Going Coastal

The Sun Sets on 2008 . . .

. . . And Rises on 2009

(Photo Credit: Moose, evening, 12/31/08 and morning, 1/1/09)

The moms are ringing in the New Year at a funky, wonderful inn on the beautiful Sonoma Coast. They spent last night feasting like queens and dancing in "2009" masks and a glorious afternoon today strolling along the beach at Gualala Point talking about their hopes and dreams for the coming year. Resolutions? Yoga, writing, and pushing the Obama administration to the left.

How about you, my legions of loyal fans? What's on your hearts and minds as a new year dawns? Your friends at Roxie's World send warm wishes and virtual face licks your way. May peace, health, and dog's love be with you in 2009.

MLA 2008

(Photo Credit: Moose; Mark Hopkins Hotel, San Francisco, 12/30/08)

MLA Highlight Reel: The Good, the Bad, the Barfing

My typist has discovered that actually attending the MLA Convention leaves one precious little time for blogging about the convention. Apparently, being several states away and in a different academic field leaves one considerable time for blogging about the convention and rounding up other peoples' posting about the convention, so go visit our good friend Historiann, who has been doing an excellent job of proving that you don't have to go there to know there. (Click here, here, here, and here for reports and links.)

Meanwhile, here on the ground in San Francisco, the moms have enjoyed the usual mix of hard work, hob-nobbing, heavy drinking, and sleep deprivation that is the MLA. The fun has been a little more subdued this time around because Goose was hit by a nasty stomach bug that sidelined her for about 24 hours. It's hard to decide whether her most impressive accomplishment during the convention was tackling a terrified job candidate as she raced to a bathroom to barf and then returning to the lobby of the Hilton to schmooze as if nothing had happened or getting through two presentations on back-to-back sessions when she hadn't had a bite of food in two days. Or, wait, finding clever ways to use her new iPhone to promote her latest scholarly project. That Goose, she's a trooper and a marketing genius.

The professional highlight for Moose was having a front-row seat for the big smackdown between Stanley Fish and Judith Butler over Fish's provocative new book, Save the World on Your Own Time. (The Chronicle of Higher Ed has a report on the session, which also included Patricia Bizzell and Jonathan Culler, here.) Moose, being a keen observer of human behavior, was as fascinated by the spectacle of the session as by the substance of what anybody said, since what was said was a mostly unsurprising argument over what we mean by "the political" when we talk about politics in the classroom. For the record, Moose thinks Butler won that argument on points, because she thinks Fish, like most critics of political profs, sets up a straw man, some agenda-driven ideologue who uses the classroom as a space for recruitment to a cause. From her front-row seat, Moose had great fun watching the body language of the occasion. Fish and Butler sat next to each other on the dais -- the aging curmudgeon and the still youthful-looking theory diva. He looked out at the audience with bemusement as the other speakers took their politely delivered shots. She made occasional sidelong glances in his direction and looked out at the audience with a gaze that seemed serene or studiously non-reactive. Or both. Moose happened to be sitting with a friend who knows Butler, so when the session was over she was delighted to have a chance, at long last, to meet the Girl Who Upset the Apple Cart of Gender and discover that she is, in fact, an incredibly warm, down-to-earth person. How cool is that, kids?

The highlight for today is that the MLA is over and Goose woke up with some semblance of an appetite, declaring she wanted Corn Flakes for breakfast. As you may gather from the photo on this post, room service at the Mark Hopkins had only Rice Krispies to offer in the way of Cereals We Remember from Childhood and Long to Have When Our Tummies Are Recovering from Icky Disturbances, but she has eaten, and now it's time for the moms to hit the streets of one of the world's queerest, most fabulous cities. No, they can't get married, but they can sure as heck have some fun, and that's what they're going to do. Tomorrow: Off to the Sonoma Coast to ring in the new year on the mighty Pacific. Peace out.

PS: Blog pal Jon Swift has posted his round-up of Best Blog Posts of 2008 (Chosen by the Bloggers Themselves). Roxie's World is proud to have contributed to this venture, with our favorite political post of the year, "Hillary: A Valediction," which we wrote in early March when it appeared that Hillary Clinton might be driven from the primary race. We were wrong on the timing, but, we think, right on the emotional/political significance of Clinton's race for the White House. Head over to Modest Jon's blog and check out some of the self-selected greatest hits of the blogosphere for 2008. It's been one helluva year, and somebody somewhere was blogging every amazing moment of it. Don't miss a click.

California Christmas

(Photo Credit: Courage Campaign)

Sorry to mess with your holiday buzz again, kids, but my typist stumbled across this community photo project aimed at putting faces on the 18,000 California couples who face the threat of forcible divorce as a result of Prop 8. Forcible divorce. Is it me, or does that phrase sound just a little Romanian to you, too? Click over to the Courage Campaign, and take a look at some of the families Ken Starr would like to de-legitimize. Just make sure you've got a hankie handy and maybe an extra shot of bourbon for your eggnog.

Happy Holidays from all of us in Roxie's World. Here's hoping that the sweet-faced kids gathered around your Christmas tree aren't worried that their families might get voted out of legal existence. Here's hoping that in the new year the next president of the United States will come to understand that a truly "fierce advocate" of LGBT equality would never demean that struggle by casually referring to it as one of several "certain social issues" upon which reasonable people will disagree. There is nothing reasonable about denying a class of citizens all of the rights and benefits of citizenship. We'll play the kid card on you, Mr. President-Elect. Look at the kids in this picture and try to imagine explaining to them why their mommies can't be married anymore. We'd like to hear you do that. Maybe you could bring Sasha along to help you find just the right words. Forcible divorce is not a very child-friendly expression, after all.

Hey, we're not the only grinch in the blogosphere. Tom Watson's got a little holiday pick-me-up called "George Bailey and the Darkness on the Edge of Town" that offers a grim reading of It's a Wonderful Life and its echoes in our own grim winter of economic discontent. He ends by channeling Bruce Springsteen in one of his gloomier moods, calling the Boss's "Darkness on the Edge of Town" (1978) "the Christmas carol I'm humming this week." Yikes, Tom. You need to drop by Ishmael's, the seedy yet cozy bar around the corner from the global headquarters of RW Enterprises, LLC, for some good company and a glass of something special. Maybe we could help lighten your mood. Or at least get you whistling one of Springsteen's happier tunes. "Out in the Street?"

May your days be happy and bright, my lovelies. Barring that, may the state at least not seek to intervene in your most intimate choices or take away rights it has given to you. The moms take off at the crack of dawn Saturday for the big gathering of English profs in San Francisco. Where, obviously, they will not have to waste time trying to decide whether to attend sessions or run off to the county clerk's office to get married. Lucky for you -- Instead of boring honeymoon stories, you'll get luscious SF photos, details of sybaritic meals, and the latest news on what's happening in queer studies and digital humanities. Oh, what fun!

In Praise of Gus Van Sant

(Photo Credit: Found on imdb; provenance unknown. Gus Van Sant and Sean Penn on the set of Milk.)

Attention, Please:
First Guest Post EVER on Roxie's World!

Greetings, citizens of Roxie’s World. This is qta, and I am here, at special invitation from Roxie herself, to bring you the Queer of the Year for 2008 (Non-Grrl Division). The Candy Man will no doubt be disappointed that we did not choose out Australian Olympic diving gold medalist, Matthew Mitcham for this year’s honor. It was close, and we are certainly proud of Matthew for his triumph, his skill, his dexterity, his bravery, his physique, his tears of victory, and for having his mom and his boyfriend by his side as he gave interviews. But young Matthew will have to settle for silver in this category, because director Gus Van Sant is the Queer of the Year (Non-Grrl Division).

Gus Van Sant’s quest to bring the story of Harvey Milk to the big screen began in 1992, right after his breakthrough film, My Own Private Idaho (1991). It took him 16 years to bring the project to fruition. But those 16 years of waiting paid off enormously well in 2008. Van Sant is no novice when it comes to queer film. In addition to the above mentioned My Own Private Idaho, he also directed Mala Noche (1985), Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1993), and Elephant (2003). But Milk (2008) may just be his greatest work.

This film could have gone so wrong in so many ways. It could have fallen into the standard biopic trap, but that would have been an injustice to all that Harvey Milk represents to the LGBT civil rights movement. It could have fallen into the “issue film” trap, but then it would have lost the story of the man. It could have been just a political thriller, but then it would have lost its soul. Van Sant falls into none of these traps. Instead he offers us a powerful and moving film that keeps the man, the movement, the politics, the tragedy, and the queerness of it all in splendid balance. What’s more, he makes sure to keep the film queer. It would have been so easy to play down the queer sex and politics and just shoot a deifying portrait of a slain martyr.

But Van Sant is not content to limit Harvey Milk to the status of martyr. His Milk is just a man -- but a charismatic and passionate man -- who by the age of 40 hadn’t even begun to make his mark. His Milk is a savvy and powerful politician who knew how to make the system work and had the strategic genius to make it work for his agenda. Gus Van Sant’s Harvey Milk shows us everything that is wrong about our current LGBT political movement and its players. This film is meant not only to celebrate the life of one of our greatest leaders, but also to wake us up out of our complacency. One need only look at the enormous setbacks the queer community suffered in this year's elections to see that the current LGBT political establishment is not working. By bringing Milk to the masses this year (perhaps when we needed it the most), Van Sant reminds us of how it can be done . . . and for that, Gus Van Sant is Roxie’s World’s Queer of the Year for 2008 (Non-Grrl Division).

(Comedian Wanda Sykes is Queer of the Year for 2008 [Grrl Division].)



PS from Moose: Many thanks to qta for this post and so much more. You are the Queer of the Year (Grad Student Division) for this and every year. Love and happiness to you and yours from all of us in Roxie's World.

The Dark Night

A little solstice treat for my adoring fans, because you've all been so incredibly sweet this year:

Somewhere in the dim recesses of the culinary past of the Moosians, these delightful shortbread holiday cookies had another name, but in the bawdy, chick-centric period of her early dyke-o-lescence, Moose gave them a new name that matched her gyno-sensibility. For some mysterious reason, she started calling her all-time favorite cookie "Boobs." Incredibly, the name stuck, even among the church-going Midwesterners in the family. A few years ago, when the Mother of the Moosians passed along the recipe, she had written across the top of the index card, in her excellent former schoolteacher's hand, "Mom's Boobs," which makes Moose laugh every holiday season when she pulls the recipe out of her file.

We pass the recipe along to you, but we are going to call them "Moose's Boobs," on account of Moose has made some slight adjustments in the recipe (she uses butter rather than margarine) and because, well, frankly, she's just a little creeped out by the idea of inviting you all to partake of her mother's, um, body. Hers? Oh, have at it, kids. And may the darkest night of the year find you warm and happy and surrounded by those you love. Take heart. As the light-loving father of the Moosians used to say on this night, summer's coming! Tomorrow, the days start getting longer! Peace out.

Moose's Boobs

Preheat oven to 400.

1 C. butter
3 T. sugar

1 t. almond extract
2 C. flour
1/2 t. salt

candied cherries, halved

Cream the butter and sugar together. Slowly add flour, salt, and almond extract. Mix together, but don't over-mix.

Form teaspoon-size balls. Place on cookie sheet. Press 1/2 candied cherry on top. (You can also use Hershey's Kisses, but Moose strongly prefers the candied cherries. Use a mix of red and green cherries for a festive-looking presentation on that tacky Christmas-tree platter somebody bought you when they thought there was hope of turning you into a conventional suburbanite.)

Bake for 10-15 minutes, but keep a close eye on them. They burn easily.

Yield: 30-36 cookies

Another Rev. Wrong

(Updated below.)

A Visual Representation of Reaction in Many Parts of the "Progressive" Community to the Announcement that the Rev. Rick Warren, Who Has Compared Same-Sex Marriage to Incest, Pedophilia, and Polygamy, Has Been Selected to Deliver the Invocation at the Presidential Inauguration of Barack Obama:

A Visual Representation of Reaction to That News in Roxie's World:


(Image Credits: Edvard Munch, "The Scream"; random image search on "sleeping dog")

Why so blasé, you ask? Because, my darlings, we. told. you. so.

Pam's House Blend and Shakesville have had analysis and reaction on this issue all day. Pam nicely characterizes Obama's reaction to criticism of the selection as "sucktastically ineffective." Melissa McEwan has a withering critique of the suggestion that both sides of the abortion issue or the same-sex marriage issue are equivalent when in fact they are not.

If you feel the need for a deep, cleansing puke, go read HRC president Joe Solomonese's op-ed in Wa Po, which makes us ill not because of anything he says but because we still haven't forgiven him for those triumphant e-mails the morning after election day, which took credit for Obama's victory without acknowledging the stunning disappointments on all of the ballot issues of importance to the LGBT community in the election.

Anyway, kids, we are so totally unsurprised by this news that we can't muster up any significant outrage or indignation. All we can think to say to anyone who expected Obama to be a strong advocate on LGBT issues is, Told you so, suckers.

Update: Butch PhD takes on the Warren debacle, in thunder. The piece includes a solid interview with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom. We think Rache is trying to position herself for next year's Queer of the Year (Grrl Division) in Roxie's World. Work it, girl:

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Excellence WITH Money?!?

(Image Credit: The Carnegie Corporation of New York, 12/16/08)

OMG, kids! It's just Day Two of the Excellence Without Money campaign launched by Roxie's World and blog pal Historiann, and we already have a major victory to report! (To read up on our joint effort to save public higher ed from the forces of evil and economic contraction, go here, here, and here.) What happened? The Carnegie Corporation of New York spent buckets and buckets of money to place two-page ads in Wa Po and the New York Times this morning calling upon the incoming Obama administration to intervene in the crisis of underfunding that is imperiling the nation's public higher educational system. Moose nearly spat her coffee across the breakfast nook as she looked at the letter, signed by more than 40 leaders in higher education (including William E. Kirwan, chancellor of the Queer the Turtle U system).

(Wanna know if your prez or chancellor signed the letter? To see a pdf of the ad, go here.)

The letter calls on the Obama administration to commit 5 percent of the economic stimulus package "-- in the range of $40 to $45 billion -- toward higher education" in order to "provide the stimulus that will propel the nation forward in resolving its current economic crisis" and to "lay the groundwork for competitiveness and the well-being of American families into the future." The proposal calls for the creation of block grants to states that would be administered by governors and focused on construction and renovation projects to help campuses upgrade their infrastructures and meet the rising costs of building high-tech facilities. The emphasis on construction is clearly aimed at heightening the appeal of the proposal, because such projects would generate jobs and other forms of economic activity in the communities surrounding the campuses. That's all well and good, but here's the quote that brought a tear to Moose's under-caffeinated eyes this morning:

The present economic crisis requires an investment in human capital, and graduates of public universities historically have provided most of the workforce to meet the nation's needs. After all, their innovative researchers have often invented the technologies that have fueled economic progress and enhanced America's economic competitiveness and ability to deliver high-quality health care. At the same time, public universities must remain accessible to all families, thereby providing opportunity and hope to families from all social and economic strata.

Shorter version: No money? No excellence, people! No money? No access!

Does the Carnegie letter lay the groundwork for the bailout of higher ed Moose was fantasizing about the other day? We'll leave it to the experts to make that determination, but the good news here is that higher ed is making a bold move to lobby on its own behalf during a moment of national economic crisis that could have catastrophic repercussions for institutions whose budgets were strained years before the bottom started falling out of everything. Some may quibble with a grant-making foundation spending a sizable amount of money on what are basically advertisements, but we think the urgency of the situation and the rare political opportunity afforded by a new president committed to making big changes justify the grandness of the gesture. Being published as they were on the very day that Obama's pick for education secretary was announced, the ads help to assure that higher ed will be on the radar screen as opinion-makers consider both the economic crisis and the incoming administration. (For brief reports on the ads, see Wa Po and The Chronicle of Higher Ed.)

Roxie's World gives the Carnegie Corporation a hopeful PAWS UP for seeing smoke and yelling "FIRE" rather than convening a meeting to decide whether to call it a "FIRE" or "a non-threatening heat-related event that will in no way impede normal operations on campus." It's gettin' awfully hot in here, kids. I say let's call it a FIRE and bring in the big trucks with a whole bunch of water! Peace out.