Tintern Abbey Photo Smackdown

The Challenge:  Take a picture of an overly familiar place, a place much visited, widely documented, and famous in literary history for its powers to inspire.  Find an angle or perspective that will not only avoid visual cliches but will make that overly familiar place seem unfamiliar, even to an audience of smarty-pants readers who think The Norton Anthology of English Literature is handier than a highway atlas for finding one's way around the back roads of the Welsh-English border region.  Oh, and snap that photo quickly, on account of your merry band of literary travelers has to find its way back to Cardiff to surrender a rental car and catch a train so that the good people of Wales will be safe from the threat of at least one car full of drivers careening around the countryside with someone constantly screaming, "Keep to the left!  Remember, keep to the left, ridiculous as that may seem!"

The Contestants:  Geoffrey, armed with his cute little Panasonic Lumix, and Moose, running around like the Annie Leibovitz wannabe she has always been with her Canon G9.

The Judge:  The official ex-yearbook editor of Roxie's World, Moose, who promises to be 100% objective, because, like, she's totes committed to Fairness and Truth.

Wevs, kids, here's the kind of shot that'll get you voted off this show in the first round, pretty as it is:

(Photo Credit:  Moose, 8/2/10)

Are you still awake?  Yeah, me neither.  Standard, boring tourist snap that by some miracle doesn't have two or three grouchy Germans looking for the loo strolling across the bottom of the frame.  (It's down to the left, by the way -- the loo.)  Nice, but totally insufficient for our purposes.  Next!

(Photo Credit:  Moose, 8/2/10)

Regular readers will note in this photograph the Moosian fondness for frames and for zooming in on relatively small parts of a large building or landscape as a way of capturing -- or avoiding? -- the whole.  Yep, photography for Moose is often a matter of failed synecdoches.  Oh, and if she were a better technician, you'd be able to see that there is a little white dove perched on the apex of that roof in the bottom third of the frame.  For all the photographer's limitations of skill and vision, we kinda like this shot for the repeated patterns of threes, the attention to texture, and that nice triangle of sky at the top.  In directing the viewer's attention to a particular spot, the image asks us to pause and look carefully at something we otherwise might not see.

Not bad, Moose.  Next!

(Photo Credit:  Geoffrey, 8/2/10)

Geoffrey takes a totally different strategy on this assignment, bravely seeking to capture both the epic scale of the 13th-century building and the drama of what time has taken away from this awe-inspiring space -- i.e., its roof.  Standing in the middle of what was once the edifice's great church, he looks up and captures three walls open to and reaching toward heaven, a heaven that in that particular moment looked especially appealing, with its puffy clouds and big patches of bright blue sky.  (Moments later the sky was dark, and the abbey became a different place altogether.)  Geoffrey's image is beautifully composed but also wonderfully disorienting.  It conveys immensity and loss, ambition and elegy.  The beautiful emptiness at the center of the frame perhaps recalls the secular consolations Wordsworth found in the area around the abbey, where he found "tranquil restoration" in nature.

So, who wins the Tintern Abbey coffee mug that Goose did not purchase yesterday in the gift shop?  We are giving Geoffrey the edge -- but we'll let our devoted readers weigh in before we make the final decision.  Have at it, gentle judges.  The moms and Geoffrey are in London now and off to catch a museum or three.  Hope you all are doing well and enjoying the dog days of August in your neck of the woods.  Peace out! 

Horses

She had some horses.

She had horses who called themselves, "horse."
She had horses who called themselves, "spirit," and kept
their voices secret and to themselves.
She had horses who had no names.
She had horses who had books of names . . . .

She had some horses.

She had some horses she loved.
She had some horses she hated.

These were the same horses.

-- Joy Harjo, "She Had Some Horses"

(Photos by Moose:  Wild ponies on St. David's Head, Pembrokeshire Coast National Park, Wales, 7/30/10; carousel on Cardiff Bay, 7/28/10)

In the Ruins

Pembroke Castle, 7/29/10

Bishop's Palace, St. David's, Wales, 7/29/10

(Photo Credits:  Moose, on her Canon G9)

In Transit

Paddington Station, London, 7/28/10

(Photo Credit: Moose, on her Canon G9)

The great queer family adventure of summer 2010 is underway, my pretties!  The moms and my brother Geoffrey have safely arrived in Cardiff after a smooth if cramped flight to London and a train ride that neither of the moms remembers.  An extremely embarrassing yet strangely wonderful photo of the moms doing synchronized, slack-jawed napping on the train is up on Facebook.  It won't be posted here, darlings.  Sorry -- You get the artsy-fartsy stuff.  Tired as she was, Moose thought Paddington Station looked beautiful in the early morning light and jumped off the train to snap this shot just moments before departure.

Oh, and for those of you who have been worried sick about Moose's recent battles with the fraud department of her bank, we are pleased to report she successfully withdrew funds from an ATM at Heathrow this morning.  Apparently, the dudez behind the sinister patriarchal plot to deny her access to her hard-earned money have realized she may not be breeder material after all.  Wooooeee! -- That was a close one, wasn't it?

Anyway, off to see the city, if we can convince Goose to stay vertical for awhile.  Peace out, darlings, and we hope it's pretty in your neck of the woods.  It's a postcard-perfect 66 degrees in Cardiff today.

Customer Service

In Which an Angry Moose Sprains Her Tongue Trying Not to Go Vulgar and Sarcastic on the Overly Vigilant Anti-Fraud Department of Her Bank

Last week in this space we very nearly talked about sex, which is pretty remarkable when you consider that most days this is a queer blog that seems as if it might be edited by Jane Austen.  Today we broach an even trickier, more intimate subject:  money.  Go away if that makes you uncomfortable, darlings.  Click over to the discussion of a prominent academic's sexy memoir that's been going on between and among Tenured Radical (part I, part III), Historiann (part II), and Comrade PhysioProf (part I and only) if that's where your head is at on this steamy summer morning.  My typist has something she wants to get off her chest, and, by golly, she's going to unload it on my poor, unsuspecting readers.  Welcome to the rant zone, my pretties.  You have been warned.

For very nearly a quarter of a century, the moms have been loyal customers of a certain locally owned bank that shares a name with a town in Maryland and a former star of Saturday Night Live.  About eighteen months ago, in the midst of the mortgage meltdown, it was announced that this "local banking icon" was being acquired by a Virginia-based bank holding company whose slogan has probably been annoying you for years:  "What's in your wallet?"

Moose finally has an answer to that question:  A check card I am afraid to use lest I arouse the suspicions of your overly zealous anti-fraud system.  Uh-oh.  Let me explain.

A few weeks ago, Moose started making reservations and other plans for the moms' upcoming trip to the UK.  When she attempted to purchase theater (pardon me, theatre) tickets (because that is what tasteful queers do when they go to London, darlings), the transaction was declined.  She figured the transaction looked fishy because she usually uses her check card for far less glamorous things than tickets for the hottest play in London.  She immediately called the bank, confirmed that was the problem, and had a long, friendly conversation explaining that she was making plans for a trip she would be taking in a month, so please don't be alarmed by international transactions.  Yes, yes, she was told, but be sure to call us back right before you go to make sure we enter the information into the system again so that you won't have any problems using the card while you are there.  Sure thing, Moose replied, thanks so much for your help.  My pleasure, ma'am.  Have a nice day.

The very next day, Moose tried to use the card again to order some new clothes for the trip.  She was feeling all virtuous for planning ahead rather than realizing the day before departure that she had absolutely nothing suitable for hiking, conferencing, and London theater-hopping.  To her considerable consternation, she got an e-mail the next day from the merchant (a merchant she and Goose matronize so regularly that they argue about who should be able to order this shirt or these pants in that color) saying that the transaction had been declined.  She called the bank again and was again told the transaction had been flagged as suspicious by the bank's anti-fraud system.  "But I don't understand," a frustrated Moose said.  "I went through this yesterday and thought we had everything worked out."  "I'm sorry, ma'am, but you'll need to speak to the people who investigate suspicious activity.  That is done by a third party, not the bank.  You need to call them and verify these transactions."  "But, but, I, but, yesterday -- " spluttered a frustrated and puzzled Moose.

It was no use arguing with the brainless automaton who could do nothing but read from the company script the highly trained customer service representative who did her perky best to assist the increasingly indignant Moose.  She dutifully dialed the number she was given and spoke to a tele-dork who probably hates women and thinks theatre is for wusses a hard-working crime-prevention specialist whose only interest was protecting Moose's hard-earned money.  They went through the whole rigmarole of verifying the transactions, and she made sure his office had all of her phone numbers because a piece of the story we left out in the interest of concision had to do with the fraud people allegedly having tried to reach her and for some strange reason having only the number of an office she rarely uses.  She also tried to get an explanation for why, after what she had gone through the day before, her card had been flagged again.  "You'll have to ask the bank, ma'am.  We've got nothing to do with that."

Here are two things you need to understand:  1.  Moose loves her check card.  She loves the convenience of plastic and the simplicity of having charges immediately debited to her account.  She doesn't care about racking up points or miles and doesn't like the idea of being slammed with a big bill at the end of the month.  She is that rare creature, a pay-as-you-go liberal.  Blame it on the German accountant who lives in her brain.  2.  Moose is also an anxious traveler, which you probably already know if you hang out here regularly or know her in Real Life.

So, after two frustrating rounds with the bank and the fraud hacks experts, our poor Moose is dependent on her check card, anxious about her trip, and worried sick that she will not be able to used the card abroad.  She calls the bank back to try to get an explanation for why the card was flagged again and to try to get some assurance that she will be able to access her money when she is thousands of miles from home.  (Something else you may or may not need to know:  At this point, Moose has no other cards on which she can get cash advances.  I mean, for dog's sake, people, how many pin numbers is a middle-aged woman supposed to have to remember?)  She goes round and round and round and round with the powerless but well-intentioned young woman who picks up her call and who, to her astonishment, cannot explain why this keeps happening.  As calmly as she can, Moose asks to speak to a supervisor.  (Goose, who usually handles customer service problems in our household, has trained her to do this.)

The stick-up-her-a$$ who in the blazes are you to be interrupting my day with questions about your damn money witch patience of Job and financial wisdom of Buffett supervisor makes the clever move of speaking to Moose as if she were an impertinent yet dim-witted 5-year-old and basically says that the bank's position is that any transaction, no matter how small or seemingly ordinary, could be fraudulent, whether it's for theater tickets in London or deodorant from the pharmacy around the corner.  "So you're telling me I really can't count on using my card.  In other words, I can't count on being able to access the money I have in your bank."  (Full disclosure:  As her frustration levels rose, she actually said things like, "the thousands of dollars I have in your bank," as if she were Leona Helmsley or something.  Forgive her.  She was trying really hard not to cuss, and if you know Moose at all you know what a herculean effort that required.)

She hung up the phone, a seriously unsatisfied and deeply anxious customer.  She went out on Facebook and trashed the bank, started asking friends for recommendations on alternatives.  She considered pulling her vast wealth out of the bank soon not to share a name with a town in Maryland and a former star of Saturday Night Live and putting it into the state employees' credit union after reading an article affirming that banks suck nowadays because they are ginormous corporate entities that view customers as nuisances while credit unions are small, not-for-profit, and member-owned.

And then of course, because it is summer and there are papers to be written and blogs to be redesigned, she did nothing.  She went to the movies, a couple of times.  She obsessed about birds that seemed to have taken up residence in the chimney.  She got a haircut.  And then yesterday, realizing she had neglected one small bit of trip planning, she tried to make reservations at a charming hotel in Wales.  And the transaction, of course, was declined.

She called the bank.  Initially she was told the charge was declined because the 3-digit security code that had been entered was incorrect.  Moose didn't think that was true but kept the person on the phone while she reentered the information.  Declined, again.  Now she was told it was being flagged as suspicious.  Further, some previous transactions had been flagged and she needed to verify those:  movie tickets, the chimney service (which was called in to install a second damper to prevent future bird incursions), and, yes, even the haircut.

At this point, Moose is feeling like Offred in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, convinced that she is being denied access to her money as part of a sinister totalitarian plot to turn her into a breeder for a brutal patriarchal regime.  (Woo, yeah, good luck with THAT, fellas!)  You might feel that way, too, kids, if you found yourself in the midst of a conversation that suddenly took this turn:

Moose:  The hair salon?  You're flagging a transaction at my hair salon?  I've gotten my hair cut at the same place for twenty years!

Bank:  Well, yes, ma'am, but the amount was substantially higher than usual.

Moose:  Oh, for dog's sake, are you kidding?  I bought product, not that it's any of your business, but I bought product!  (Meanwhile, in Moose's head, which was on the brink of explosion, she is saying something like:  Oh, dear bank, I do humbly apologize for being so vain as to require both conditioner and styling lotion to create the illusion of actually having any hair at all.  I realize it is not fiscally prudent to expend my meager, furloughed resources on such trifles, and I will endeavor in the future to be less extravagant, but in the meantime, you deranged mother frackers, will you get your big corporate a$$ out of the way and let me spend my goldurned money!)

Goose overheard this conversation and can verify that it was as baffling and frustrating as Moose felt it was.  She is sympathetic to The Handmaid's Tale view of the situation, as she is nothing if not a conspiracy theorist.  She offers another view, though, which is that this bizarre episode of corporate Big Brother/Shaming Mother-ism is a small yet frightening example of what can happen when automated software systems take too much control of our lives and our ways of doing business.  She may be right, but poor Moose, in the meantime, is in a dither, wondering if she should travel with cold hard cash or a stash of jewelry to sell along the way in case her card doesn't work.

She's ready, though, for her next conversation with the faceless, heartless, clueless corporate drones from the bank soon not to share a name with a town in Maryland and a former star of Saturday Night Live.  Next time they ask her for the last four digits of her Social Security number and her mother's maiden name, she will dutifully spit out the number, but then she'll take a deep, cleansing, Betty White-channeling breath and calmly reply, "Blarfengar!"

Peace out, darlings, and have a pleasant weekend.

From a Distance

The Wisdom of Margaret Soltan, on the Onlining of Higher Education:

It’s now possible to see a future in which the only actual human activity on university campuses will be the buzz of sports: agents in negotiation with about-to-be-drop-outs; training sessions; games. Classrooms will be used for press interviews and police investigations.

Because, you know, even the online stuff is being farmed out to off-campus vendors.

That is all, darlings.  There are painters in the house and a paper to be written in Roxie's World today.  The summer of home maintenance continues, and the last precious moments of someone's leave are ticking away.

days theme sound bite  Days of Our Lives sound bites

Click on that sound file and imagine if you can the sorrow of the Moose. Oh, and have a nice day.

Links and Drinks

(Photo Credit:  Moose, on her iPhone, with Lolo, [still] her favorite CameraBag trick, 7/15/10)

I know it's early in the day to be drinking, kids (and we certainly don't encourage wine before breakfast), but my typist has a lot to do today and has had this pic of a pleasant sauv blanc with a pretty summery label just sitting in her phone waiting for an excuse to be shared avec vous, so we thought we'd use it to set up a little midsummer reading list to keep you occupied while she works on the paper she'll be giving at the big Emily Dickinson shindig in Oxford in a couple of weeks.  (Don't get confused, darlings.  Moose hasn't gone and turned herself into a poetry geek.  She'll be presenting a piece of her new stuff proving that every woman writer who ever mattered at all would have made one heck of a blogger.  Dickinson fits into that odd paradigm rather nicely, as it happens.  [See also this brief report on what she did at last summer's Willa Cather shindig.])

Oh, if you've wandered in here by way of Shakesville (which kindly included our critique of The Kids Are All Right in yesterday's Blogaround), welcome to Roxie's World!  We are delighted to see you.  We don't do movie reviews every day, but we try to do something fun and socially redeeming on a regular basis, so give us a click when you've got a moment to kill as you wander the Interwebz.

Anyhoo, here's a bunch of stuff we've been collecting on a range of subjects -- queer intimacies! higher ed!  reading! -- likely to be of interest to our marvelously motley crew of readers.  Read, ponder, discuss, and for dog's sake hydrate, my pretties.  We've got another scorcher on tap for the eastern half of the US of A today.

• First up for your consideration is a piece that follows nicely on our critique of the narrow, conservative terms in which queer families and intimacies are imagined in The Kids Are All Right.  Queer legal eagle Nan Hunter points us toward a new study of gay male relationships that are "long-term, stable, and open."  The study, led by Colleen Hoff and Sean Beougher of San Francisco State University, looked at 566 Bay area couples and found that nearly half had negotiated open relationships that allow for sex with outsiders.  According to the San Francisco Chronicle report on the study, "47 percent reported open relationships. Forty-five percent were monogamous, and the remaining 8 percent disagreed about what they were."  (Note to self:  If you find yourself having dinner with some fellas in that 8 percent group, do not bring up the subject of dating!)
• Next up are several pieces offering further depressing proof that the plan to destroy public higher education in the United States is right on track!  California continues to lead the way.  You might want to crack open a fruity little sauv blanc (or something stronger) before you read this report, again from the SF Chronicle, about plans to start offering "a bachelor's degree over the Internet comparable in quality to its prestigious campus program."  Ah, yes -- distance learning:  because we don't need no education; we just need degrees!  As always, our blog boyfriend Chris Newfield has been all over this story with a series of posts on what the UC regents have been up to lately, but in this one he cites a study that demolishes the myth that online education saves money.  Also, while you are torturing yourself with the grim outlook for higher ed, go read this update from the Department of Yes, Things Can Always Get Worse -- a Chronicle of Higher Ed report on how deeply screwed university systems in New York and Illinois are by the budget limbos created by legislatures in those states.  It ain't pretty, kids (and that article is behind the sub wall -- sorry).
• Don't worry, though -- Our neighbors to the north have decided to wreck their higher education system, too!  Here is a piece by comparativist Linda Hutcheon on news this week that the University of Toronto plans to close its Center for Comparative Literature, founded more than forty years ago by Northrop Frye.  It's being billed as a cost-cutting move, of course, but Hutcheon rightly reads it as an attack on interdisciplinarity.
• For a little pick-me-up (and if you've been following those links you need one about now!), go read this heartwarming story from one of our Virginia pals about Keswick, a 2-year old yellow Labrador retriever who is the new service dog for Robbie Bingler, a staffer at UVA's Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities who is paralyzed below the shoulders.  Robbie's previous dog Harpo, who had helped him with daily tasks for seven years and was a beloved presence around IATH, died of cancer in March.  This is a great story about animals, humans, and love in the workplace.
• Finally, even if you didn't just get a new iPad delivered to your doorstep, as someone in Roxie's World did this week, you'll want to take a look at this thoughtful commentary by Duke's Cathy Davidson on what she does not love about reading on devices like Kindle and the iPad.  Not only did it make Moose feel a little less jealous about not being the person who received the sleek new gadget, it also sparked some important reflections on how print-based assumptions about reading are embedded in our tools for non-print reading.  Davidson finds that limiting and frustrating, and Moose suspects she will too if she can get her hands on the new iPad for an extended test-read.  Check out the piece and let us know what you think.

Ah, that feels better!  Now we can close some of those tabs and get down to work.  Happy reading, my pretties, on the gorgeous little gadget of your choice.  Peace out.