bear to watch the few glimpses of the anniversary coverage she happened to catch on TV over the weekend. It was too much, she said, and it brought up too much sorrow, not only for what was lost on that beautiful morning ten years ago but for all the tragedies and nightmares unleashed in the wake and too often in the name of that morning. The visuals were just too intense. In the car, though, on the way to and from the wedding, the Moms kept the radio tuned to NPR and so heard much of its coverage, made bearable, perhaps, by the soothing voices and the absence of high-definition images of the World Trade Center towers gently -- or so it looks, in slow motion -- sinking to the ground.

And so it was that on their way out of town on Friday afternoon they happened to hear a story about the extraordinary efforts to rebuild and reopen the damaged section of the Pentagon within a year after the attacks. In the middle of the story, which featured Walker Lee Evey, a modest, genial-sounding fellow who managed the reconstruction project, they glanced out the car window and realized they were driving past -- the Pentagon. They marveled at that weird bit of synchronicity and went on their way. On the return trip Sunday evening, they listened to a selection of StoryCorps' 9/11 tributes and recollections. The stories are captivating, of course, recording with gut-wrenching specificity the individuality of lives lost and survivors struggling to carry on. They listened intently to one particularly powerful account by Beverly Eckert, whose husband Sean Rooney spoke to her for more than 30 minutes from the 105th floor of the World Trade Center until the collapse of the building cut off the call and his life. As Eckert's narrative ended, the dulcet-voiced reporter picked up the story -- with the tragic update that Eckert, who became a prominent advocate for those affected by the attacks, was killed in a plane crash in 2009 while flying to an event to honor her late husband. Both Moms gasped as they took in that painful detail, and as they struggled to absorb it the car rounded a curve -- and there again, across several ribbons of highway and in the soft light of a sweet late-summer evening, was the Pentagon.

The Pentagon is about ten miles from the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC. Going south from Roxie's World, it's the first clear sign that a trip is underway, as the federal city and its monuments fade from view. Coming north, it means, Hooray, we're nearly home! One part of our household's 9/11 narrative that didn't make it into the 2008 post is that, on the weekend after the attacks, the Moms felt moved to get in the car and drive down to see the damaged building. It felt necessary and appropriate to do so. They are hardly fans of the military-industrial complex, though Moose has always admitted that in the aftermath of the attacks she took comfort in the sounds of fighter jets constantly passing over the house. In any case, they needed to see for themselves the appalling gash in the massive building, smell the smoke from the barely extinguished fires. They were hardly alone in that impulse. The highway was packed with vehicles that slowed to a crawl as they approached the Pentagon.

Others have written about experiencing 9/11 at some distance from the attacked places. (See, for example, Historiann's comment on TR's post.) The Pentagon is different from the World Trade Center in being geographically separate from its surroundings and in being not a relatively open center of commerce but a closed space designed to be hard to access and even, in some ways, to see. These are points made in a thoughtful piece by Marc Fisher in WaPo a couple of weeks ago on why and how it is that public memory of the 9/11 attacks focuses almost exclusively on New York, with only nominal attention paid to the Pentagon (or Shanksville, PA, for that matter).

"[T]he story of 9/11 has become overwhelmingly a New York story," Fisher notes. He goes on to explore this imbalance by acknowledging the many factors that have given rise to it, including the scale of the losses at the different locations, the lack of video of the plane hitting the Pentagon, the building's architecture and its physical remoteness from its surroundings, and a military culture that favors secrecy and efficiency over openness and prolonged public debate over how to honor the victims of the attacks. Fisher writes without rancor about the skewing of public memory toward New York, refusing to enter into an unseemly game of comparative suffering, but his point should raise concern for those who are interested in having as full and accurate a record as possible of the attacks and their impacts.

The military may not be comfortable having such a devastating assault on the symbolic and actual center of American power be a part of public memory, but the rest of us should insist upon it. The Moms have lived in the Washington area for a quarter century now. Nothing in all those years compares to those terrible hours of uncertainty when the Pentagon was burning and rumors swirled of bombs on the grounds of the Capitol. If history "requires the assembling and collation of memory," then Washington stories, too, must be brought into the account. The Pentagon was on fire. My friend could see the flames from her office window. Goose went to Taco Bell on her way home from campus late in the afternoon because neither of us had eaten. I stayed in my bathrobe and watched TV for 16 hours. In the family calendar she faithfully maintains for the household, Goose wrote on September 11, 2001, simply: "The saddest day." That weekend, we drove down to Arlington and went slowly by the Pentagon. We rolled down the windows and could smell the smoke. I don't remember what we said or if we said anything at all. That was a sad day, too.

(Photo Credit: Bob Houlihan, US Navy, via)

The Day I Became a Dog

2011-09-07T11:10:00.000-04:00

Our big question: When will Ruby speak? Stay tuned.
--Tenured Radical, 8/28/11

Roxiom 1: Dogs, like people, are different from each other. Even dogs of the same breed, who share many of the same physical characteristics and behavioral tendencies, may be so different from one another as to seem like all but different species.

With dogs as with people, therefore, one who would enter into significant relationship -- who would, in short, fall in love -- must assume nothing in advance about what the beloved critter will prove to be or do in any given circumstance. Past relationships with similar critters will be of limited value and can in fact be detrimental to forming an understanding of a new dog if one is forever comparing the one to the other. Every sentence that begins, But [our last dog] [loved this] [hated that] [always did this] [never did that] -- , is an insult to the unique and perfect incarnation of doggedness standing before you, ready and eager to love and be loved for and as itself.

Dogs are different from each other. The differences may arise from that vague yet powerful place known as temperament. Some dogs are alpha, others simply are not. Some are willful and aggressive, others are inclined to be docile. Some love water, others fear it when they fear nothing else on earth. Some are territorial and lunge at the UPS guy every day of their lives even if he is the sweetest fellow ever to drive a truck. Others yawn through his incursions with apparent indifference. Some bark lustily and often. Some . . . rarely make a peep. Same breed, different critters.

Dogs are different from each other. Some differences arise from experience or environment. (Yes, my clever darlings -- It's a nature/nurture conundrum we are probing here.) A dog raised from birth in a stable, stimulating, critter-affirming home is bound to be different from one who spends the first three years of her life in, say, a Missouri puppy mill, neglected, confined, unsocialized, unloved. That the latter critter could emerge from such deprivation eager to bond with humans and prepared to adapt to a radically different set of circumstances is testament to an admirable resilience. Nonetheless, such a critter will need time to adjust and to figure who and how she will be, now that she has the luxury of being able to make choices in such matters. My yard? you imagine her marveling. What can you possibly mean? Mine? And I should go play in it? What is this thing you call "play?"

All of this hemming and hawing over difference may seem to avoid the question at the top of this post, a question put to us by this blog's dear, though as yet unmet, friend, Tenured Radical, from her lofty new perch over at the Chronicle of Higher Education (which has apparently become a hotbed of lesbian blogging -- Who knew? Yo, Chron, my typist is a raging Sapphist! We await your call!).

Anyhoo, TR has been ~~nagging us~~ quietly persisting with the question of when the new embodied dog of Roxie's World will begin holding forth in this space. It is, as she says, a big question, one that preoccupied the creative team for much of the long, hot, whacky summer of 2011. When the Moms weren't gallivanting from here to there to the other place, Moose spent long hours huddled with Mark Twain, director of the Office of Persona Management for Roxie's World, considering if, when, and how the adorable Ms. Ruby would make her debut as more than just a pretty face around here. Though Moose and Mark often disagree on matters creative and political, they both felt strongly that such a delicate issue had to be handled with the utmost care, especially in light of its potentially blog-transforming significance.

Over drinks at Ishmael's, the seedy yet cozy bar around the corner from the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC, Twain argued forcefully that if Ruby spoke she should not disparage his home state of Missouri, despite her unhappy experiences there, but he thought it would be OK if she cussed. "You know, Moose, this place could use some healthy swearing -- and not just in comments from your pal PhysioProf. There ought to be a room in every house to swear in. It's dangerous to have to repress an emotion like that." Moose was dubious about the swearing, healthy as she finds it to be in her own off-blog communications life. She thought Ruby might offer uplifting advice to people and critters struggling to overcome adversity. "She could become the voice of the glass half full, on account of she got a rough start in life, but she never lost hope and things have turned out pretty well for her." Twain rolled his eyes and ordered bartender Peter Coffin to put a shot of vodka in Moose's next smoothie.

It went on like this for weeks, with Moose and Mark going back and forth and round and round, raising possibilities and shooting them down, until finally one evening, as happy hour was winding down, a scratchy little voice from a pallet beside Moose's seat at the bar said,

I could tell them about the deer.

Moose and Mark looked down at the floor and then at each other in amazement, for Ruby is not in the habit of interrupting their barstool colloquies. "What?" they said, in unison.

I could tell them about the deer.

"Go on, Ruby," Moose said gently. "What about the deer?"

I could tell them about that night, last week, after the earthquake and the hurricane and the start of school, when the deer was out in the yard, chowing down on the hostas again. I was in the house with you, Tall Lady -- the one Roxie called Moose. The Other Lady -- the one Roxie called Goose -- was out in the yard, frustrated because she couldn't get the deer to leave. You and I saw what was happening and you decided to let me out, thinking I would probably ignore the deer because I'm not much of a hunter but I might manage to startle her anyway and get her to leave the yard. To your surprise, though, in that moment I came into full possession of my mighty terrier heritage. I found my voice, my speed, and my powerful instinct to give chase. I pursued that deer up and down the ridiculously large backyard, barking louder than you had ever heard, determined to make her leave. You and the Other Lady were impressed but worried, concerned that the deer in her panic would attack me. (Such things happen.) She didn't, though. I chased and I chased, and finally, in one delicate movement of her whole body, she leapt the fence and was gone. You and the Other Lady beamed happily at me and gave me a rub behind the ears. "Well, well," you said, "looks like somebody figured out she's a terrier!" I was so excited that I promptly went and took a big poo in a remote corner of the yard, which, you know, I rarely do, preferring to take care of my business on walks around the block.

"That's right, Ruby-doo," Moose said with a doting smile. "That's a wonderful story, and I agree it's one our readers should hear. What would you want them to take away from it?"

How the heck should I know? I did not spend the first three years of my life curled up on the floor of an English prof's study, taking in queer theory and Emily Dickinson by osmosis. Your readers are pretty smart critters. They'll figure out that this is a story about how, six months into my new life with you and the Other Lady, I recognized and acted upon something important about what it means to be a Dog With Humans. You are my people, your yard is my yard. I will love and protect you, as you have loved and cared for me. You will show me a world I never knew existed, a rich, vast, varied world of groomers and grandmothers and pretty boys and feisty girls and beautiful trails and bodies of water that seem to go on forever. In return, I will chase deer from the yard and put my head on the keyboard of your laptop when it's time to stop typing and snuggle. Stuff like that. As I said, though, readers will figure out why the story matters -- You don't have to tell them everything.

Mark Twain looked at Moose and said, "She has a point, you know. Like most stories on Roxie's World, Ruby's charming tale of her encounter with the deer is of the humorous type, and the humorous story may be spun out to great length, and may wander around as much as it pleases, and arrive nowhere in particular."

"Of course," Moose replied. "That's our stock in trade. So Ruby fits right in to our rambling style and our admittedly loose preexisting structure. We don't have to change a thing, and we don't have to explain anything!"

"Good lord, no!" Twain thundered. "Explanations are for comic stories, not humorous ones, and involve such tedious things as exclamation points and parentheses. All of which is very depressing, and makes one want to renounce joking and lead a better life."

"And lord knows there'll be no renouncing of joking around here, eh, Mark? I'll raise my smoothie to that, with an exclamation point!"

Twain raised his whiskey and clinked Moose's glass. They both laughed heartily and with evident relief. From the pallet on the floor, the new dog sighed and laid her head on Moose's foot. My human. My world. My still, small voice.

* * *

With thanks to Tenured Radical, for asking the question and helping us to shake off the lethargy of summer. Paws up to you, pal.

(Photo Credits: All photos by Moose. The top one is Roxie at Smith Mountain Lake in October, 2003. The middle one is Ruby on a Sunday morning in March, 2011. The bottom one is Ruby soaking wet from Hurricane Irene on August 27, 2011.)

Mammaries of Irene

2011-08-30T23:56:00.001-04:00

Cruising the academic interwebs looking for back-to-school wisdom? Forgetaboutit, sweet peas. Click elsewhere, immediately if not sooner. We had us, like, a triple-dip disaster here in Roxie's World in the past week: Earthquake on Tuesday, hurricane on Saturday, power outage stretching from 4 a.m. Sunday to 4 a.m. Monday (and we got off easy compared to a lot of our neighbors!). Classes start tomorrow at QTU, and my typist is in her usual state of Holy crap, where did the summer go and do I really need a syllabus and why the heck can't I just keep thinking about peaches? and yoga? and other happy things?

Yeah, it's like that, so in lieu of a post, we offer a picture, taken by our dear Candy Man, to show the weird havoc wreaked by Hurricane Irene on one Baltimore row house. (Point of clarification: We are not making light of Ms. Irene. It was a scary, destructive storm, and we're glad it had lost some of its power by the time it smacked into lower Manhattan. We exercise the privilege of mocking something that we lived through because, well, because we think this picture is hilarious, and we want to share it with you. It will appeal to your inner 11-year-old. It will make you think up punny captions while you are standing in line waiting to copy your syllabus. [You could go paper-free on that, you know. Give trees a chance, why don't you?])

Anyhoo, here's Candy Man's pic of the damage to his home and his ingenious way of dealing with it. We call this photo The Mother of Invention:

Moose is going to remember this photo the next time she is doing battle against ice dams. Geoffrey has already left a witty, Irene, thanks for the mammaries! comment up on Facebook. The picture also brings to mind the revised version of "The Way We Were" Moose's late father was prone to sing after a few beers: Mammaries light the corners of my mind, misty watercolor mammaries of the way we were . . . .

Top that, PhysioProf. And have at it, lit critters. Ten points if your response combines a pun, a literary allusion, and an esoteric reference to whatever fountain in, probably, Rome Moose thinks of but can't quite recall when she looks at this picture.

G'night, lovelies. And may all the disasters that befall you -- and us! -- this week be small, unnatural, and not likely to lead the evening news.

64 Flamingos and an Imaginary Dog

2011-08-25T13:59:00.000-04:00

A Meditation on Two Earthquakes

Many readers no doubt felt the shifting of the earth beneath Roxie's World that occurred the other day. The animals at the National Zoo in Washington certainly felt it. The Zoo's Center for Animal Care Sciences released a fascinatingly detailed report on changes in animal behavior that staffers noted just before and during the 5.8 magnitude quake that shook the region on Tuesday afternoon: apes abandoning their food and climbing to the tops of tree-like structures, vocalizing in ways that indicated irritation; snakes (normally inactive during the day) writhing; a pride of lions standing still and facing a building; 64 flamingos rushing around just before the quake and grouping themselves together, staying huddled until the trembling stopped. 64 flamingos: I love that odd bit of numerical precision, don't you? Do flamingos always hang out in square numbers? (Flamingo photo via.)

Wa Po's Joel Achenbach has a good followup on the Zoo's report that explores the question of what it is that animals seem to know in advance of events such as earthquakes and how they know it. Shorter version: Scientists aren't sure, but possible explanations include an ability to hear, feel, or smell things humans can't detect or, more simply, that animals are paying closer attention to the natural world than humans are. Lacking smartphones and large-screen TVs, perhaps apes and flamingos have more room in their smaller brains to notice that the planet is gearing up to rearrange itself. Just a thought.

We don't have especially gripping tales to tell of the Day the Earth Moved, alas. Ms. Ruby, the new embodied dog of Roxie's World, was home alone at the time, so the Moms can't say whether she exhibited signs of preternatural knowledge of what was about to happen or put up a blood-curdling howl when the house began to pitch. (The house doesn't seem to have pitched much. Aside from a few crooked pictures [see photo at left] and a couple of crawl-space doors popped open, there's little evidence of seismic activity or stress.) Moose was in the car when the quake occurred and felt nothing, though she "heard" it by way of "The Kojo Nnamdi Show," which she was listening to on her way to the office. Goose was having lunch at a restaurant on the campus of QTU, which was thoroughly shaken by the quake. (The university's main library, McKeldin, remains closed today, while structural engineers check for damage and workers re-shelve more than 13,000 books that fell to the floor during the episode. Check out these photos of the mess -- and then go find a librarian to hug, OK?)

Funny thing, though, and this will take us to the imaginary dog referred to in the title to this post: Both moms, in the excitement of the day's events and independently of one another, thought back to an itty-bitty earthquake that rattled the Washington area not too long ago. They both remembered it, though they were fuzzy on when it happened. "Summer," Moose said with confidence, "but I'm not sure if it was 2009 or 2008. I'll have to check the blog. We posted on it." They both told a similar story about how I, then embodied, awoke them by starting to bark moments before the rumbling of the quake began. They told this story, independently and with absolute certainty, before they had seen any of the reports about animals at the Zoo seeming agitated in advance of Tuesday's temblor. I am charmed by this tale, flattering as it is to my animal wisdom and the vital work I performed as guardian of two sweet but largely clueless humans for darn near sixteen years.

The only problem with this happy story, as you might have guessed by now, is that it isn't true. The itty-bitty pre-dawn quake the Moms so vividly recall occurred not in 2009 or 2008 but on July 16, 2010 -- seven months after I had moved on to what we might, for lack of a better term, call Heaven. When Moose finally tracked down our post on the earlier quake, she was astonished to realize how utterly mistaken she and Goose had been in their recollection of the event and by how sincerely they believed something that was demonstrably untrue. Moose had told the story a couple of times that afternoon: "Sure, I remember that other quake. It was summer. Roxie was still with us, and she started to bark just before we felt the tremors." Late Tuesday evening, Goose spoke to her brother, a criminal defense attorney, and they had a good laugh about the unreliability of eyewitness testimony. "People don't necessarily mean to lie," they agreed. "They often just misjudge or misremember what they saw."

That's true, but Moose is still marveling over the imaginary dog that somehow found its way into her and Goose's memories of the Little Quake of 2010 that came before the Not So Little Quake of 2011. Yes, memory is fallible, but our mistakes may be significant. What psychic need was fulfilled by this particular lapse? she wonders. Last summer, we were still grieving the loss of our much loved and fiercely protective companion. Did we insert her into that memory because at the time she was, psychically, still very much with us? Or is this an instance of the present reshaping the past? We have a new dog now who in many ways strongly resembles the old dog. Did Ruby's presence fill in the blanks created by Roxie's absence from the original earthquake? Was our memory lapse really a case of mistaken identity, as in all those times, in the early months of her being with us, when we would slip and say Roxie instead of Ruby? Is the imaginary dog an instance of seeing Ruby where we once would have seen Roxie?

Grief is funny, sometimes. Sometimes literally. Two weeks ago at the beach, members of the extended pack slipped a few times and said Roxie instead of Ruby. "Roxie is dead," Moose declared when one such slip occurred. "That's Ruby." She said it sardonically but with a twinkle in her eye that let kiwiboy know it was OK to giggle. It was her way of saying, Yes, she is really gone, and that breaks our hearts, but we carry on as best we can and find ways to love and reasons to laugh again. This is one of the two lessons Moose sees it as her duty to teach little children. The other is that grownups get to cuss whenever they want to but kids can't. Hey, Miss Jean Brodie she ain't, but you have to admit that resilience and pragmatism are useful life skills.

So, darlings, consider this an invitation to tell us your quake tales or your stories of real or imagined shaggy dogs. Where were you when the earth moved? We're dying to know.

Body Matters: Short Takes

2011-08-22T23:44:00.000-04:00

As we ease our way back toward serious blogging, we thought we'd call your attention to a few stories that caught our attention in between ocean swims and fine meals and beach reading of books Moose emphatically decided not to include in the trans lit course she'll be teaching this term.

The Aging, Vegan Ex-Presidential Body: Bill Clinton turned 65 the other day, which prompted a spate of stories on the Big Dawg's impressive efforts to manage his heart disease through diet and exercise. The former president, who has a family history of seriously bad tickers, had a quadruple bypass in 2004 and angioplasty in 2010. Since then, working with Dr. Dean Ornish, he has dropped 20 pounds and become mostly vegan, though he confesses to CNN's Sanjay Gupta to having a bite -- one bite, he says, with a wag of his famous finger -- of turkey at Thanksgiving. Moose liked this story because she is delighted to claim her favorite living former president as a comrade in Lifestyle Adjustment. She also thinks it's good for the country to have to reckon with seeing the nation's most famous devotee of Big Macs and Krispy Kremes as a poster boy for clean living and healthy eating. Moose imagines she would choose death over veganism, because she isn't sure she could live in a world without eggs, but she was endowed by her creator with a ridiculously healthy heart and so has never had to face that choice. Mostly, though, we like this story because it offers further proof that we just can't stop thinking about Bill Clinton's body. We need to know what he is ingesting, how he is looking -- fabulous! -- and how he is feeling (more energetic than ever!). Clinton's successor in the Oval Office also turned 65 earlier this summer, and the AP story focused on the thousands of virtual birthday greetings he received through a campaign orchestrated by his wife. No one, it seems, wants to think about Shrub's aging body or what's going into it. I know: Quelle surprise. And we sincerely apologize for putting that image into your head so early in the work week.

The Professorial Body: Duke's Cathy Davidson, who is garnering raves for her new book, Now You See It: How the Brain Science of Attention Will Transform the Way We Live, Work, and Learn, did a marvelous blog post a couple of weeks ago on a Pilates class that resonated with some of our musings here about yoga, bodies in middle age, and minds/bodies in techno-culture. The post advocates balance, breathing, and compulsory dance movement in schools and workplaces as a necessary counter to the seated life of the mental worker staring at the screen. It offers compelling observations about kids' relationships to their bodies and movement in an age in which bike helmets and pain avoidance constrain them in both body and soul. It even offers a couple of simple exercises to foster alignment and deep breathing. Read the post. Try the exercises. And get Davidson's book, for dog's sake, because everyone else you know is getting it and you don't want to be out of the loop. We've got Now You See It loaded up on Kindles and iPads throughout Roxie's World and can hardly wait to read what this passionate yet practical digital visionary has to say about the world in which we live, think, work, and breathe.

The Lesbian Body: Christina Santiago was 29 years old, a lesbian, a native New Yorker living in Chicago, and manager for the Lesbian Community Care Project at the Howard Brown Health Center. She was killed in a freak accident at the Indiana State Fair on August 13. Four other people died, and Santiago's partner, Alisha Brennon, was also seriously injured when a concert stage collapsed in a strong thunder storm just before the group Sugarland was to begin a show. The story caught our eye in part because the tragedy occurred in Moose's home state but also because of allegations that began circulating on the queer interwebs that the Marion County coroner's office refused to release Santiago's body to Brennon for burial because of the state's DOMA law. First reported by Bil Browning on The Bilerico Project, the charge went viral when Dan Savage wrapped it up in a fiery denunciation of how such laws "serve to torment and persecute gay people at the most trying moments of their lives."

The problem, as it turned out, is that the story wasn't true. The critically injured Brennon had not contacted the coroner's office and appears not to have been treated disrespectfully by anybody. Her partner's body was released to an aunt of Santiago's who was listed as her next of kin. Santiago's funeral and burial were in the Bronx, but those closest to Santiago and Brennon suggest matters were handled amicably and sensitively. Brennon is still hospitalized but seems to be recovering. Bil Browning posted a lengthy apology for his poor judgment and reporting, admitting that his "history of dealing with homophobic behavior by Indiana office holders" likely predisposed him to believe the story without sufficiently verifying it. In his retraction, Savage noted that, "These sorts of things have happened -- surviving gay spouses barred from bedsides, not allowed to retrieve their partner's remains, barred from funerals by hostile family-of-origin members -- but it didn't happen this time."

Savage is right, of course. Such things do happen, and we need to work hard to reduce the likelihood of their happening by securing full legal equality for LGBT relationships. That will require overturning the federal Defense of Marriage Act and every mini-DOMA on the books in states from sea to shining sea. Bil Browning is to be commended for his thorough and thoughtful self-criticism, but we can also learn something from his mistake, from his -- and our -- willingness to believe that a low-level functionary in a coroner's office would see it as his or her job to enforce a state DOMA in such a cruel fashion. (Since Santiago and Brennon were residents of neighboring Illinois, Brennon could presumably have claimed her partner's body under that state's domestic partnership law.)

Again: Such things do happen, but that doesn't mean we can assume they've happened without fully and fairly investigating the claim. Browning didn't try to speak with Brennon because she was still in intensive care and "it seemed crass to call her for a statement." Fair enough, but shouldn't the fact that Brennon was in intensive care have made him doubt that she was in a position to call the coroner's office to try to claim Santiago's body? That it apparently didn't is powerful evidence of how strongly inclined he was to believe what he was hearing without fully corroborating the charge. Yes, Indiana is full of homophobes in high places and lacks the most basic protections for LGBT citizens and relationships, but that doesn't justify jumping to conclusions and circulating falsehoods about particular offices or officeholders. Such mistakes don't serve the cause of advancing LGBT rights, as Browning knows. They also don't honor the memory of Christina Santiago or comfort her grieving partner, family, and friends.

Attention, please: This brief rant has been brought to you by Moose, who feels bad for circulating Savage's post about the Marion County coroner's office on her Facebook page without independently checking out the story. You heard it here first, folks: Not everything you read on the interwebs is true. Be skeptical. Be fair. Be thorough.

RIP Christina Santiago. Your memory will endure, and your vital work will go on. Our condolences to those who loved you and healing thoughts to Alisha Brennon for a full and swift recovery.

Peace out.

Beach Week Highlight Reel

2011-08-20T10:05:00.000-04:00

Cocktail of the Week: Mojitos, by Candy Man, the Official Mixologist of Roxie's World:

Culinary Revelation of the Week: Strawberry Risotto, by the Italian Stallion:

Transgression of the Week: Late-Night Beach Walks with Dog, in Clear Violation of Stupid, Local, Anti-Dog Ordinances:

(No, that isn't a freakish August snowstorm, just salt on Geoffrey's camera lens. Looks cool, doesn't it?)

Restaurant Meal of the Week: Blue Moon, Rehoboth, where we celebrated somebody's 39 + 1 birthday:

The Moms ate at Blue Moon aeons ago, back when their idea of Beach Week was a couple of nights at a just-a-notch-above-seedy dyke-owned B&B in Rehoboth. They were delighted to revisit the blue-and-yellow Victorian just a couple of blocks off the beach and discover that the kitchen is still putting out the tastiest and most creative food on the shore (that's a superb fried green tomato appetizer in the photo above) and the bar is still a mecca for pretty boys on the make. The main difference between then and now? The cruising gets a tech-assist from Grindr. Oh, yeah, and the pretty boys aren't, you know, dying.

Yes, there are photos of our happy queer family frolicking on the beach in bright sunshine, but we won't be posting them here. We figure we've shown you enough skin. this summer, darlings. School's about to start, so we need to start figuring out ways to boost our academic cred. That's right. Y'all can look forward to a series of posts so weighty and profound you'll think you've stumbled into Tim Burke's corner of the blogosphere. Soon, kids, I swear to dog. In the meantime, we'll play you off with something light and fun and beachy while we're still shaking the sand out of our shoes and you are still wishing this crazy-a$$ed summer would never end. Peace out, surfer dudes and dudettes. May you catch the wave of your dreams and ride it, like, forever.

(Photo Credits: Moose, except for that artsy-fartsy shot of Ruby on the beach, which Geoffrey, the Official Prep-School Teacher and Forty-Year Old of Roxie's World, took.)

Late Summer Mellow

2011-08-15T12:31:00.002-04:00

A Photo Meditation on Rain, Pasta, Beach Kitsch, and Queer Affinities

The Moms and Ms. Ruby are hanging out in a beach town in Delaware this week, getting in a little queer family vacay before they hunker down for the start of a new academic year. They are with Geoffrey, Candy Man, kiwiboy (also known as Son of Candy Man), and a charming new fellow who shall be known in these precincts as the Italian Stallion. Yesterday was a rainy day, so our resourceful gang did what beachcombers from time immemorial have done when nature puts the kibosh on plans to spend the day staring at the ocean while the sun turns one's skin to shoe leather.

They strolled the beach between storms taking moody shots of the scary looking sky and the nearly deserted beach, which Moose made even moodier looking through the magic of CameraBag:

They prowled the rooms of their rental home documenting the many fine examples of the style known as Beach Kitsch:

And, of course, they cooked. And ate. And drank a little. Moose declared it a no-point day and gave herself permission to indulge without guilt, though she did take Ms. Ruby on a number of walks.

Candy Man and the Italian Stallion collaborated on a gnocchi so good it would make an Italian grandmother wish she had a gay grandson:

And tomato sauce so simple and so perfect it would make Marcella Hazan swear off onions forever:

And because there were peaches aching to go out in a blaze of glory, Moose whipped up a batch of what she termed beach cobbler (recipe and rhapsody on this delicious dish here):

It was a lovely day, despite the torrents of rain falling from the menacing sky, which just goes to show that even a deluge can't rain on your parade if you are determined to have a good time. Who'll stop the rain? asks a famous song of the hippie/folkie/rockie era. Why, no one, darling. You're never going to stop the rain by complaining, so, you know, don't. But, still, a great song is a great song. We'll play you off with a little CCR before we head down to the beach -- where, we are pleased to report, the sun is for the moment shining as happily as Michele Bachmann at a Christian corn dog festival. Peace out.

Tuning In/Out (Live!) to Melissa Etheridge

2011-08-10T15:01:00.000-04:00

Caption this (kinda blurry) photo, which does indeed show rocker Melissa Etheridge sandwiched between Moose and Goose backstage last night at Baltimore's Pier Six Pavilion:

(Photo Credit: Emily Rodgers, 8/9/11)

What? You're surprised to see a couple of humble English profs consorting with a Grammy Award-winning mega-dyke? On a Tuesday night? You're shocked to see Moose 2.0 in the arms of a woman with a, um, reputation for getting around with the ladies -- while Goose looks on with a smile? You didn't imagine that Moose's new wardrobe included sexy belts and at least one Peter Pan/Robin Hood/Jane of the Jungle-type tank top?

Well then, darlings, it's possible you don't know the wimmin of Roxie's World quite as well as you thought you did, isn't it?

Here's the scoop, you brave and crazy gals and non-gals: The Moms have the good fortune to be represented in the Maryland House of Delegates by the awesome and openly gay Heather Mizeur, who just happens to be good buddies with Etheridge. (Because, yes, all lesbians know all other lesbians and hang out with them on a regular basis. Which is why Moose has spent the better part of thirty years waiting for Jodie Foster to call, dammit!) The meet-and-greet with Etheridge was a fundraiser for Mizeur. The Moms were happy to contribute, because Heather is the real deal, a politician who truly believes in government of, by, and for the people. We see a great future for her and look forward to being seated in the friends' box when Heather is sworn in (by, uh, Chief Justice Elana Kagan) as the first openly lesbian president of the United States of America. Moose is already trying to decide what to wear.

Anyhoo, dolls. You are probably dying to know what they talked about and what morsels of gossip they picked up among the dyke-erati. The Moms impressed Melissa by recalling that they had seen her at the Bayou in Georgetown way back in the day -- 1988, Etheridge was quick to recall, before she had really broken through to popular success. (The Moms credit one of Goose's very first grad students with bringing Etheridge to their attention -- and getting them down to the Bayou that evening.) A totally unexpected bonus was that Etheridge's new partner, Linda Wallem, was also in attendance last night. Wallem is a TV writer and producer who co-created Showtime's spectacular Edie Falco vehicle Nurse Jackie. Moose did not quite get down on her knees to thank Wallem for designing and developing one of the most extraordinary female characters in the history of series television, but she came close. Wallem, we are pleased to report, is a funny, friendly gal. We wish her and Etheridge many years of attracting and captivating one another.

Oh, and the concert? Fabulous, of course. Etheridge, who turned fifty in May and faced breast cancer seven years ago, still rocks her guts out on stage. We think even Comrade PhysioProf, who usually takes strenuous, visceral, Anglo-Saxon exception to our musical taste, would have enjoyed the show, which was loud and tight and kept the audience on its feet all night. It was a sweaty, satisfying evening, which is more than one can say for a lot of Tuesday nights in Baltimore, n'est-ce pas?

Now, aging rockers, about those captions you are going to write: Hop to, will you? You come up with some pithy lines of dialog, and then we will tell you what Moose was actually saying as the world's most famous lesbian rock star wrapped her bare shoulders in a vise-like grip, while her partner of 27 years looked on with delight. Go on. We know you weren't really planning to work this afternoon. Go on and close your eyes, imagine yourself there last night. You know you want to.

Peace out.

Tuning In/Out to Stevie Nicks, In Your Dreams

2011-08-06T19:43:00.000-04:00

The long. hot. horrible. summer of 2011 continues, and Roxie's World is working hard to ignore it. Why? Because we don't have any economists or climate scientists on staff, and political prognostication is really just kind of a hobby for us. Besides, we figure our legions of smarty-pants loyal fans know where to go to get their fill of bummer-inducing news and analysis and come here to get little dribs and drabs of health and happiness to try to keep their glasses close to half full while they wait patiently for the handbasket to come whisk them away to Hell. Which should happen, like, any minute now, don't you think?

We'll return to more serious programming over the next few weeks as the Moms shift into Back-to-School mode. (Srsly, kids, I swear: Moose is not going to turn this into a health, food, and fitness blog, recent appearances notwithstanding.) Meantime, let's indulge in a little musical interlude to wile away a cloudy summer evening.

Stevie Nicks released her first solo album in ten years a few months ago. It's called In Your Dreams, and it's been in extremely heavy rotation in Roxie's World ever since it arrived. It's a smooth, tight record, as dreamy as its title would lead you to expect, with 13 songs written by Nicks and, mostly, producer Dave Stewart. Nicks' voice is in fine form. The singer is 62, and you can hear the marks of time and experience on a voice one reviewer described as having "steely sides, but its center is worn and approachable, like suède." Perfect.

In Your Dreams doesn't break new ground, lyrically or musically, but it comfortably mines the emotional, intuitive terrain Nicks knows so well. Moose has a soft spot for "Cheaper Than Free," a sweet celebration of love in which Nicks' and Stewart's middle-aged voices blend to give rich texture to the admittedly sappy words -- but, hey, high passion is demonstrably better than high fashion. Both moms are keen on "Wide Sargasso Sea," a hard-rocking synopsis of Jean Rhys' novel, and "Annabel Lee," a lush adaptation of one of Poe's creepy/beautiful poems on the allure of a dead woman. These two exercises in feminist criticism induced Moose to describe In Your Dreams as the album you always wished Gilbert and Gubar had made.

And you did always wish that, didn't you? Isn't that how everybody got through the 80s? In any case, treat yourself to In Your Dreams. It will mix well with all those other albums by husky-voiced wise women that are rattling around in your record machine. We'll play you off with "Annabel Lee," because that's the cut Goose has been passing along to all the 19th-century poetry geeks in her acquaintance. Take it away, Stevie.

Daring to Eat a Peach (Cobbler)

2011-08-03T11:42:00.003-04:00

(Photo Credit, Food Prep, and Point Calculation: Moose, 8/2/11)

Longtime readers know how much we love the peach cobbler recipe from The Silver Palate Cookbook. You might -- or might not -- have been wondering how we were going to get through peach season without indulging in a treat so delicious Moose says it produces a response similar to Meg Ryan's famous scene in When Harry Met Sally. The first few weeks of the season, Moose had been experimenting with LAP-approved crisp recipes that were delicious and happy-making, if not quite, well, orgasmic. What can I say, people? Quaker oats and agave nectar are super cute but not, you know, sexy.

This past Sunday, though, the peaches were so stupendously beautiful that Moose began to dream about her old flame, peach cobbler, the one with two-thirds of a cup of actual sugar, not to mention white flour and vegetable shortening! And -- here's the truly orgasmic part -- topped off with whipped cream (right there!) spiked with peach (oooooh!) brandy (yes!). Goose seemed to be thinking about it, too, and got a little misty-eyed when Moose indicated it might not fit into the household's new food plan. "Oh," Goose said, "OK." [Translation: I have been with you for 27 years and know I need to express support for your ludicrous position while also conveying the slightest bit of disappointment. That way, when your position shifts -- and I know it will --, I get points for being willing to forego pleasure for your sake -- and I get the cobbler, too!]

Goose got her cobbler -- and several relationship points for epic forbearance over the course of the past six months. She's been a trooper, but how, you may or may not be wondering, did Moose come around to the idea of making -- and eating -- a dish that contains all those sinfully delicious ingredients? Is the virtue binge over? Has she fallen off the wagon and returned to the kind of mindless, decadent eating that got her into her middle-aged funk?

Hardly, darlings. Moose woke up Tuesday morning, stepped on the scale, and saw that she was still losing weight rather than merely maintaining it, which is the goal now. This whole clean living thing can get a little addictive, you know, especially for a girl who finds it hard to believe that what she sees in the mirror is real. Anyhoo, she came downstairs, used her LAP's recipe builder to calculate the points per serving for the glorious peach cobbler, and sent Goose to the store to get heavy cream. "I love you, honey," she said, "and there is room in my life for an 11-point treat. Get asparagus, too. We won't be having carbs at dinner tonight."

So, see, it wasn't a lapse or a sin or an instance of being bad. It was a conscious choice, an instance of eating mindfully and well. Resulting in a happy little food orgasm and a week's worth of motivation to keep racking up activity points. Step aside, kid. That is MY treadmill for the next 45 minutes. I've got a date with the sweetest cobbler on dog's earth, and you're in my way!

Feel free to weigh in, as it were, with your own summer food delights. What are the treats that get you, um, going?

By the way, if you missed it, WaPo had a couple of good pieces on aging well in yesterday's "Health and Science" section. Here's one on a 62-year-old guy who has stayed remarkably young looking just by being consistent in his commitment to a pretty sane and simple set of health and fitness habits. One expert quoted in the story estimates that after 50 how you age is about 30% a matter of genetics and 70% a matter of lifestyle and behavior. The good news here is that moderation works. You don't have to work out seven days a week and forego booze and, you know, peach cobbler in order to live long and well. Moderate exercise and a diet low in saturated fats will do the trick. Oh, and not smoking, of course, but you knew that. Here's another article on older athletes that focuses on injuries and how to avoid them. Also helpful.

In other news, the United States narrowly avoided fiscal disaster yesterday, but no one seems too happy with how things worked out. Gosh, kids, do you think this deal would taste better if we could throw a dollop of whipped cream spiked with peach brandy on it? Yeah, me neither.

Peace out, my pretties, and may your day be sweet as an August peach.

The Virtue Binge

2011-08-01T11:06:00.002-04:00

Goose has been out of town on urgent Emily Dickinson-related business for nearly a week. Moose has been batching it, which used to mean she'd revert to grad school habits of having popcorn and beer for dinner while zoning out to really trashy movies on Lifetime. Good times, right, Moose?

Anyhoo, this week, aside from Wednesday night's decadent dinner at America Eats, in which Moose permitted herself the (now) shocking indulgence of a third glass of wine, she's been living like a freaking monk. It's been all yogurt and whole grains and farmer's market veggies. Not a beer in sight. Her big indulgence food-wise was to use half a cup of olive oil in some pesto she made. Half a cup! And pesto meant that she treated herself to pasta for dinner! Whole wheat, of course. Whoa, Moose. Way to ride the edge.

Then there's been the whole activity thing. The trips to the gym. The rides on the stationary bike in the basement when she felt too lazy to schlep to the gym. The Friday yoga class. The Saturday yoga workshop. Yes: Two and a half hours spent painstakingly refining plank and cobra poses. Srsly, kids, the fun just never stops around here, does it?

You leave town, and I go off on some kind of virtue binge, Moose quipped to Goose in a text message yesterday. The quip got her thinking, and -- Oh, heck, I think I'll just let her tell you. Being disembodied, I am less equipped, as it were, to talk about certain kinds of things these days. Take it away, Moose!

* * *

(Photo Credit: Anon, Self-Portrait After Plank Workshop, 7/30/11)

You have to admit it's a funny line -- I go off on some kind of virtue binge -- but it's also a revealing one, loaded with assumptions and, perhaps, anxieties about bodies, behavior, discipline, moralism. It registers a certain pride, yes, but it also captures some of the discomfort I've experienced in recent months as I've tried to find ways to talk and write about losing weight without sounding sanctimonious or fat-shaming. (That discomfort is explored in this post.)

At this particular moment, the notion of a virtue binge also resonates with the political fiasco unfolding on Capitol Hill, as Republicans and Democrats battle, with nearly equal disingenuousness, to position their nearly indistinguishable plans for trimming the alleged fat off the nation's fiscal body as the morally correct one. (And how telling that the fiscal and governmental bodies are so frequently imaged, as in the cartoon anchored to this paragraph, as obese to a degree designed to elicit disgust.) The binge will end -- because binges always do -- the moment the deal is signed and there is no more political advantage to be gained by exaggerating one's own virtues and the vices of one's opponents. It will be resumed -- because binging generally is -- when new circumstances arise that once again make it expedient to demonize the opposing side as lacking in virtue. (Yes, darlings, I am well aware that one of our two major political parties is more in thrall than the other to a strategy of framing any kind of difference or disagreement as a world-threatening conflict between good and evil. I am lumping them together because everyone involved in the debt ceiling debacle has behaved so badly and because both the president and Senate majority leader Harry Reid strike me as guys whose lives have been one long virtue binge.)

Anyway: The virtue binge may be a uniquely and obnoxiously American phenomenon, a hangover of what one astute student of cultural history has described as The Puritan Origins of the American Self. That is a major source of the discomfort I feel with my own little quip. I am troubled to hear myself describe my weight loss and my recommitment to fitness in such terms because they suggest that I have internalized a set of value judgments about physical/moral fitness that I am deeply committed to contesting. (See, for example, the first two chapters of this book.) A quip is just a quip, of course, and I could take refuge in the idea that the joke mocks the tendency it names and therefore does contest the values that might motivate any kind of virtue binge. I was a firm believer in the salvific power of parody long before Stephen Colbert came on the scene.

All kidding aside, though, perhaps what really bothers me is the inadequacy of the language available for describing experiences like the one I have had over the past several months. How do we talk about weight and fitness -- especially as women, feminists, and queers -- without falling back on metaphors that equate physical health and "normal" size with moral virtue? I'm obviously a big fan of the Lifestyle Adjustment Program I used to lose weight, but I can't bear to read the "Success Stories" prominently featured on its website because they so relentlessly emphasize the virtues of being on track and in control. Success in these terms is a matter of reasserting discipline over a body defined as unruly, disorderly, and out of control.

"I feel like I've conquered the world," says my LAP's most famous current spokesperson, singer Jennifer Hudson, of her weight loss. Such language perpetuates a dualistic model of the relationship between mind and body that is both punitive and terroristic. I hate it -- even though I know full well that I had come to feel fairly out of control in relation to food, drink, and weight. Even though I admitted, right here in Roxie's World, that I had reached the point of feeling miserable in my body by January of this year and proudly offered an illustrated announcement just a few weeks ago of "what feeling better looks like." Careful and non-fat phobic as I have tried to be, my own language is as problematic as Hudson's, even without the cheesy metaphor of world domination.

I want another way to narrate this story, some alternative to the plots of conquest or redemption that have done so much damage in American culture and the world. I don't want to see what I am doing these days as either a virtue or a binge, because virtue is boring and binges are transient. I want to say to the friends and the sisters who are looking to me for advice and inspiration in their own efforts to take off weight that mind and body are one and we have to let go of self-loathing. We need to find ways to relate to our bodies, ourselves with love and compassion, whatever our size and shape. And we need to find ways to talk about the disciplines of self-care not as regimens of self-punishment and sacrifice but as forms of pleasure and play. You hear some of this rhetoric in the wellness industry's "this is not a diet" mantra, but my LAP's emphasis on tracking and control still sounds more anxious and paranoid than I would like.

The most satisfying language I've come up with so far is one that emphasizes mindfulness in relation to eating and activity. I put on weight over the course of several years because I stopped paying attention to how much I was eating and let go of a commitment I had maintained for most of my adult life to regular, vigorous exercise. In cultivating mindfulness, I've discovered new pleasure in food, which tastes better and is more satisfying when you pay attention to every bite, no matter how simply or sensibly it's prepared. And I've reconnected with the deep pleasures of working/playing in and with my body to learn new skills or to revel in the joy of movement for its own sake. Yes, I spent two and a half hours on Saturday afternoon working strenuously to improve my ability to perform what are basically glorified push-ups -- and walked out in a state of endorphin-produced bliss as glorious as anything I've felt in years. My posture was impressive, too. I don't want to underestimate the challenge of getting into shape after years of being mostly sedentary. It's been hard and humbling, but it has also been enormously satisfying and in a lot of moments just plain fun.

Perhaps what I am getting at is a model of bodily discipline or practice similar to what Foucault describes in The Use of Pleasure as "the arts of existence": "those intentional and voluntary actions by which men not only set themselves rules of conduct, but also seek to transform themselves, to change themselves in their singular being, and to make their life into an oeuvre that carries certain aesthetic values and meets certain stylistic criteria" (10-11). I like the emphasis here on both intentionality and artfulness as aspects of self-making. Or perhaps I'm thinking of the vulnerable, imperfect, necessary body Adrienne Rich tenderly claims in her "Contradictions: Tracking Poems (18)":

The best world is the body's world
filled with creatures filled with dread
misshapen so yet the best we have
our raft among the abstract worlds
and how I longed to live on this earth
walking her boundaries never counting the cost

The best world is the body's world: Amen. This ain't no binge, friends. It's a way of life. Peace out.

(Photo Credit: Anon, Self-Portrait After Plank Workshop [2], 7/30/11)

America Eats -- Well! (Srsly!)

2011-07-28T19:24:00.000-04:00

So, what do three English profs -- all Americanists, all chicks, all enthusiastic foodies -- do for fun and a bit of low-key continuing education on a fair summer evening in their nation's capital? Hmmm, how do you combine love of food with (critically informed) love of country, without straying too far from a Metro station? Why, it's easy, my hungry lit and history critters! All you gotta do is swing by the National Archives to check out the recently opened exhibition, "What's Cooking, Uncle Sam? The Government's Effect on the American Diet," and then step right over to America Eats Tavern, the pop-up restaurant set up by rock-star chef José Andrés in conjunction with the show. (Make a reservation. The joint is jumping from good buzz and the coolness of its short shelf life.)

(World War II poster, ca. 1942. National Archives, Records of the Office of Government Reports, via.)

The "What's Cooking?" exhibit won't overly tax your summer-ized brain. Moose commented that it seemed targeted at (not especially precocious) fourth graders, but it offers enough in the way of nifty images and compelling tidbits of cultural history to justify a visit. (Hey, it's free, and you can drop in and make sure the Constitution hasn't been shredded while you weren't looking!) Moose and her companions, the Shy One and the individual who comments here occasionally as kb, particularly enjoyed some pretty botanical prints of exotic agricultural products the government was exploring and promoting, including Japanese persimmons and Meyer lemons. Moose didn't see any posters for the Clean Plate Club (which was discussed in our recent food/nutrition post, "Breaking Up With Potatoes"), but she was intrigued to see the range of ways in which food has, for more than a century, been bound up with economics and ideology, with systematic government efforts to promote and produce particular kinds of bodies, behaviors, citizens, and identities. Many if not most of these efforts have failed -- we never did become a nation of carp-eaters, despite the Bureau of Fisheries' strenuous promotion campaign ("Eat the Carp!") of 1911 -- but that is part of what makes them so fascinating, especially as we watch the rollout of yet another government plan to encourage healthy eating and physical activity.

To heck with that, though! The real point of this gathering of friends was to see what kind of restaurant Andrés would spin out of his partnership with the Archives and Uncle Sam. We are pleased to report that he is in no way slavish in relation to the exhibition, which means, among other things, that there is no carp on the menu. (I know -- Try to contain your disappointment.) Given the prominence of certain bivalves on offer (prepared seven different ways, including grilled, stewed, and in a spoonbread topped with ice cream and caviar), you might suppose the U.S. government had staged an aggressive "Eat the Oyster!" campaign if you had imagined Andrés would be so literal, but you hadn't (unless you are this guy) and he isn't. The menu is dazzling and chockfull of historical fun facts uncovered by Andrés' staffers, who did weeks of research in the Library of Congress to find recipes from the nation's culinary past. Who knew, for instance, that catsup wasn't always made out of tomatoes? America Eats offers eight different varieties, including one made of -- natch! -- oysters and another made out of -- what? -- Jack Daniel's.

The menu doesn't have a great deal of coherence, but neither does the nation whose diversity it celebrates. (Insert flag-waving icon here.) Our waiter explained as soon as we sat down that, unlike Andrés' other establishments, America Eats is not a tapas restaurant. Still, one could dine happily by treating it as such, grazing and sharing from the several courses of smaller plates and sharing a couple of entrees. Our party of three did that and was too stuffed to consider dessert, though, truth be told, the dessert selections were not awe-inducing enough to make Moose willing to cash out anymore activity points in order to try one. C'mon, José: Cheesecake? Pineapple upside down cake? Can't we get a little more unconventionally retro than that?

Earlier in the meal, Andrés' trademark ingenuity is more in evidence, as he riffs on classics such as lobster newberg and the locally mandatory crabcake. We give high marks to the two forms of oysters we sampled, on the half shell and grilled in butter. The oysters were briny enough to make a girl think she was standing in the surf pulling them out with her bare hands. The night's only real disappointment was a New England clam chowder with poached cod that seemed undercooked in both the literal and the figurative sense. It was bland, and Moose does not waste points on bland these days.

All in all, though, America Eats is a night of fun and fine dining, offering great food, attentive service, and a menu that will captivate you even if you don't earn your living studying American culture. However, we think non-local readers who do earn your living that way and will be in Baltimore for the ASA convention in October should plan to spend an evening in DC so you can visit this joint before it disappears. Not convinced yet? Click below on the movie Moose made out of the not great photos she snapped of most of what was eaten last night. We are confident that her epic, The Case of the Hungry Americanists, will persuade you to stop in for a bite at America Eats. Oh, and visit the bar, which for some strange reason is not called America Drinks. It's good, too.

(The Case of the Hungry Americanists is brought to you by New Dog Productions, a wholly owned subsidiary of RW Enterprises, LLC. No oysters were harmed in the making of this film. Oh, and for reasons no one could figure out, America Eats brings diners their checks inside a book, which, in our case, was a Hardy Boys mystery. That explains the strange denouement of this woefully under-narrated film. With love and thanks to kb and the Shy One, who had absolutely nothing to do with the making of this film, though they ably assisted in ordering, eating, and photographing the food.)

Picturing Marriage Equality

2011-07-26T13:25:00.000-04:00

This here blog has had quite a bit to say on the subject of marriage equality over the years. We've mapped out a ~~tortured, wishy washy~~ carefully nuanced, ambivalent position that captures our passion for civil rights and our (queer/feminist) skepticism toward marriage as a means of arranging intimacy and distributing benefits to which all citizens should be entitled, regardless of relationship status. Do a label search on "gay marriage" if you are interested in finding those posts. Our all-time favorite on the subject is a piece from March 2010 commemorating the Moms' twenty-sixth anniversary. Its subtitle is "Love Without License." A close second would be a long postmortem on the 2008 election, in which, you may recall, voters elected the nation's first African-American president while voting down same-sex marriage in California, Arizona, and Florida. That one is called "Repetitive Motions."

We may not be quite the rainer on the same-sex marriage parade that our good buddy queer legal eagle Katherine Franke is (here she is on WNYC), but, having said so much, we feel permitted to take a pass on coming up with something pithy to say about Gay New York becoming Gay-Married New York, as civil marriage rights became available Sunday to same-sex couples in the Empire State. Instead of telling, we're more in a mood to do some showing -- of some of the very compelling images that have come out in the last day or two. Regardless of how ~~fraught and fuzzy~~ necessarily complex our position on marriage is, we have to admit that pictures like these move us. They make us smile or bring a tiny tear to a jaded eye. More importantly, though, they also have significant political potential in the power they may have to reframe the way the culture sees not only the institution of marriage but sex and gender variation more generally. (We've made this point before, deep in this post.)

As of Sunday, in New York, this is what a newly married couple looks like (via):

(The couple is Connie Kopelov, 84 [in the wheelchair], and Phyllis Siegel, 76, who have been together for 23 years and were the first couple married in Manhattan. This lovely shot reminds us of the Ladies First etiquette that prevailed in San Francisco back in 2008 when pioneering dyke activists Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon were the first same-sex couple to jump the broom during the brief period when marriage equality was available in the Golden State.)

These folks, too, are ready to play The Newlywed Game:

(The image above is a partial screen capture of a gallery of "Portraits From the New York City Marriage Bureau" that ran in the New York Times. All photos by Fred R. Conrad, NYT. See the whole thing, which includes links to brief audio commentary by each couple, here. The website BuzzFeed also ran a collection of 60 portraits of just-married same-sex couples. Access here.)

The logic of such representations is inescapably normalizing. A wedding portrait is a wedding portrait, whether the couple at the center of the frame is same-sex or opposite-sex. These images fit comfortably into the matrimonial grid, as it were, and into the assimilationist logic embraced by many proponents of same-sex marriage. "We feel a little more human today," commented a 68-year-old New Yorker who married his partner of 42 years on Sunday. Wow: State-sanctioned love makes us a little more human. So much for that whole We don't need no piece of paper from the city hall keeping us tied and true, eh? Please, sir, license my love so that I may feel a little less monstrous than I have felt these 42 years.

On the other hand, there is also something ineluctably queer about these photos, shaped as they are by a homologic we don't see in opposite-sex wedding portraits. Roxie's World is in general opposed to same-sex couples dressing alike, which is why the Moms carefully consult one another before ordering out of certain catalogs that cater to women of a certain age and sensibility. In the wedding photos, however, sartorial similarity -- matching jackets, ties, tee-shirts, banners -- injects an element of symmetry that is, in this context, destabilizing and revealing, accustomed as our eyes are to the traditional asymmetry of a groom in a tux and bride in a gown. On closer examination, the new marital order turns out not to look like the old one, at least not entirely.

The photos also have a giddy, anarchical quality we don't tend to associate with hetero wedding portraits, hyper-stylized and air-brushed as they are. The slightly unruly, improvised look in some of the photos from New York no doubt has something to do with the excitement and uncertainty of rushing to get on stage for the opening performance of a new musical we ought to call The Empire (State) of Love. One might hope, though, that something of that unruliness will persist even as the novelty of same-sex marriage wears off, in New York and elsewhere. For those who would insist that marriage will change (for the better) once queers get hold of it, the signs of difference and disruption in these images are encouraging: State-sanctioned love doesn't make us more human. We make state-sanctioned love more queer. Pretty to think so, isn't it?

As we pause here in that happy interlude that comes after the first weddings and before the first divorce, yes, my darlings, Roxie's World raises a glass and a paw to the idea that queer love can survive anything, even marriage. Congratulations to all of those who took the plunge this week. May your landings be soft and your love as stubborn as an old queen trying to get the bartender's attention at last call. Peace out and mazel tov!

(Niagara Falls [via] all decked out [maybe] for same-sex marriage.)

Ruby's Worlds

2011-07-21T14:09:00.002-04:00

The heartwarming story of Sister Ruby's journey from a Missouri puppy mill to a Maryland pleasure palace is now up on the American Fox Terrier Rescue website. It includes photos even the Moms have never seen of the new embodied dog of Roxie's World shortly after her liberation, late last November, from a life of confinement and forced breeding. (Ruby was called "Sissy" by the angels who rescued her, so her transitional name was "Sister Ruby.") You'll also find a little piece that Moose wrote to let readers know how Ruby's adjustment to life with a ridiculously large backyard and a couple of besotted humans is going. Shorter version: The poor kid is coping. Somehow.

On their recent road trip to the midwestern Land of the Moosians, the Moms -- in that way they have of pretending that dogs talk -- imagined that their adorable little companion kept asking from the backseat of the car, "We're not going through Missouri, are we? 'Cause I really don't want to go through Missouri!" -- As if she were a canine Louise ordering Thelma to find a way to get to Mexico without going through Texas. "Not to worry, Ruby-doo," Goose assured her. "We won't be going through Missouri, ever!"

Sometimes late at night, curled up on the couch, Moose gazes into Ruby's big, brown, trusting eyes and tries to imagine Missouri and the first three years of her sweet girl's life. She wants to reconstruct that missing time and space in order more fully to understand the present -- the way Ruby will freeze in her tracks when she encounters a more dominant dog, for example, or the deep, instantaneous attachment she can form to a new toy. In this desire, Moose is not unlike Denver in Toni Morrison's Beloved, who longs to know the story of her family's origins at Sweet Home, the Kentucky plantation from which Sethe, her then enslaved mother, escaped while pregnant with her. "Denver, you can't never go there," Sethe urgently insists, after explaining Sweet Home's persistence in what she calls rememory. "Never. Because even though it's all over -- over and done with -- it's going to always be there waiting for you. That's how come I had to get all my children out. No matter what."

Is it fair to compare a puppy mill to a slave-holding plantation? Probably not, though we think the analogy points to certain brutal economic similarities between the two spaces. In any case, we hope you'll grant the validity of Moose's desire for knowledge of a beloved other's possibly traumatic past. Tell me your story, we say to those we love. Tell me your story, so that I may know you fully and we can share whatever burden there may be from your past. Tell me your story, and I will tell you mine, and in the telling we will become something new.

Or we will write a new story, in a new place, a better place, a hotter than hell place that is not hell but Paradise. With smoothies.

It's the American dream, darlings, as revised and realized by the Department of Middle-Aged Dykes With Dogs. Don't be jealous. Every breed has a rescue organization. If you love a particular breed and are ready to expand the size of your pack, get in touch with a rescue group. Or contact a shelter in your area. As Lucinda Williams says in the song we embedded here the other day, "You were born to be loved" -- and you were born to love. What the heck are you waiting for?

* * *

Dedicated, with thanks and admiration, to the good folks of American Fox Terrier Rescue, who brought the sweetest critter on dog's earth into our lives, and to all the friends who have so kindly welcomed Ms. Ruby into our extended pack. We love running with each and all of you, actually and virtually.

Smoothie/Ruby Tuesday

2011-07-19T13:40:00.002-04:00

(Photo Credit: Moose, 7/19/11)

Moose couldn't take it anymore. Over the past couple of weeks, she's been subjected to a barrage of ads for McDonald's new mango-pineapple Real Fruit Smoothie. The commercials are peppy and fun and summery, and the fruit is so luscious and juicy-looking that Moose's mouth would water every time she saw the ad. Damn, she'd think to herself, I want me a mango-pineapple smoothie! Finally, instead of driving to McDonald's, which she has not done in several decades, she ordered Goose to pick up a mango or two on a recent trip to the grocery store. This morning, she decided today would be the day she made her very first smoothie.

Yep, kids, this is what passes for culinary adventure as the household moves forward on the effort to maintain Moose 2.0: A Considerably Less Broad Broad Than She Used to Be. You want high-fat food porn? Photos of risotto swimming tantalizingly in a sea of butter and white wine? Recipes that call for half a pound of ricotta without offering the nutri-Nazi qualifier part-skim? Then head on over to our pal Comrade PhysioProf, whose latest nom de plume is the apt Comradde RisottoProffe. He'll keep you fat and happy or permit you to indulge in some safe full-fat voyeurism if that is what floats your boat.

Here in Roxie's World, however, the name of the game is keeping the points low and the satisfaction high, which means, ladies and non-ladies, that it's time to start your blenders!

Moose did some surfing around the intertoobz looking for a smoothie recipe, just enough to realize that you don't really need a recipe. Here's what she ended up doing, and the results were deelish:

Moose's Mango-Pineapple Smoothie:

1. Peel and chop a mango. Toss into blender.
2. Chop a nice thick slice of pineapple. Toss into blender.
3. Slice a banana. Toss into blender.
4. Dump 3/4 cup of non-fat vanilla yogurt into blender. (We've been enjoying Brown Cow yogurt lately. Just sayin'.)
5. Dump about a cup of ice into blender.
6. Put lid on blender, press "smoothie" button, and pulverize the heck out of that healthy $hit.
7. Pour into a clear glass, photograph for posterity, and present to skeptical partner, who, a few minutes later, will squeal happily, "I feel like Popeye eating his spinach!"

So, what's (not) cooking in your blenders, nutri-Nerds? Moose brought some of the season's first peaches home from the market on Sunday, so we're betting tomorrow's frothy mix will include a fuzzy orb or two. What do you do to sex up your smoothies? Are there any fans of flaxseed out there? Debauchees of dates? We're new to this liquid breakfast business, so we are eager to hear your thoughts.

Meantime, since it's Tuesday, here's a little glimpse of Ruby, whose been spending quite a bit of time curled up with a new toy the Shy One brought for her the other evening. It's a pheasant, and Ms. Ruby has been obsessive in her devotion, spending long hours in her crate and refusing to let anyone else get near the adored stuffed critter. She loves it so much she hasn't even disemboweled it to get at its squeaker yet:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 7/19/11)

Ruby Tuesdays are about songs, so here's one from Lucinda Williams, who the Moms will be seeing tonight at Wolf Trap. Technically, it's not a Ruby song, since that name is never uttered, but it's a beautiful song about how all dog's children are born to be loved, which means it has a special resonance for a girl rescued from the cold cruelness of a puppy-mill and transported to the paradise of Roxie's world. Sing it, Lucinda, and remember, darlings: You weren't born for nothing either. Peace out.

Dear Abby

2011-07-14T12:50:00.000-04:00

Would you please come home and raise the debt ceiling? Yours sincerely, US of A

Because, you know, I'm pretty sure she could.

(Photo Credit: Martin Meissner, Associated Press, via. AP caption: United States forward Abby Wambach celebrates after scoring the winning goal against France on Wednesday.)

Girl's got a good head on her shoulders, after all, which is more than you can say for the dudebros in DC these days.

(Photo Credit: Associated Press, via.)

Sigh. We are officially soccer-illiterate here in Roxie's World, but you know we love us any estrogen-fueled spectacle of power and grace, so we are all in for Abby and her gang o' high-kicking gal pals over there in Germany battling for the World Cup. You go, girls, and when it's over get your firm behinds home and get to work fixing any of the several. pickles. our nation. is currently in.

Meantime, whatever it is you do to win a soccer game, we hope you will do it supremely well against Japan on Sunday. Use your heads, wimmin. Right? Right! Go, team, go!

And, you, dudebros, being all preening and stupid and strateger-ic: Straighten up, fly right, and pay the bills. The clock is ticking, and your nation is sick of the dithering. Shut up and make a deal. Use your heads, if you can manage to pull them out of your un-firm behinds.

Yours sincerely, US of A

Blogger Babes Bare All!

2011-07-12T15:01:00.000-04:00

Apparently, it's Show-and-Tell Day in the academic feminist blogosphere. Missed the memo? Consider this your invitation to participate!

Our dear friend Historiann, whom we have never met in the dimension commonly referred to as Real Life, posted photographs this morning of herself and her husband frolicking in the Colorado wilderness. These are, as far as we know, the first images Historiann's readers have ever seen of the Real People behind the blog. To our surprise and considerable disappointment, Historiann is not wearing chaps or brandishing a lasso in the picture. On the other hand, the head-and-shoulders shot proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that our favorite tenured cowgirl has a very fine neck and a regal way of looking at a camera, which somehow does not surprise us. Think Audrey Hepburn, only outdoorsy-er.

Not to be outdone by our blog pal's sudden penchant for self-revelation, the Beach Blanket Bingo players of Roxie's World are pleased to offer this bodacious image of Moose last week in South Haven, MI, looking for all the world as if she is ready for the swimsuit competition in next year's Ms. Blogosphere pageant:

(Photo Credit: Little Sister of the Moosians, 7/4/11)

Yes, as a matter of fact, we have lost our minds. It could be the heat has gotten to us. It's hot as heck here in the national capital area today. We thought this photo might help local readers cool off. Also, we thought you'd get a kick out of seeing the reading glasses placed strategically in front of the giant sunglasses, not to mention the kind of high-octane reading material Moose takes with her to the beach. (Look, she had her Kindle with her, too, and actually read a screen or two of Sherry Turkle's Alone Together before nodding off in the sun!) We also felt it was important to immortalize the ridiculous floral bathing suit Moose was forced to buy out in New Mexico when she showed up at a hot springs spa that used to be sex-segregated and clothing-optional. That she is still wearing the suit nearly two years later proves that cheapness triumphs over vanity in la famillle Moosianne.

Mostly, though, we offer this shockingly revealing image as a way of commemorating the six-month anniversary of Moose's Lifestyle Adjustment Program. It's true. Six months ago today she walked into a meeting, stepped on a scale, and made a commitment to eating less, moving more, and feeling better. Tomorrow, she will walk back into a meeting, step on that same scale, and declare herself on maintenance. An important part of the journey will be over. A victory will be (sensibly) celebrated, and a new stage, more challenging in many ways for Moose than the effort to take off weight, will begin. To mark that transition, we offer a photograph, not to brag, shame, or even necessarily inspire, but simply to acknowledge and to remember: For one feisty middle-aged broad, this is what feeling better looks like.

Peace out, darlings. Be well.

The Party's Over

2011-07-11T16:55:00.001-04:00

(Photo Credit: Moose, 7/10/11)

We don't usually title Moose's humble photographic efforts, to which this blog's loyal readers are regularly subjected, but The Party's Over seems an apt name for this lucky shot of Ms. Ruby mesmerized by the balloons left over from the 80th birthday bash thrown for the Mother of the Moosians on Saturday. Ruby bounded out of her mobile home on Sunday morning and went straight to the festive bunch of slowly sinking balloons in the living room. She watched them for awhile, then entertained herself and assorted caffeinating Moosians by experimenting with various ways of attacking them, including pouncing, swatting, and snapping at them. Eventually, some sensible person intervened to put the balloons out of reach, concerned that the embodied dog of Roxie's World might injure herself if one of them popped and forced her to ingest an inordinate amount of helium. Just in case the video below, which by some strange coinkydink Moose had stumbled across late Saturday night, is not an accurate depiction of what happens when a cute little fox terrier is forced to ingest an inordinate amount of helium (trigger warning for extreme ridiculousness and [we hope] possible fakery):

Ruby and the Moms tore themselves away from the balloons and the family and hit the road at high noon yesterday. They made it back to Roxie's World shortly after 10 PM, just in time to unpack, nuke a couple of low-fat frozen dinners, and accidentally catch the last few minutes of The Marriage Ref. Moose's verdict on the show? If the Defense of Marriage Act can't protect us from this bizarre monstrosity, what freakin' good is it? Srsly, people, if this is what civilization has come to, I think we should demand a do-over.

So, the pack is back. The trip was in every way delightful. Moose worried about gaining weight simply because she crossed the threshold of an ice cream parlor at one point and stood down wind of a heaping vat of mac 'n cheese at another. She ended up losing a couple of pounds, of course, and so is eagerly anticipating an official transition to maintenance later this week. Stay tuned for the further adventures of Moose 2.0: A Less Portly Dyke Than She Used to Be!

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the blogosphere, a smart young whippersnapper calling himself Will Danger went to see Next to Normal at KenCen and wrote a fine long post exploring what the show has to say about the affective trajectory of grief. And Historiann asks some timely questions about whether Skype interviews will eventually (or soon?) replace the ~~meat markets~~ centralized forums for academic interviewing that the conventions of the American Historical Association and the Modern Language Association have become in recent decades. Go read them, darlings, while we knock the sand out of our shoes and try to remember what exactly it was we intended to accomplish this summer. Oh, and if you really need to hear the song our post title put into your sensitive little head, click here and let Doris Day soothe your disappointed, dissipated, party-loving soul. Peace out.

By the Lake

2011-07-07T13:08:00.000-04:00

Vacay Photo/Text Essay Brought to You by Willa Cather, Because Even When We Play We Are Hard-Workin' Lit Critters in Roxie's World.

Photo/Text #1: This one goes out to our good buddy and summer reader Historiann, who will score 25 points and an extra large pisco sour if she can identify the source of the following revery upon Lake Michigan:

[le Michigan] is altogether different. It is a sea, and yet it is not salt. It is blue, but quite another blue. Yes, there are clouds and mists and sea-gulls, but -- I don't know, il est toujours pus naif.

Photo/Text #2: Here Cather supplies us with a clever title for a pic of Ms. Ruby and her cousin Scooter out for a long evening stroll beside the lake. We call it, naturellement, Shadows on the Rock:

(Photo Credits: Moose, 7/6/11)

The Moms and la Ruby are on the road for a few more days, headed south later today to gear up for a big eightieth birthday celebration for the Mother of the Moosians this weekend. Back to regular blogalicious programming soon, I promise. For now, we'll leave you with another pithy Cather quote on the particular loveliness of Lake Michigan, which Moose is so deeply delighted to have discovered once again:

[T]he great fact in life, the always possible escape from dullness, was the lake . . . . [I]t was like an open door that nobody could shut. The land and all its dreariness could never close in on you. You had only to look at the lake, and you knew you would soon be free.

We'll let Historiann tell you where that one came from, too, darlings. We've got a boat to catch! Peace out.

The Fireworks Are Hailing . . .

2011-07-04T10:28:00.000-04:00

. . . over a Little Eden slightly west of Jersey last night. Greetings from South Haven, Michigan, darlings, where the Moms and Ms. Ruby are celebrating the birth of the nation with the Baby Sister of the Moosians and several guitar-playing, shaggy-haired adolescent sweet peas. The sky is clear and the breeze is soft. We hope your particular corner of the world is as pretty as this one is today.

All photos by Moose, lying on her back on the beach, looking up through the lens of Goose's iPhone, her heart full of joy and the memories of summers past in this ever lovely place. Peace out, my pretties, and remember: It's your country, too. Make something of it.

Breaking Up With Potatoes

2011-06-27T18:00:00.000-04:00

The incredible shrinking typist of Roxie's World was disappointed but not surprised to read the news last week from a Harvard School of Public Health study suggesting that what you eat matters as much as how much you eat when it comes to maintaining a healthy weight over the long haul. That concern looms large for Moose as she gets close to the magical moment in her Lifestyle Adjustment Program when she shifts her focus from trying to take off weight to trying to keep it off. Forever. (For those of you who have been following the progress of our very own Biggest Loser, Moose has dropped 43 pounds since January. Of 2011. Yes, she is proud. And feeling really, really good.)

Anyhoo, the Harvard study analyzed "data collected over 20 years from more than 120,000 U.S. men and women in their 30s, 40s and 50s" and came to the conclusion that the mantra Moose has been repeating to herself over and over for the past five and a half months -- Eat less, move more, and you will lose weight -- is kinda true but also kinda simplistic. Yes, calories are important, so paying attention to how many you consume and how many you burn still matters. The study shows, however, that "some foods clearly cause people to put on more weight than others, perhaps because of their chemical makeup and how our bodies process them."

“All foods are not equal, and just eating in moderation is not enough," said Dariush Mozaffarian of the Harvard School of Public Health, who led the study published in last week's’s edition of the New England Journal of Medicine.

The leading culprit among foods in terms of the slow, incremental weight gains that so often add up to middle-aged girth? Poor Mr. Potato, of course. Rob Stein explains the sad news in his report on the study in WaPo:

Every additional serving of potatoes people added to their regular diet each day made them gain about a pound over four years. It was no surprise that french fries and potato chips are especially fattening. But the study found that even mashed, baked or boiled potatoes were unexpectedly plumping, perhaps because of their effect on the hormone insulin.

Stein's next paragraph focuses on the better news from the study about particular foods that seem to help keep weight off, should that happen to be your goal:

[W]hile it was no shock that every added serving of fruits and vegetables prevented between a quarter- and a half-pound gain, other foods were strikingly good at helping people stay slim. Every extra serving of nuts, for example, prevented more than a half-pound of weight gain. And perhaps the biggest surprise was yogurt, every serving of which kept off nearly a pound over four years.

Moose's first reaction to the study was to get a little wistful about her lifelong relationship with the lowly, lovely spud. Oh, potatoes, she might have said, if she were in the habit of speaking to vegetables, which, we are pleased to report, she is not, I love you so, from the bottom of my German-American heart. I remember every french fry I ate with every single Big Boy sandwich of my misspent Midwestern youth. I remember every barrel of Charles Chips I ever curled up with in front of the TV for long hours of Dark Shadows and The Secret Storm. I remember every hour I spent in the kitchen with my mother, grating piles of you to be turned into hash browns, nestled on a plate next to giant sausages. You were the faithful companions of my peripatetic childhood, the ones who whispered in my ear that food was my friend and overeating my birthright as a middle-class American kid. You were the cheap staple of grad-school vegetarianism, and later, the glorious gratin dauphinois the lord clearly meant to accompany Julia Child's beef bourguignon. Oh, potatoes, I can't even say that I wish I could quit you. It appears, however, that I should.

Her second reaction was to look around the kitchen and get a grip, realizing she had already quit potatoes, mostly, months ago, and was getting along quite well without them. Oh, nuts! Oh, yogurt! Oh, couscous! she rhapsodized. You are my new best friends, and you are better to me than potatoes ever were. With you I feel light and strong and full of energy. I have no cravings, no hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. As dog is my witness, with your help, I swear, I'll never eat potatoes again!

Well, it's possible she didn't entirely have her grip, but you know how Moose is. In any case, kids, the results of the Harvard study are worth pondering, even if you aren't prepared to go all nutri-Nazi in an effort to reach or maintain a healthy weight. The study's release follows by just a couple of weeks the launch of the USDA's latest effort to encourage healthier eating, the MyPlate campaign, which replaces the dopey food pyramid that no one ever understood or used. A WaPo story on the MyPlate rollout is here. A nice history of government nutrition guidelines, first issued in 1916, is here.

It's interesting to note that one of the government's earliest food-related initiatives was the Clean Plate Club, launched in 1917 to encourage citizens not to waste food due to limited supply during World War I. The Clean Plate Club was terminated after the war but was restarted in 1947, when food was again scarce at the end of the Depression and World War II. Moose swears there was a Clean Plate Club in her elementary school in the mid-60s in southern Indiana and blames it entirely for her inability to leave a morsel of food on her plate, ever. Goose says there was no such program in her school -- and feels no compunction at all about leaving the table with half a meal left on her plate, which may or may not prove Moose's point. Note, too, on the poster for the Clean Plate Club anchored to this paragraph that potatoes are prominent on the list of foods citizens are encouraged to eat more of as part of the war effort. Moose insists that potato-eating was still considered patriotic in southern Indiana in the 60s. Goose cannot explain why Texas appears not to have been on board with the program.

Consider this an open invitation to share stories about food, family, ideology, and your own adventures in embodiment. Was there a Clean Plate Club in your school growing up? Do you have vivid memories of being kept at the table until you had consumed everything on your plate? Have you broken up with potatoes -- or made peace with them or some other food you have loved too much? Do you think the Tea Party will manage to demonize MyPlate.gov as yet another nanny-government overreach that interferes with Americans' god-given right to have fries with that, dagnabbit? Is this blog successfully avoiding fat-shaming as we search for ways to write about these issues? We sincerely hope so, but let us know what you think.

Have at it, darlings. My skinny-a$$ed typist has to get up off it and go for a little run. Peace out, and have a healthy tomorrow. ;-)

Progressive Versus Fauxgressive

2011-06-25T11:02:00.000-04:00

A WaPo editorial on last night's passage of marriage equality in the Republican-controlled New York Senate nicely clarifies the distinction between a progressive Democrat (NY Gov. Andrew Cuomo) and a fauxgressive Democrat (MD Gov. Martin "You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy" O'Malley). Cuomo, according to the Post, fought hard for the bill, which makes civil marriage equality the law of six states and more than doubles the number of citizens who live in states that offer it: "[Cuomo] used the bully pulpit to garner public support around the state. He backed that up by using the power and prestige of the governor’s office behind the scenes. Cuomo was personally involved in securing votes until the very end."

Cuomo's high-profile activism on the issue and the legislative outcome are pretty much the opposite of what we saw in Maryland a few months ago when a marriage equality bill was up for a vote. Democrats here in the Free State control the House and Senate and occupy the governor's mansion. The Post explains how little that proved to matter for the state's LGBT citizens this spring:

The history made in New York stands in stark contrast to the disappointment in Maryland last March, when a similar effort failed. After passing the state Senate, a marriage-equality bill was referred back to committee in the House of Delegates after lawmakers who had supported the bill backed down in the face of opposition. Among those reneging on their commitment were Del. Tiffany T. Alston (D-Prince George’s) and Del. Sam Arora (D-Montgomery County), who got elected campaigning on the issue. For his part, Gov. Martin O’Malley (D) supported the marriage-equality bill. He even lobbied some legislators behind the scenes. But as we learned in New York, legislation of this significance needs more than rhetorical hand-holding by the governor. It needs determined leadership.

Rhetorical hand-holding versus determined leadership, platitudes versus action, bull$hit versus the bully pulpit, losing versus winning: Yep, that sums up the difference between the fauxgressive and the progressive Democrat about as well as anything we've seen. We wish we could believe that You, Sir, Are No Jack Kennedy would aspire to be the latter rather than the former as he moves forward in his promising political career, but we're not holding our breath waiting for the tiger to change his stripes. O'Malley, we have learned, is less of a tiger than a pretty but ineffective kitty cat when it comes to tough fights on hot-button issues.

Thank you, Gov. Cuomo, for showing how it's done, and congratulations, New York, for bending the arc of the moral/legal universe a little further in the direction of justice here in the Weirdly Divided States of America. We heart you today and always.

(Photo Credits: Top: Nathaniel Brooks for the New York Times [via]; New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo signs same-sex marriage bill late last night in Albany. Bottom: via; Maryland Gov. Martin O'Malley looks up, in hope, perhaps, of finding his missing courage.)

Celebrating Our Sister Bloggers

2011-06-24T14:18:00.001-04:00

If my typist had the tech skill required to create speech balloons, there'd be one above this photo that said,

Having a swell time in Northampton -- Wish you were here!

(Photo Credit: Willa Cather Archive [Image Gallery]; Louise Pound and Willa Cather at the University of Nebraska, 1890s.)

Pardon the radio silence, kids. The moms have been away at Cather Camp for the past several days, making their debut as co-authors and collaborators with a paradigm-shifting (that's academic-speak for, No one in the audience audibly snored) plenary address called "Cather, Dickinson, and Sexuality." The conference was focused on novelist Willa Cather's roots in and connections to the nineteenth century (she was born in 1873), so Moose seized the opportunity to get Goose to pay her back for delivering a paper at last year's Emily Dickinson shindig in Oxford. They did indeed have a swell time hanging out with old and new friends on the bucolic campus of Smith College, which is as crawling with fiercely adorable young dykes as their fevered, middle-aged imaginations had hoped it would be. Moose used the photo above of Cather and her college crush Louise Pound to illustrate a point about how different literary history would look if women's affective and creative relationships were brought into the picture. (Goose had a similar Dickinson image, but we are not at liberty to show that to you yet -- Stay tuned!)

Anyhoo, while Roxie's World was as deserted as the executive suite at Gingrich campaign headquarters, some of our very favorite blog pals were hard at work, making news and waves and paradigm-shifting announcements of their own. We'll toot their horns as a way of getting back to regular programming. Go read 'em, and tell 'em Roxie sent ya.

Tenured Radical announced on Wednesday that she's pulling up her virtual stakes and moving to the big stage of The Chronicle of Higher Education. We couldn't be happier for TR and look forward to seeing her wise-cracking, professionally savvy self shaking up and queering up the sometimes stodgy Chron. We are also crossing paws, fingers, and a variety of other appendages in hopes that her great and powerful blogroll will migrate with her, on account of we totally heart the hits we get by way of her influential sidebar. Love you, TR. Need you. Mean it.
Meanwhile, in today's New York Times, our favorite queer legal eagle Katherine Franke, who runs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law at Columbia (and its blog) has an op-ed bravely arguing that marriage will be a mixed blessing for same-sex couples if it means losing some of the rights that have been gained for unmarried domestic partners and effectively forcing "people to marry — whether they be gay or straight — to have their committed relationships recognized and valued." It's a great piece and a timely one, as New York seems poised to become the sixth state in the nation to offer civil marriage to same-sex couples. Of course, as we learned in Maryland recently, there is a world of political difference and distance between being poised to become and actually being a state that offers complete marriage equality. We look forward to seeing what happens in Albany, but in the meantime we recommend reading Franke's op-ed as a way of saying, again, Be careful what you wish for, darlings. I mean, yes, equality is swell -- but compulsory marriage? Uh, not so swell, if you ask us. And you should.
Finally, speaking of surprising news of a queer sort, our beloved blog buddy Historiann, who recently publicly confessed to being a breeder, has now announced that she has gone gay! We are delighted, of course, to welcome her to the fold and the team. We even offered to declare her male husband an honorary lesbian so she could continue to keep company with him while pursuing her new ~~lifestyle choice~~ sense of queer alliance and comradeship. We always knew, girlfriend, and we are here to help. Now, tuck in that flannel shirt before we slide your pisco sour across the bar. We're running a classy joint here, you know! (Srsly, kids, go read that gone gay post. It's hilarious, but it and the comment thread that follows raise some great questions about identity and conversation online.)

Paws up to all of our wonderful sister bloggers and to you, our loyal readers, who have been so patient with our sporadic attention lately. It has been and will continue to be a busy summer, but we will do our best to keep you up to date on how the view looks from the ridiculously large backyard of Roxie's World. Peace out, and a sweet summer weekend to you and yours.

RIP Clarence Clemons

2011-06-18T23:03:00.000-04:00

(Photo Credit: Scott Audette, Reuters [via])

Clarence Clemons, aka "the Big Man," incomparable saxophonist in Bruce Springsteen's E Street Band, has died from complications of a stroke he suffered last weekend. Here's how the news was announced in Jersey. And New York. And here's a statement Springsteen put up on his website:

Clarence lived a wonderful life. He carried within him a love of people that made them love him. He created a wondrous and extended family. He loved the saxophone, loved our fans and gave everything he had every night he stepped on stage. His loss is immeasurable and we are honored and thankful to have known him and had the opportunity to stand beside him for nearly forty years. He was my great friend, my partner, and with Clarence at my side, my band and I were able to tell a story far deeper than those simply contained in our music. His life, his memory, and his love will live on in that story and in our band.

The E Street Band was, is, and ever shall be the official house band of Roxie's World. We are devastated. That is all. Except, of course, for this (a sublime Clemons sax solo starts at 4:20):

Peace out, darlings. And play on.

Truth in Blogging

2011-06-13T18:18:00.000-04:00

For some reason I feel compelled to remind you today that I am not really a dead dog. You get that, don't you, intelligent reader that you are, but you click back in here regularly, perhaps because you are bored senseless in your cubicle and find some mild amusement in our quirky mix of commentary, sophomoric humor, and randomly appropriated images? You understand, though, that the "I" who speaks here is a Dickinsonian "supposed person" -- er, dead dog -- and not an actual one, right? (We will save for another day -- or blog -- the vexing question of whether any and every speaker is not in some sense a supposed rather than an actual person. That conundrum is way beyond my pay grade.)

Anyhoo, kids, just wanted to clear that up. Truths are being announced or exposed all over the blogosphere this week, and we didn't want anyone to think we were trying to pull the wool over anybody's eyes. We take seriously our blogger's oath to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, with stretchers occasionally thrown in when the truth is insufficiently entertaining. We also have strong opinions on the matter of pseudonymity in blogging (enunciated here), and we don't blame readers for getting ticked off when some a$$hat abuses the venerable tradition of writing under a fake name, even if he thinks his cause justifies it. My typist taught Riverbend's Baghdad Burning, the book based on a pseudonymous blog produced in occupied Iraq, in her blogging class, as a way of exploring with students both the power and the ethical complexity of pseudonymity in online worlds. Bloggers and other users of social media are risking their (real) lives to tell the (true) story of events in Iraq, Syria, and elsewhere. For them, pseudonymity is an essential tool aimed at assuring their survival. It's disheartening, to say the least, to see some white straight American guy undermine all that brave work by deciding to pose as a gay Syrian woman as a way to bring attention to issues he felt strongly about. Oh, dude, you so went about it in the wrong way. And you so don't get the difference between an apology and a mansplanation.

So, anyway, as I was saying: I am not a dead dog -- or the living mother of a living child or a gay girl in Damascus. I am just a -- Oh, never mind, my darlings. That is all for now. Carry on.

Advice from the Big Dawg

2011-06-11T17:52:00.001-04:00

(Image Credit: Jack Ohman, The Oregonian, 6/9/11)

No, darlings, there is nothing at all funny about the ridiculous case of the congressman lost in the Twitterverse, but my typist still chuckled over her WaPo this morning when she saw the above cartoon. The sexual/textual relations joke has been made before. If you google the phrase "I did not have textual relations with that woman," you get tons of hits related to former Detroit mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, who had, among many other moral and legal impairments, a bit of a text-messaging problem. Anyhoo, we like the way the revision of Clinton's famous denial works in this instance, because the cartoon succinctly acknowledges Clinton as patron saint of the modern sex scandal, while marking the shift from what already feels like a remote universe in which what mattered was the biological evidence of sexual activity (the DNA left on Monica Lewinsky's blue dress) to the wacky world of Weiner-gate, in which fools are done in by the merely textual traces they leave of their junk. Have we reached the place where bodies matter only in that they are what we use to produce ourselves as texts -- images and films that we eagerly publish, apparently oblivious to the potential harm, to ourselves and others, that might result from doing so?

Not quite, my pretties. This dead dog is here to tell you that bodies still matter, which might help to explain why we can't let go of Bill Clinton. Love him or hate him, Clinton still reminds us of energies and appetites rooted in the body. They can get us into a world of trouble, those incorrigible desires, but they also make us look and feel and be alive. Clinton survived the humiliation of a politically motivated investigation of his sex life at least in part because, for all his denials and apologies, he never seemed ashamed of the deep passions that got him into such a mess. We loved him for that, even if we deplored what his recklessness did to his wife and his presidency (and, believe me, we were furious with him over both of those things back in 1998). Whatever his failings, Clinton got through his ordeal by relying on a joie de vivre that fueled his determination to stay in office when everyone in Washington had declared him toast. We have a hunch that same joie helped repair the damage he had done to his marriage, though far be it from us to speculate as to why or how Bill and Hill have stuck it out together when so. many. other. political. couples. have fallen apart.

We can't let go of Bill Clinton because we don't want to. Thirteen years after he wagged his finger at us and insisted he hadn't done anything "inappropriate" with Monica Lewinsky, we still need his passion, his resilience, his heart, his Aw, shucks, babe, it's good to be a little bad from time to time, isn't it? spirit. That's why he finds his way into every story about a politician with a self-inflicted junk problem. Clinton owns that story, and we are all still reading it, with bated breath, waiting to see how it ends.

Disclaimer: This post in no way condones or promotes infidelity, meanness, or the photographing of one's private parts. Srsly. Swear to dog. No junk photos, please. Why? We'll let Gina Barreca explain.

Sated in San Fran

2011-06-09T16:14:00.000-04:00

Being a culinary followup to yesterday's post on the Moms' just concluded trip to one of the finest cities on dog's earth. Because even the most committed Lifestyle Adjusters dine in style when they spend time in the food-fabulous town formerly known as Yerba Buena.

The Plan: Eat, drink, and bond for four nights and three days while exploring San Francisco without the monumental distraction of a major professional obligation to get in the way of the fun.

The Players: Moose and Goose, plus the Sister, Brother, and Sister-in-Law of the Goosians.

Base Camp for the Adventure: Hotel Monaco on Geary Street, which we would recommend even if it didn't welcome dogs, but it does! Plus: Free coffee and tea every morning and a wine reception every evening! Oh, and a goldfish in your room if you selfishly left your dog at home but still want to have a pet around!

Where We Ate: Boulevard, the Slanted Door, Poggio (Sausalito), Sears Fine Food (breakfasts), Sam's Grill, Barbara's Fishtrap (Half Moon Bay), Sutro's at the Cliff House.

Best Bites: Goose loved everything she put in her mouth, including the cute little Swedish pancakes from Sears, but she was especially impressed by the cellophane noodles with green onion and dungeness crab meat at the Slanted Door, duck breast roasted in pancetta at Boulevard, and the ahi tuna tartare at Cliff House. Moose was determined to enjoy food without seriously sabotaging five months of strenuous dietary discipline, so her choices were a little more restrained than Goose's (and she logged several miles on the treadmill at the hotel), but she ate well and felt good doing it. She loved the salad with grilled calamari she had at Poggio as well as the halibut with cilantro, lemongrass, and kaffir lime she had at the Slanted Door. Oh, and the salmon in whole-grain mustard sauce with celeriac puree at the Cliff House was pretty yummy, too.

Bottom line? We didn't have a bad meal the whole trip. Sam's Grill was underwhelming food-wise, but the great service and the stepping-into-olden-times vibe of the place made up for that disappointment.

Here are some photo highlights of the culinary part of the adventure:

Slanted Door: The aforementioned halibut is in the foreground (two orders); that's sauteed baby spinach and asparagus with king trumpet mushrooms in the background.

Barbara's Fishtrap: Dungeness crab louie salad tasted as fresh and wonderful as it looks.

Sutro's at the Cliff House: Ravioli with an arugula and walnut pesto that was good but not as great as the tuna tartare. We didn't have a chance to snap a shot of the tuna before an overly zealous waiter mixed all the artfully arranged ingredients together, so this will have to do.

Sutro's at the Cliff House: The dining room at sunset. Comradde PhysioProffe trashed the joint in a comment on the previous post, but we're thinking maybe he hasn't visited since a recent renovation. Try it again, my friend -- Looks great, tastes better! And if you dine on a Tuesday night, you can sip a fine bottle of wine for half off the usual price!

A good time was had by all, lovelies. We hope your summers are off to a similarly delicious start, whether you are combing a beach somewhere or shopping for your next girlfriend at the Mother of All History Conferences or toiling away in some dusty archive. Leave us a little postcard in comments to let us know what you've got planned for the sultry summer of 2011. The denizens of Roxie's World care deeply about everything that's on your plate, too. Bone appétit, my pretties.

Spotted in San Fran

2011-06-08T15:49:00.000-04:00

In Which It is Learned that One of the World's Great Cities is Even Greater When There Aren't Ten Thousand English Profs Roaming Its Streets Searching for Free Drinks and Cheap Food Fabulous Enough to Merit a Facebook Status Gloat

Spot #1: On the top of Nob Hill, the last elegant woman in America sits on a park bench not worrying that something she posted on Twitter is going to get her in a boat load of trouble:

Spot #2: When dogs start running around the park unleashed and soaking wet, the last elegant woman in America makes a dignified exit and leans gently against a lamp post while waiting for a light to change. Perhaps she fondly recalls the (less elegant?) days when she worked this corner:

Spot #3: Why, look -- Someone has gotten the crazy idea that if you want support for public higher education you have to ask for it! Who'd a thunk it? Way to go, SFSU:

Spot #4: Oh, look, off in the distance, a pretty bridge! Neat, let's have dinner:

(Photo Credits: Moose, 6/5-7/11)

Sorry for the lack of commentary, kids, but the typist has a plane to catch. See you on the other side, darlings!

Dogs For Choice

2011-06-04T14:19:00.000-04:00

Well, will wonders never cease? The new kid – the embodied dog of Roxie’s World – is ready to make her first political statement. Suffice it to say, I – the spirit dog of Roxie’s World – heartily approve Ms. Ruby’s message:

(Photo Credit: Moose, 6/3/11)

Of course dogs in general, being sensible, freedom-loving critters, are pro-choice, but sweet Ruby is, well, like a dog with a bone on this particular issue, having been forcibly bred lord knows how many times during the three years and two months of her life she spent in a Missouri puppy mill – Bow-schwitz, as Moose insists on calling it – before she came to live with the moms. She knows that no being can be called free if it lacks reproductive autonomy: the right to choose whether or not to have sex, bear offspring, and tend to those offspring as one’s own. What is the difference between Bow-schwitz and South Dakota or Georgia these days? Not much, Ms. Ruby declares.

Want to meet some other pro-choice dogs and a couple of anti-dog/pro-choice cats? Check out Dogs For Choice, which we stumbled upon by way of the critter-loving, gyno-affirming Melissa McEwan of Shakesville.

Have a lovely weekend, darlings, and, whether you’ve got two legs or four, we hope you will fight for reproductive choice – doggedly. Start by clicking here and giving the good folks at Planned Parenthood a shekel or two. With all the woman-hating, sex-phobic dipsticks that have taken power in the states these days, Planned Parenthood could use all the love and money you can spare. Peace out.

Ruby Tuesday

2011-05-31T12:18:00.001-04:00

Or, Songs in the Key of Ruby, Part Deux: Dream on Me Edition

Last week, we launched a series of posts aimed at "exploring the colorful cultural heritage of the new dog in Roxie's World, the adorable Ms. Ruby, whose name, with its sassy, slutty connotations, has figured into many a crooner's tune. Really -- Lots of them!"

Today, we offer the second installment in the series with a smackdown between the glorious Ray Charles and the (to us) obscure Uncle Walt's Band on the mellifluous "Ruby," the theme from a 1952 film, Ruby Gentry, starring Charlton Heston and Jennifer Jones. The song was composed by Heinz Roemheld, with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. It's a dreamy, haunting sort of song that makes you want to take a pretty woman by the hand and lead her out onto the dance floor for some suave cheek-to-cheek action while a tuxedo-clad waiter brings a couple of fresh dry martinis to your little round table. That is definitely the vibe conjured by Charles' smooth-as-silk version:

Uncle Walt's Band plays it a little more down-homey, but their take on the song is also easy on the ears. It'll make you want to take a pretty woman by the hand and lead her out onto the dance floor while some dude in a tee-shirt brings a couple of longnecks and some fresh peanuts to your table:

Which do you prefer, music lovers? And what are your all-time favorite songs or other pop-cultural tributes to critters named Ruby? It's the first day of summer school, and the new kid in Roxie's World has a lot to learn. Help us teach the young dog some new tricks about herself!

(Many thanks to the devoted but previously unknown reader who de-lurked to send us the Uncle Walt's Band version of "Ruby." We appreciate your dedication and your musical taste. And the Texans among us are delighted to discover a hippy band that recorded a live album at Austin's fabulous Waterloo Ice House. Thanks for reading -- and writing!)

Act Your Age

2011-05-28T14:12:00.001-04:00

Lede of the Day: She is 74 years old, and she is ripped.

Photo of the Day (Or, Visual Proof that the Lede of the Day Is Fully Justified):

(Photo Credit: Marvin Joseph, Washington Post. Wa Po caption: [Ernestine] Shepherd instructs a body-building class in Baltimore. 5/29/11. Full photo gallery here.)

Tomorrow's Wa Po magazine has a cluster of features on women and aging, including DeNeen Brown's profile of Ernestine Shepherd, who was a self-described couch potato into her mid-50s, when she and her late sister Mildred started working out together in response to weight gain. Twenty years later, Shepherd holds the Guinness World Record as the oldest female bodybuilder in the world and tells classes full of huffing and puffing students decades younger than she is that, "Age is nothing but a number." Point taken, girlfriend.

Read the story before you tuck into that vat of Memorial Day potato salad you're planning to devour this weekend. It's mostly feel-good, female-affirmational stuff, but a) what's wrong with that? and b) the story also has the poignant subtext of the relationship between the two sisters. Of the other pieces in the cluster, the commentaries on aging while female by four women of different ages (the youngest being 33) are a little too full of lines like "Groomed eyebrows are an absolute key" to be worth our time, but, hey, wevs, wimmin. Naomi Wolf weighs in with an essay aimed at demolishing the myth that women experience aging as a process of existential loss tied to changes in physical appearance by asserting that she and the women she admires are doing just fine and the men in her social set who bring much younger trophy chicks to dinner parties are looked upon with pity rather than envy these days. 'K, Naomi, thanks for clearing that up for us.

Ernestine Shepherd, we do hereby declare you our Feisty Old Broad of the Holiday Weekend. Thank you for your chiseled abs and your sweaty persistence and your dedication to the dream you shared with your beloved sister. Long may you run -- and lift and squat and sculpt and teach. PAWS UP to you from the hard-working, lifestyle-adjusting middle-aged broads of Roxie's World.

(Photo Credit: Marvin Joseph, Washington Post. Wa Po caption: [Ernestine Shepherd] runs at least 10 miles every day in Druid Hill Park in Baltimore.)

Peace out, darlings. Wherever you go and whatever you do, may the official start of your summer be sun-drenched and pleasure-filled.

Songs in the Key of Ruby

2011-05-24T10:38:00.000-04:00

Grades are in. Let's dance!

To honor the official conclusion of the Semester That Would Not Die (and Is, In Some Tedious Yet Important Respects, Still. Not. Over), we do hereby inaugurate a new series dedicated to exploring the colorful cultural heritage of the new dog in Roxie's World, the adorable Ms. Ruby, whose name, with its sassy, slutty connotations, has figured into many a crooner's tune. Really -- Lots of them! We'll make our way through as many as we can before, you know, we forget we launched the project and turn to our usual summer subjects of food, movies, and travel.

"Rock 'n Roll Ruby" is a little ditty written by Mr. Johnny Cash in 1955 and recorded by Warren Smith in 1956. (Read the story about Cash handing the song off to Smith and the band, The Snearly Ranch Boys, at the Cotton Club in West Memphis, AR, here.) We especially like this song because in this instance Ruby is not a slut or a siren but the source of a prodigious energy that captivates the crowd in the juke joint and "satisfies [the] soul" of her male companion. She can't not dance, and once she starts her joyous rockin', we scream for more as a way of tapping into those vital energies in our own uptight selves. Ah, sweet Ruby, how my soul needs what you reach in me!

We'll pause here for 2:54 to give you a chance to brighten up your Tuesday morning with some toe-tapping rockabilly fun. Ready? Set? Click!

Groovy, yes? For purposes of comparison, take a listen to Cash's stripped down, country version, which we also quite like:

Rock out, little darlings, and, whatever you've got to do today, here's hoping it satisfies your soul.

"Please Don't Settle for Happiness"

2011-05-18T21:50:00.001-04:00

Please don't settle for happiness. It's not good enough, Nobel laureate Toni Morrison said in her remarks to graduates this past Saturday at Rutgers University (graduate alma mater of both the English profs of Roxie's World, btw). “Of course you deserve it," she went on to explain, "but if that’s all you have in mind -- happiness -- I want to suggest to you that personal success devoid of meaningfulness, free of a steady commitment to social justice -- that’s more than a barren life. It’s a trivial one.”

Commencement will finally be held tomorrow at QTU. We have no idea who the speaker is (oh, this guy -- are you fricking kidding me?), but we pass along Morrison's words, so much wiser than the usual graduation folderol, especially for those among our less aged readers who are about to be unleashed upon the world with their undergraduate degrees. Bless you, darlings. Go forth and do good. We are so very sorry that the world awaiting you is such an utter mess and that your prospects for gainful employment in it are so disturbingly remote, but Morrison is right: The journey will go better for you if see it as a pursuit of meaningfulness -- or of integrity or truth, the other alternatives Morrison suggests to Jefferson's emphasis on happiness -- rather than as the pursuit of something as banal and self-centered as happiness. (Morrison's critique of Jefferson's inclusion of the "pursuit of happiness" among the inalienable rights enumerated in the Declaration of Independence begins at 4:28 in the video of her address at Rutgers.)

Think about it. Do you think the waves of pro-democracy activism that have swept across the Arab world in recent months were sparked by a desire for happiness? Similarly, do you think the brave Freedom Riders who put their lives on the line fifty years ago this spring to integrate buses and trains deep in the American south did so to support the cause of happiness? (Follow that Freedom Riders link and watch that new PBS doc. It's riveting.)

We are by no means opposed to happiness, and we are pretty sure Toni Morrison isn't either. Still, we've got a hunch that happiness should be a by-product or a consequence of the pursuit of those other, loftier ideals and not the object of the pursuit itself. If you are searching for meaningfulness -- in your work, your relationships, your way of moving through the world -- then we suspect you will end up feeling happy, at least most days, if by happiness you mean feeling satisfied with the general direction of your life and energies. However, if you focus on happiness primarily and lose sight of those larger-than-self aspirations, we worry that you'll wake up some morning twenty or thirty years from now and go, "Geez, man, is this all there is?"

Don't mind us, kids. We're just grouchy old broads who get a little high-minded and tender-hearted this time of year. Here ends the sermon on the speech. We now return to our regularly scheduled grading so that all those Happy Turtles strolling across all those stages over the next couple of days can have their accomplishments certified as legit, official, and diploma-ready. Peace out, and srsly: Congratulations, graduates. Dogspeed to each and every one of you.

(Image credits: Morrison picked up here; Peanuts here.)