tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-175927952024-03-13T01:41:39.257-05:00So anyway...Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.comBlogger210125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-66299018185493720242023-07-03T12:04:00.003-05:002023-07-03T12:04:35.329-05:00Book Reviewlette: Indulgence in Death<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7685763-indulgence-in-death" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="Indulgence in Death (In Death, #31)" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1292915498l/7685763._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7685763-indulgence-in-death">Indulgence in Death</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/17065.J_D_Robb">J.D. Robb</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5453281573">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Good paperback genre read. Character arcs essentially flat (because in a series?) but distinct and intriguing. The murder mystery plot and setting are both clever; futuristic and creative. I'll probably try another in the series for comparison and to see if it/main character gets old with repetition of quirks and plots.<br /><br />(Four stars for what it is/genre. Not comparable to deeper reads.)
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-84038410210040237452023-03-31T18:36:00.001-05:002023-03-31T18:36:25.680-05:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22327927-hillbilly-women" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="Hillbilly Women: Struggle and Survival in Southern Appalachia" border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1401117987l/22327927._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/22327927-hillbilly-women">Hillbilly Women: Struggle and Survival in Southern Appalachia</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/116602.Skye_Moody">Skye Moody</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4792431051">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Skye Moody (aka Kathy Kahn) originally published "Hillbilly Women" in 1974, then updated primarily the introduction and end note in 2014. The subject and form were a huge undertaking; <b>all but the last chapter are written in the words of individual women living in Southern Appalachia</b> whom Moody visited during her first decade of living and organizing there. Inevitably, there are some absences and some repetitions.<br /><br />In fact, the author developed the project that became the book based on her own noticing of absence and repetition in the stories she heard. Traveling within the mountains, listening as women told their lives to the writer and activist, Moody<br /><blockquote>"...began making tape recordings of individuals' life stories with the intention of carrying them to their counterparts across the mountains and hollows. This was before the Internet and satellite television existed. I wanted them to know that they were not alone, and that their stories matched those of thousands of others not so far away struggling to survive under the same spiteful thumb of poverty, prejudice, and exploitation."</blockquote><br />Moody shared this context in the book's endnote. I would have appreciated being more aware of this as I read through the stories from the beginning, and <b>I would recommend reading the last couple of pages first</b>.<br /><br />In the final chapter, titled "Without Anger There Won't Be Any Change," Moody's voice concludes the book, necessarily apart from--and probably also necessarily after--featuring diverse yet entwined voices of Appalachian women from multiple generations, races, religions, relationships, and jobs.<br /><blockquote>"Every time I read over the stories of these women, I am filled with a sense of failure. I feel somehow I failed to capture their intensity and strength and the emotion with which they recall the cruel experiences of their lives...<br /><br />I'll never forget the day Myra Watson got indoor plumbing in her house and the pride she felt because she had finally saved up enough money to have it installed. Why did she have to wait 64 years for indoor plumbing?"</blockquote><br />Of course the stories include what Moody angrily identifies as "cruel experiences," influenced by natural and unnatural disasters such as business-and-government-made floods and jobless, deadly freezing in unheated homes. They also feature sly humor, pride, generosity, music, discernment, and everyday culture in food, family, and education. <br /><br />I looked for a couple of years for a book or other document that would show the people, place, history, and social circumstances of this group of Americans who existed mainly in my world as caricatures in movies or figurative language and country song lyrics, with the occasional brief, out-of-date documentary treatment. "Hillbilly Women" is the best I have found, even in its own dated-ness. <br /><br />Together, the stories, presented through a series of themes (sorrow, creativity, migration, motherhood and mills...) provided important American history that I hadn't learned in my privileged education. I had previously seen "Coal Miner's Daughter," "Norma Rae," and Barbara Kopple's 1976 "Harlan County, USA" documentary film (as well as having read that disingenuous, unfortunately successful more recent book with "Hillbilly" in the title). "Hillbilly Women" filled out some of my minimal knowledge of Appalachian unions, corporation towns, and Cincinnati's Over the Rhine neighborhood as Blue Ridge Mountain refugees told of hillbilly life in their "slum."<br /><br />If you're interested in reading some stories and voices of mid-20th century Appalachian women, I can recommend this collection.
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-86068622159037170162023-02-28T14:45:00.002-06:002023-02-28T14:50:03.355-06:00All Boys Aren't Blue: Review<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44280883-all-boys-aren-t-blue" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="All Boys Aren't Blue" border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1559859817l/44280883._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/44280883-all-boys-aren-t-blue">All Boys Aren't Blue</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19309237.George_M_Johnson">George M. Johnson</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4536168804">3 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">
At the end of his memoir (acknowledgements?), George M. Johnson notes that he learned of the existence of YA memoirs just before writing his. I am -- as a reader nor a teacher -- not the target audience. Johnson's story is important and compelling as a queer Black young adult from a loving, expansive family and strong education. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">In my reading,* the stories, ruminations, tones, and general themes did not cohere. Its structure felt to me like a personal blog: sometimes personal narrative, sometimes personal diary ("might delete later"), cultural artifact lesson, family tree, fraternity history... occasionally how-to manual. I hope and expect several pieces of this memoir are valuable -- and accessible -- to students (and their teachers) who are wondering if they are alone.</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Takeaway:</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><i>"<span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather;">There is truly something to be said about the fact that you sometimes can’t see yourself if you can’t see other people like you existing, thriving, working."</span></i><div class="noteHighlightTextContainer__noteContainer" style="background-color: white; color: #181818; float: left; font-family: Lato, "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif; font-size: 14px; padding-bottom: 10px; padding-top: 5px; position: relative; width: 550px;"><div class="noteHighlightTextContainer__noteContainer__userIcon" style="float: left; padding-left: 7px; position: absolute;"></div></div></span><br /><br /><i><br /></i></div><div><i>*two-thirds paper, one-third audio, read over 12 months (library copies).
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</div>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-50038704445092525872023-02-28T13:28:00.002-06:002023-02-28T13:28:11.947-06:00Finding Me, Viola Davis: Audiobook Review<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60611726-finding-me" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="Finding Me" border="0" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1651270078l/60611726._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/60611726-finding-me">Finding Me</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/3262562.Viola_Davis">Viola Davis</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/5373333586">5 of 5 stars</a><br /><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">
Absorbing (I listened in just three sittings), intense, surprising, stark, direct, and infallibly hope-full. </span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">The last is something I am definitely not; hearing this vein in "Finding Me" felt similar to my listening experience as a not-Black, not-child of horrible poverty and of violence at home, not-EGOT. That is, I am grateful for the generosity of Ms Davis' sharing from her life to my privilege (minus the EGOT, I guess!). </span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /></span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;">Ms Davis' memoir -- which must be listened to in her voice -- was especially accessible to me as a woman, actor-adjacent, sibling, and analyzer. <br /></span><br /><span style="font-size: medium;">Two takeaways:</span><div><span style="font-size: medium;"> <br /><i>"What memory defines me?"</i> (VD, via Will Smith)</span></div><div><span style="font-size: medium;"><br /><i>"The question still echoes:</i> How did I claw my way out? <i><b>There is no out.</b> Every painful memory, every mentor, every friend and foe served as a chisel, a leap-pad that has shaped ME. Me, the imperfect but blessed sculpture that is Viola."</i></span>
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</div></div>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-47164328753509654432023-02-01T03:27:00.003-06:002023-02-01T03:34:50.340-06:00Impressions Review: The Sympathizer, by Viet Thanh Nguyen<p>⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ </p><p></p><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KSuq2Obu1OKq_Ue-umz2t64hMfrqAYlzEOjDg541Yr7KyaY6dsEQFFl5bOow8Yxwo6rp0HKW8VQ3wMLXOE1uWSZ3fT0BCbe_EGKURbwcsc7C9W5DhNEDROrJP49Nyi5MrN5UiuC5yWecviQwwjOsV7hFadB-nLCLCNICtinuEgmtv8BsXuY/s855/Sympathizer%20cover.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="855" data-original-width="566" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj0KSuq2Obu1OKq_Ue-umz2t64hMfrqAYlzEOjDg541Yr7KyaY6dsEQFFl5bOow8Yxwo6rp0HKW8VQ3wMLXOE1uWSZ3fT0BCbe_EGKURbwcsc7C9W5DhNEDROrJP49Nyi5MrN5UiuC5yWecviQwwjOsV7hFadB-nLCLCNICtinuEgmtv8BsXuY/w133-h200/Sympathizer%20cover.jpg" width="133" /></a></div><br /><i><br /></i><p></p><p><i>The Sympathizer</i> earns a careful review, but just now these are some are of my impressions. </p><p style="text-align: left;">▷ My experience of the (Pulitzer-prize-winning) novel about a Vietnamese refugee who left Saigon at its "fall" -- from Southern, U.S.-allied government to Northern, communist government in 1975 -- is inevitably influenced by my experience over the last 50 years. My experience began and continued as a (white, female) American born to white, Christian Bible translators in South Vietnam in 1972; my experience includes leaving Saigon as a toddler near its fall in 1975. The author was born the year between me and my older brother, and like my parents and three older siblings and I, left Vietnam in 1975. While reading (and listening to the final few chapters of) <i>The Sympathizer</i>, I felt both insider and outsider. The narrator of The Sympathizer is a counter-operative, biracial-bastard Vietnamese refugee to America.</p><p>▷ I read the novel over almost two years, in and out of states of being able to focus on reading books and states of not, stretched out through many two-week stints borrowing, then waiting my turn, then borrowing again from my local public library until I bought the audiobook to own and to finish what was pretty consistently clear as the best book I'd read in a few years.</p><p>▷ The five-star plot immaculately weaves together intricate and intense layers. When talking about the book with my mom the day after finishing, I was surprised to realize I could remember so many scenes and storylines vividly.</p><p>▷ Humor and horror. Gritty and (story-and-tone-relevant) philosophical. I found <i>The Sympathizer</i> to be, on balance, uncynical, in the best ways. From one wide angle, the story is about disillusionment, featuring a faithful friend and comrade whose loyalties are worked over like something presumably whole and valuable put through a meat grinder. One of those loyalties is to his sure sense of himself.</p><p>▷ In a January 2022 essay in the NYT about (not) banning books, Viet Nguyen wrote, "...<i>loving books is really the point — not reading them to educate oneself or become more conscious or politically active (which can be extra benefits)</i>." Of which I frequently need to be reminded, and sometimes convinced. I am especially persuaded in this case (and in the NYT essay) through Nguyen's association of "loving books" with expanding empathy through a novel's ability to make us care about a character (preferably a complicated one). <i>The Sympathizer</i>'s evocation and generation of empathy happens in multiple ways throughout the book, perhaps as the narrator and the characters he describes live through both such quotidian and such traumatic, multiplied/divided lives. Writing about some books banned for their dangerous potential to expand empathy with characters some parents and activists fear (and some books that some of us have conflicting cognitive and complicated aesthetic responses to), Nguyen reminds us to: </p><blockquote><p>"<i>Read “Fahrenheit 451” because its gripping story will keep you up late, even if you have an early morning. Read “Beloved,” “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” “Close Quarters” and “The Adventures of Tintin” because they are indelible, sometimes uncomfortable and always compelling. We should value that magnetic quality[... ;] books must be thrilling, addictive, thorny and dangerous</i>." </p></blockquote><p>Or, from <i>The Sympathizer</i>:</p><p></p><blockquote><span style="background-color: white; color: #181818; font-family: Merriweather;"><i>Art could be both popular, aimed for the masses, and yet advanced, raising its own aesthetic standard as well as the taste of the masses. We discussed how this could be done in Ngo’s garden with blustery teenage self-confidence, interrupted every now and again when Ngo’s mother served us a snack.</i></span></blockquote>I'm hoping to start (and finish!) the sequel, <i>The Committed</i>, in way less than two years, and am curious-confident about how I will experience it as insider-outsider, book-loving, disillusioned, non-cynical, fan.<p></p><p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/culture/book-banning-viet-thanh-nguyen.html">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/29/opinion/culture/book-banning-viet-thanh-nguyen.html</a></p><p><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3821060613?book_show_action=false">Goodreads review</a></p>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-6188542493052206852022-08-28T17:05:00.000-05:002022-08-28T17:05:16.006-05:00Tiny Book Review: The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance by Matt Ortile<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53927080-the-groom-will-keep-his-name" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px"><img border="0" alt="The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance" src="https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1591757504l/53927080._SX98_.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/53927080-the-groom-will-keep-his-name">The Groom Will Keep His Name: And Other Vows I've Made About Race, Resistance, and Romance</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/19629149.Matt_Ortile">Matt Ortile</a><br/>
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/3686750032">4 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Peppy and pointed reflection on the experience of culture and colonization. It's like listening in on a friendly, sharp, post-college mono-chat about cultural theory meets lived experience, with a brief history of the Philippines and some 2010s hip blogging/writing connex. The author's reading absolutely adds value to my experience of the book.<br /><br />(My review written from the perspective of a Gen X writer and cultural studies academic with some growing up years in the Philippines and a tug-of-war lens of cynicism-optimism.)<br />(Includes some explicit sex description, FYI.)
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-62515864263200721422020-03-04T20:19:00.000-06:002020-03-04T20:19:31.677-06:00Bourne Legacy: “I really have no idea what’s going on.”<i>This review was originally posted in 2012 on my former college's blog, which is no longer active. I am reposting here as an example discussion of a "relaxing movie" for my Applied Humanities students -- and you.</i><br />
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I tried to explain the premise, as I understood it from
previews, of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bourne Legacy</i> to my
friend as we walked into the theatre to see the fourth movie in the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne</i> trilogy. As far as I can tell, I
was successful.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Jason Bourne was never really a real person, or at least not
who he seemed to be, or Jason Bourne wasn’t his real name, and he had a lot of
identities when played by Matt Damon in the first three films and in his role
as a part of The Program, run by the U.S. government, or by corporations, or
rogues, so it’s okay that there’s a new actor (Jeremy Renner) now in the same
role, except it’s not the same role, but. . . <o:p></o:p></div>
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Wait, let me start over.<o:p></o:p></div>
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A few minutes into my viewing of the fun, action-packed,
pretty-to-look-at, sometimes cleverly-scripted, but just as often cliché-ridden
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne Legacy</i>, I started to track
dialogue that explicitly acknowledged the story is convoluted, but who cares?
My notes include the line, “I really have no idea what’s going on,” in quotes –
but I have no recollection of who said it, when, or why.<o:p></o:p></div>
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“Is it possible?” one character asks. “I’ve kinda lost my perspective
on what’s possible,” another responds. Me, too! “How do you know I’m not
evaluating you?” one spy-like guy says. “I don’t. Maybe you are, maybe I don’t
care. <b>Don’t you ever not care?</b>” Perfect! The movie spends its first 30 minutes
setting up questions, while blatantly supplying no answers. We jump from Alaska
to somewhere in Africa, to Korea – quick scenes, multiple storylines, little
progress. Blood, drugs, mystery. What’s this? Don’t dwell – on to the next
scene, where a character, playing it straight, says, “You’re not saying much of
anything.” No kidding! <i>I’m a third of the way through the movie before I care
enough to wonder about a plot point – but I’m not bored until the last third
when we’ve been told all there is to know.</i><o:p></o:p></div>
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Jason Renner plays a guy with a name (eventually), or at
least a name a couple of people call him, as well as a number. He’s at a
training camp where he’s put through rigorous physical and mental tests while
taking a blue and a green pill, occasionally returning to a pharmaceutical
research lab for monitoring and adjustments. Something happens (seriously, I’m
not sure what, and I’m pretty smart and attuned to details) and this program,
being run by some organizations and some powerful people (honestly…), spirals
into chaos. Pills must stop being taken, and people with knowledge must stop
being alive.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Renner’s character (I’m going to call him Aaron, because some
other people do at some points) goes on a quest to replenish his supply of
chemicals, because the effects they have on him are compelling. He’s so much
smarter and stronger than he was without them, and that’s good. He hooks up
with one of the research doctors and they take off on a trip to Manila, trying
to stay alive and smart and strong.<o:p></o:p></div>
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As the movie goes on, chase scene after chase scene and plot
twist upon plot twist, <i><b>empathy remarkably grows in me as a viewer</b></i> as I connect
to these two pretty characters who don’t know what’s going on either. Dr. Marta
(Rachel Weisz) asks Aaron why he needs so badly to maintain his advanced
chemical state, and he responds, “It doesn’t really matter, does it?”<o:p></o:p></div>
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I liked the three previous <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne</i> movies. They didn’t shape my view of humanity or
international relations, but they <b>entertained me with intrigue, action,
empathetic heroism, and exotic settings</b>. I liked this movie, too, but it’s like
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne</i> lite, and even while it gives
me what I’ve come to expect in a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne</i>
flick, it also reveals a flaky underbelly.<o:p></o:p></div>
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To wit: what’s a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Bourne</i>
movie without a car or motorcycle chase on stairs in an urban setting? <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Legacy</i> gives us that, but in such a way
that it somehow feels like, “Here’s your chase scene, I hope you like that we
made it 20 minutes long and devoid of any plot or character development!” It
gives us the vulnerable yet super-able hero and his reluctant yet capable
female sidekick, but then it highlights her need for superhero saving in
gratuitous, repetitive scenes. It introduces intriguing political and
philosophical situations – a questionably-still-human character chemically programmed
to eschew empathy or regret sent to chase down Aaron and the good doctor – but
doesn’t develop the premise in any way beyond the surface physical. He’s like a
robot, and we’re not as saddened or frightened by the institutional and
relational implications of this as we might be if we weren’t running up walls
and zipping through traffic for quite such a long time.<o:p></o:p></div>
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Fun (for the most part) to watch, impossible to follow, and
undeveloped in potential, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Bourne
Legacy</i> is a shot of adrenaline with undefined lasting effects about which
I’m ultimately good-naturedly and, apparently, empathetically apathetic.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<i></i>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-26907827233255303622019-08-01T21:15:00.000-05:002019-08-01T21:15:30.635-05:00Freelance on a Couch: Stuff that works for me<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><br /></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: x-small;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>#BirthMonthBlogging-1</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
<h3 style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;">Things I have learned are good to do in freelance writing and editing while working from home every day that I can mostly on a couch or comfy chair</span></i></b></span></h3>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfhVaN1oZQiDeRC4Qmd5mZNaezrtG7kW64FPztQhIrm59sfTfl51NMvw0xv-UtFtfDOtzab53sfRebMf-ZIVURV-pN1HvWY2I29SB443KqgeW4o9jitws2y8_CraQP7pljapuC2Q/s1600/cats+couch+working.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; display: inline !important; font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; font-size: 11pt; font-weight: 400; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" data-original-height="960" data-original-width="958" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhfhVaN1oZQiDeRC4Qmd5mZNaezrtG7kW64FPztQhIrm59sfTfl51NMvw0xv-UtFtfDOtzab53sfRebMf-ZIVURV-pN1HvWY2I29SB443KqgeW4o9jitws2y8_CraQP7pljapuC2Q/s320/cats+couch+working.jpg" width="319" /></a><b style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;"><span style="font-size: large;">HAVE A CAT</span></b></h3>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">As a lifelong overachiever, I currently live and work with three of the feline persuasion. If I am not <b>patting, scritching, greeting, complimenting,</b> or sharing laptop space with a cat at least every hour, I can feel the loss physically, emotionally, and mentally. Being happy-ish and healthy-ish allows me to concentrate, persevere, and create. <a href="https://newsinhealth.nih.gov/2018/02/power-pets" style="font-weight: 400;" target="_blank">There is science</a>. </span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><i style="font-weight: 400;">YMMV: It seems to me dogs would work quite well in a pinch and why not pet-able reptile or porcine pets, too?</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><b><span style="font-size: large;">EAT FRUIT</span></b></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Early this year, I started eating at least an apple a day and I do not care to imagine my life without it now. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">Fruit was like my least favorite food category (<i>besides the obviously gross ones like exotic sea creatures, internal organs, and rice pudding</i>) before, and in making the change to eating (and craving) fruit throughout the day I wasn’t an overnight success. But it is now the most reliable “yes” in the eating world for me.</span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> If I eat fruit throughout the day, I am more likely to be healthy-ish and happy-ish, and that feeds concentration, perseverance, and creativity. </span><a href="https://www.nhs.uk/news/food-and-diet/eating-more-fruit-and-veg-improves-mental-wellbeing/" style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;" target="_blank">It's just science.</a><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>YMMV: Chopping celery or carrots is too much effort and arm pain some days, but cherry tomatoes and mini peppers have the quick pick up, rinse, bite, be done quality like apples when veg is one's vibe.</i></span><i style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"> NBD.</i></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>LISTEN TO AUDIOBOOKS </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">... at night (or podcasts while folding laundry or washing dishes). Sometimes my eyes sting like peppers from looking at a screen all day and night. But I need some <b>story in my brain</b> besides what I am writing, editing, or researching. I could not do what I do without that, and sometimes I can no longer read with my eyes.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>GET DRESSED </b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I have come to love loving what I am wearing when I work at home on a couch. </span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif; font-size: large;"><b>WORK WHEN I CAN</b></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">Sometimes I cannot read or write during prime Day Job hours. My brain is broken. If I can do it at 8PM, I will. Sometimes I can do it with the TV on or family members or stranger cafe dwellers talking. I can do it starting at 1AM. So yes, your mileage may vary and this is the worst advice ever. B</span></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">ut accepting the truth that <i>forcing myself into a tight, scheduled routine</i></span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i> was making it harder for me to work</i> </span><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif; white-space: pre-wrap;">cut out a lot of anxiety and false guilt. Part of living with my mental and physical health is recognizing that there are bad days and weeks, and there are good ones. Eating fruit and taking walks doesn't make everything fit in a nice neat job box.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">I use a device that physically reminds me every hour or so to move. For the most part, I work on a couch, with my laptop either on a pillow on my lap or on a bamboo, air-slotted lap desk on my lap. If I sit all day, I will be unhappy and unhealthy, and my muscles will lock up or spasm. I will feel bruised where nothing but pillow, couch, air, or cat touched me. I will feel exhausted. <i>Sometimes that happens even when I got up and shook it out or walked to the mailbox every hour. See Work When I Can.</i></span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">These commonly known stuffs work for me. They are not unique. They might not work for you or someone you love.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><span style="font-family: "Trebuchet MS", sans-serif;">I came into my present professional set-up from a life-altering experience of major depression and I have fibromyalgia.</span></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Since 2016, I have been doing some combination of the following, professionally: </span></span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Re</i></span><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>searching and </i></span></b><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><b>writing web copy</b> for a commercial and/or non-profit client, typically of the start-up, information-economy type.This involves consistent, same-old assignments, week on week. I have worked with the same bread-and-butter client (mental healthcare-related) since 2017.</i></span></span></li>
<li><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Developmental editing, aka ghost-writing</b> and/or story/writing coaching. This involves finding and collaborating with a client on their idea for a book, typically for six-ish months per project.</span></i></span></li>
<li><span style="font-variant-east-asian: normal; font-variant-numeric: normal; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Teaching</b> "nontraditional" college students online through <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/susanadams/2019/03/28/meet-the-english-professor-creating-the-billion-dollar-college-of-the-future/#5af49cd2426b" target="_blank">a huge university</a>. This involves guiding and grading through an eight-week term, one or two liberal arts course sections at a time.</span></i></span></li>
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<span id="docs-internal-guid-30e071fa-7fff-1656-6c53-aa57d129c7bf"><span style="font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;">This is the first of an attempt to blog a few times in this, my birth month. <i>Topic suggestions welcome! </i></span></span><br />
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<span style="color: purple; font-family: Trebuchet MS, sans-serif;"><b>Share stuffs that you have learned are good to do in your job: post a comment!</b></span><br />
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<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-19986132203736984122018-01-09T12:51:00.001-06:002018-01-09T12:51:25.259-06:00<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30687200-the-stranger-in-the-woods" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit" border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1474560136m/30687200.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/30687200-the-stranger-in-the-woods">The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/206768.Michael_Finkel">Michael Finkel</a><br />
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It's a fascinating story that requires experiencing oneself as a voyeur. In the middle I was frustrated with how this true mystery about a man who lived alone in the woods, surviving in large part by theft and by emotional avoidance, was developed in the book. In the end, I recognize I needed that frustration. <br /><br />Read it if you are drawn to physical survival and wonder about aloneness and compromise. Skip it if you want an adventure.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/39533592-rini-cobbey">View all my reviews</a><br />
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-36734657876715322242017-11-07T23:24:00.000-06:002017-11-08T00:36:27.205-06:00A little story or three on bias and connectionI am currently consulting on a book about empathy, and teaching an online course about liberal arts learning. This week in the course, we're considering scholarly sources and <i>the value of recognizing bias</i>. And in that way life likes to do, the two jobs got together in my head, pulled up chairs, ordered coffee, and became friends.<br />
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So, I wanted to share a little story (with a couple of stories stuffed inside) about Bias and Me.<br />
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This is my third book consultation in a year and through it and other <i>life experiences -- which are what distinguish bias from prejudice</i> in our class material -- I've come to perceive a trend: Sometimes men of a certain age, professional success, and global experience develop a bias against the new-old-days and in particular the present ways of so-called communicating.<br />
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<i>(Foreshadowing: our protagonist Rini isn't sure the ol' days were so good nor the new ones so new or bad.)</i><br />
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In this job, it came to a point in a chapter on communication and empathy -- in particular, on social media. Some folks, based on their experiences riding high in various communications professions (like marketing and broadcast journalism) a few decades ago, have a pretty strong idea that "new media" are bad. The nature of social media is to divide and reduce the globe and all of us to angry, small-minded, non-thinking word- and meme-combatants.<br />
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<i>(Fun fact: Wikipedia tells us "dumbing down" was a phrase in use in the 1930s. The good ol' days.)</i><br />
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Enter Rini, professor of media studies, analyzer of communication across cultures, user of Twitter (like, a <a href="https://twitter.com/rinila" target="_blank">lot</a>). My bias is toward seeing people who dis "social media" as people who don't know social media, or at least have not observed or experienced its potential. Nothing pushes my buttons like implying the good-ol-days of newspapers and telephones and broadcast TV news and cups of tea in a parlor were the Unbiased Way God Intended Humans to Communicate. <i>Let me pass you one of my spare copies of <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/74034.Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death" target="_blank">Amusing Ourselves to Death</a> from 1985, okay?</i><br />
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So, I pulled together all these wicked positive data on how social media (Twitter) can save the world and along the way, I <i>1)</i> had to wade through all these dominant data that show social media is designed to exacerbate our biases; <i>2)</i> remembered a fantastic book I'd been reading earlier this year; and <i>3)</i> remembered a fantastic academic paper I gave at the Popular Culture Association conference in Toronto in 2002.<br />
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And <i>I recognized and sort of acknowledged my own bias</i> that was suppressing a point of connection that was right there in the research. In 2002 I wrote about my observations and experiences of being a U2 fan online and in line at concerts where a hundred-fifty or so of us would gather from the wee hours of the morning on the day of a concert to ensure we got inside the arena first, to grab the closest spots in the general admission sections right up against the stages. We knew where to line up, who we might see again from the last city we attended, and what the parking and public bathroom situations were because of our interaction in online fan forums. (Many were using them, too, to arrange places to sleep and transportation to the next gig.)<br />
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This was pre-Twitter (though it <a href="https://twitter.com/atU2" target="_blank">continues in that vein</a> through today), but it was a similar concept and it actually brought my client's and my competing biases together, introduced them, got them settled in comfy seats, and ordered them coffee and pie as they got to know each other.<br />
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My argument about the (potential and real) valuable outcomes of social media use is that it can connect humans who may be especially disconnected. Maybe geographically, more often sub-culturally. It allows people to say and hear what they might not otherwise say and hear. My client's argument about the (potential and real) harmful outcomes of social media use is that it can divide humans and cater to especially strong perceptual and confirmation biases. It walls them off from seeing or hearing what they would really rather never see or hear. In addition, this perspective goes, it makes us all "<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone#Criticism" target="_blank">bowl alone</a>," not talking to each other in person or making eye contact.<br />
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So how about if we looked at some examples of people using social media to connect across such vast divides, face to face in situations that would otherwise justify fear and biases? That's where (techno)sociologist Zeynep Tufekci's <i><a href="https://www.twitterandteargas.org/" target="_blank">Twitter and Tear Gas</a></i> book comes in, and especially two extraordinary stories on p. 106-108. I highly recommend buying the book (proceeds support refugees), but it's also viewable without cost (link and click-through above). I won't retell her two stories of social media meets face to face here. They are striking examples of overcoming bias in particularly volatile circumstances, and they reflect arguably uneven examples of <i>self-awareness and recognition of bias</i>. Go read 'em.<br />
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So we come to one of the questions in this week's class: W<i>hat is the value of recognizing one's own bias?</i> For one, for me, it is the potential for productive, even genuine connection that can result, and the movement toward more whole, integrated understanding of (and empathy for) our co-humans. Bias isn't necessarily wrong or even bad, if we think of it as an angle. Angles gonna angle. Proportion is all out of whack. But we usually know how to make an effort to take in some other sides in the pursuit of truth and love.<br />
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(Plus recognizing bias's super useful in information literacy and doing academic research.)<br />
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<i>post script:</i> I want to note here that this ain't rose-colored and everything we perceive is not real and all we need is not just recognizing our bias. I still see that social media use can be fruitful even when it doesn't lead to in-person-breathing-the-same-air. But it's a good starting point that can help <i>make a connection</i>, which is needed in order to communicate and learn at all.<br />
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<i>post-post script</i>: I have a fair share of biases, and when I can get around to the right spot to recognize (or, more significantly, acknowledge) them, some fine combination of these happens to happen: I slow down. I shut up (for at least a minute). I get curious. I ask questions. I do research. I read another book (follow another Twitter handle). I might, but only briefly (because all of the above), feel embarrassed (or, more sophisticatedly, chagrined; or, less intensely, <a href="https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/regretful" target="_blank">regretful</a>). You?<br />
<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-53711524620200186522017-10-26T11:10:00.000-05:002017-10-26T11:46:17.712-05:00"Nah" no more: my first #NaNoWriMo crashed my slumber party<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Does-Ever-Speak-through-Cats/dp/0929422031/ref=sr_1_fkmr1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1509033835&sr=8-1-fkmr1&keywords=does+got+ever+speak+through+cats" target="_blank"><img alt=" Not my book" border="0" data-original-height="244" data-original-width="244" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiupBkskiUA5eRbs7ShBDpxzY3U_kA0achAyXM-ImuNEVN7j08z0t0ulJVlkHvF8-8y2dKWP4d-VHth5IR3G-pBjomnWetaolWfdvSRNL5IxhnBJFbyKmpGVnwuGHNoOFQebF16Rg/s1600/1461319_10152761338339830_619335963694723030_n.jpg" /></a></div>
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<i>Literally right before I fell asleep last night, literally right before 2 a.m., my head flooded with an almost fully-formed idea for a novel.</i><br />
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I had characters, dialogue, action, and setting, setting up scenes on the sound stage in my brain as if arriving for rehearsal and I was just standing there on the side wondering if I was the production coordinator or had just wandered into the wrong room.<br />
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This little situation had not been on my agenda this week. And extra especially, it had not been scheduled for the middle of the night. But I guess it's the stuff of writer waking-dreams, so once I realized what was happening, I started typing away on my tablet's screen and didn't stop for maybe 30 or 45 minutes.<br />
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It's not an altogether unfamiliar event, but I definitely haven't had the gang all show up ready to be typed (or, back then, written in a spiral notebook) for probably decades. I've followed through a few times, but since about fourth grade never completed a full fiction manuscript. And even then I kept adding chapters because it was really a bit of a soap opera.<br />
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(My elementary novel - written on my own time in the midst of math and language arts and best-friends-angst and passing notes and whatever else it is kids do when they're nine and an old soul - was titled <i>The Smiths, The Jones, We'll Break Their Bones</i>.)<br />
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I'd been thinking about writing a short novel to experiment with <a href="https://kdp.amazon.com/en_US/" target="_blank">Amazon self-publishing</a> to see if there was anything promising in that world, but hadn't thought about it in a while and was always hung up on the absence of an actual story. <i>Characters, I got. Characters galore.</i> And dialogue. And settings. And background music, costumes, and animals and such. But plot progression? A key obstacle and goal? Look, we're all just trying to get by, I can't think of the grand stuff right now.<br />
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Until I did.<br />
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Ridiculously, it's a "YA" gig, starring a ninth grade girl, which is not in the universe of ideas I'd been visiting.<br />
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<i>At just before 2 a.m. last night I was thinking about how to stop thinking.</i> I was imagining tomorrow-today, with a 10 a.m. work phone call, half-a-day's writing assignments now two weeks overdue, and a little thing called being "under the weather" by some. I was succeeding in stopping the imagination and starting the blessed blank sleep. The timing was silly, but the gift was a gift.<br />
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And would you look at that - it's <a href="https://nanowrimo.org/how-it-works" target="_blank">National Novel Writing Month</a> next week, a possibly fun thing I've never done and rarely paid attention to. Oh, it's also adding a new teaching gig, continuing two writing/consulting gigs, weeks broken up by health care appointments, securing Obamacare for next year, nephew getting married, here come the holidays Month.<br />
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But I'm in. You?<br />
<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-34602751449677203962017-10-14T15:48:00.001-05:002017-10-15T19:52:08.731-05:00Welcome to College!<br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i> In bed, throw the covers on your head / You pretend like you are dead</i></span><br />
<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>No way, you can fight it every day</i></span><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">But no matter what you say</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;">You know it, the rhythm is gonna get you</i><br />
<i style="font-family: Georgia, "Times New Roman", serif;"> No clue of what's happening to you</i><br />
<i style="font-family: georgia, "times new roman", serif;">But I know it, the rhythm is gonna get you <a href="http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/obamacenter/ct-met-chance-obama-summit-20171013-story.html" target="_blank">- Gloria Estefan</a></i><br />
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Thirty-eight of my forty-five years as a human being have included at least one First Day of School. Eighty-four percent. I didn't even live with a cat for that many years! For more than one of those years, I had First Days of School in two different countries. I've had the darn things in five states, on ten different campuses.<br />
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In a couple of weeks, I'm having one again, for the first time in a couple of years.<br />
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This time, I will spend the least amount of time ever for a First Day of School planning what to wear. I probably won't carry a backpack. But I am planning for some jitters, meeting new people, asking for help, and most likely taking a lunch break. And supper. Maybe midnight snack.<br />
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At the end of October, I start teaching an eight-week <a href="https://www.snhu.edu/admission/academic-catalogs/coce-catalog#/programs/N1_ZoPa9x?bc=true&bcCurrent=General%20Education&bcGroup=General%20Education&bcItemType=programs" target="_blank">first year seminar online for SNHU</a>. My role, in keeping with the distinct SNHU approach, is as a mentor and guide, weaving my knowledge, connections, suggestions, advice, feedback, and encouragement into the established structure of a "Perspectives in the Liberal Arts" course. My undergraduate, adult-learner students' average ages will be around the age I was starting my last new school, in 2004 at UConn, a bright-eyed doctoral student with two First Days of School (in two New England states) that fall.<br />
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They'll have more than one full-time commitment, probably kids and a job and a return to school after some time away. I hope they'll be curious and hopeful and determined. I hope I'll empathize and be helpful, resourceful, and at least a little bit funny sometimes.<br />
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In the calendar year 2016, I had no First Day of School for the first time since Y2K. My first days since then have been many and varied. In shifting professional commitments to consulting, writing, and editing, I now experience jitters and meeting new people without the comforting embrace (or bookends) of the rhythm of schools. I don't get much orientation and knowing who to ask for help is not handed to me in announcements and handouts.<br />
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But some familiar things have bridged the gap. I have a lunch period, for one. (Because my office-mate-host-brother invites me to shadow his work-from-home schedule.)<br />
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So I'm gearing up for my new First Day of School and more schedules and priorities and commitments living in tension with each other. I'm filling out my color-coded calendars (don't think I'm not buying three-dimensional school supplies just because the class exists in a net of ether). I may actually buy a new (comfy) outfit. I've had lots of help from The School in figuring out who to ask for help. And I'm excited about learning and wrestling with ideas, new weekly topics, and assignment due dates with a group of humans sharing my First Day of School.<br />
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<i>(Except the online course is almost totally asynchronous.)</i><br />
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<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-89260359979637793102017-07-07T18:13:00.000-05:002017-07-07T18:13:38.214-05:00On the roundabout road to not much to do about not much new or now<i>via Goodreads</i><br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254898.On_the_Road_with_Charles_Kuralt" style="float: left; padding-right: 20px;"><img alt="On the Road with Charles Kuralt" border="0" src="https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1320431231m/254898.jpg" /></a><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/254898.On_the_Road_with_Charles_Kuralt">On the Road with Charles Kuralt</a> by <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/148946.Charles_Kuralt">Charles Kuralt</a><br />
My rating: <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2041597600">2 of 5 stars</a><br /><br />
Read through my 2017 eyes, this vignette collection is occasionally sweet, rarely--though not never--provocative, and always repetitive. Besides a few gestures at poverty, which is never confronted, just overcome through good will--none of the stories incorporates conflict. It's a picture of the people on the back roads of the US that is too comfortable in nostalgia and its yearning for authortative, meaningful, cohesive, harmonious pastness: The Past and The Old Ways which must be glorified because goshdarnit they're the good ol' guys. The book works as it's designed, in spurts of short and vivid anecdotes. But if I weren't reading it to get some genre context for a comparable current project I'm editing, I'd have had no drive to keep reading to the end.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/list/39533592-rini-cobbey">View all my reviews</a><br />
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-36891317116130550762017-05-31T20:42:00.002-05:002017-05-31T20:42:45.254-05:00Part I: Shelter<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I didn’t know, when I drove three days down here two years ago, that I wouldn’t be driving back.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Well, my brother drove most of the time.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two years ago I packed up half my college-professor-office and cleaned up my condo, both on the north shore of Boston. I turned in final spring semester grades, stopped by doctors’ offices for one-last-appointments, and headed southwest to my family roots in DFW. We drove through horizon-blurring fields in New York, shared a quick and quiet Lake Erie beach moment with a van of Amish women, ate pizza and filled up with gas in a possibly sad, once-industrial town in Pennsylvania. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I think it was the day after Cleveland residents protested the acquittal of an officer who shot unarmed individuals that we skirted that downtown on an Interstate. I remember driving over the Ohio River into Kentucky while eating a fragrant orange; my brother was driving. I rode, sore and serious but happy for a sweet little moment and view, in the passenger seat in front of a semester’s worth of stuff, halfway to my overdue half-year sabbatical. It rained most of the rest of our way, and I think I was the one gripping the wheel through hail and flash-flooding in Texarkana, after a night in a leaky motel room decked in mood-matching decor.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two months later, I quit my job, flew back northeast, packed up the rest of my office, for good, and piled a relatively modest layer of book boxes in my condo’s spare room, out of the way of a year-long housesitter. I probably wouldn’t be back, but who ever knew.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">A year ago, I shipped the boxes southwest, clearing a financially underwater, nor’easter-leaky, brilliant-for-me home of all the furniture and most of the household items and old paper files accumulated over 10, some 14, years.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">One of the absolute best things about the last year for me is no longer owning a home. I did love that home.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I bought the shiny, corner condo in a converted 19th century shoe warehouse at the junction of small but busy streets in downtown Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, in 2006, after spending a liminal year completing my doctoral coursework in Connecticut. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That Connecticut year, the time of Katrina, when I welcomed maybe temporary, maybe not, undergraduate students from Louisiana universities into my Humanities discussion sections at UConn, I commuted once, usually twice, more than once three times a week back up to my office and a friend’s tiny living room-filling air mattress north of Boston. I drove back and forth to teach a class, advise students, help to manage an academic department in a time of extended growing pains. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">In my year-leased Connecticut home, I slept on an eternally-flattening air mattress of my own in a dank apartment building in the woods of Ashford, Connecticut, with sketchy cell coverage and familiar neighbors I never got to know. I'd smell and hear the late night meals of Ramadan as I walked down the mildewy hallway to my dark, mainly empty space; or hear the fighting couple across the hall and wish they weren't, or eye closed doors wondering which ones protected the package-under-the-lobby-mailbox-stealer from my disappointed glare. Mostly I was too tired to care.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was like living in a turn lane or elevator stuck between floors, my books stacked on plastic shelves even I could put together without instructions. It took me a few months to figure out that my cat <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2006/03/to-each-his-own-trauma.html" target="_blank">Buddy’s frequent seizures</a> at night while we snuggled with our skeptical new companion cat Georgianna inches above the stale carpeted floor were connected to the ever-increasing punctures leaking air so we’d wake up on two comfortless layers of rubber, to the sound of a garbage truck or drunk college student at the dumpster gracing our backlot window views.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The year before the in-between year of air mattress living, I slept on a borrowed mattress in the borrowed attic space room of another generous friend’s home on Boston’s north shore, commuting the opposite direction to Storrs once, twice a week in snow and rain and bouncing cell coverage. That’s when Buddy became my friend, <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2005/11/when-our-children-embarrass-us.html" target="_blank">The Little Bastard</a> inherited sequentially two floors up from friend to friend to my borrowed apartment, where I believed I could tame the angry adolescent beast or laugh and bleed to death trying.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">That’s when I housed my papers and non-blow-up or fold-up furniture and knickknacks in a storage unit on Route 1 I still refer to as the place I lived for two years.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I fell in love with my restaurant and train station views from the high-ceilinged fourth floor windows of my new condo on a lightly raining day. The windows were huge and I almost grew elastic arms to hug them as my gracious friend and I stepped into the wide open space, just to check it out, not yet anticipating an adventure of rewarding proportions trying to hang window treatments in a space defying pre-fab rods and other hardware. I bought the extra longest sets of curtains from JCPenney and Ikea and made a home for myself and my cats that several friends came to recognize from their commuter rail train windows across the street over the next 10 years.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Arial;"><span style="font-size: 14.6667px; white-space: pre-wrap;">(The short-sale contract for my condo a year ago specified that the washer, dryer, and window treatments were to remain as part of the deal.)</span></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">It was a bubbly moment in a real estate market about to implode. An overpriced, idealistically pitched condo designed as part of a plan to create some kind of connection between a catalog-picturesque, private, woodsy liberal arts college up the road and around the lovely bends, to the urban community in my new city with a view of Boston from the public beach. I fell in love with the windows.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">After completing my dissertation and what I thought would be the longest, hardest part of my college faculty tenure - commuting between two states for nearly seven years, advancing my degree and chairing my department while teaching full-time - I bought myself a little lemon tree. Shipped to citrus-barren New England from tropical Louisiana, my new pet held its own, with I think seven beautiful yellow lemons in its first full year and another few each year after that until things fell apart. It grew tired and brown and a little mean, producing fragrant blossoms that transformed into Tic-Tac-sized green baby fruit before shrivelling up and dashing hopes. </span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">I never bought a new bed or mattress after the one I got for an unfurnished apartment just North of Dallas in my two years between first-round grad school and becoming an under-30, tenure-track faculty member in Massachusetts. After two rented apartments and a two-year stretch standing on its head in the storage unit I called home on Route 1, I placed the little double bed on the light wood floor in the condo and the cats and I slept in it until we didn't. After Buddy left this mortal coil during my first sabbatical in Texas, Georgianna grew weary and arthritic and I bought pet stairs to help her snuggle up. Then in the last half-year before she joined our Buddy in the afterlife of no pet pain, which turned out <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2014/08/a-year-in-life-of-losing.html" target="_blank">to start the hardest</a> year and a half of my college teaching era - leaving seven years of double-duty with grad school looking like a day floating on an intertube on a softly lapping lake in the shade by comparison - I broke the bedframe down and brought the mattress down to stay on the floor so George didn't have so hard a fall when she tried climbing into bed. The night before I became the ex-owner of the condo, my sister, niece, and I leaned the old mattress up against the dumpster downstairs and I slept on the floor cushioned by an unpacked quilt.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">The day before I turned in my key at the real estate lawyer’s office for her to close in my absence, we walked the dry-bone lemon tree that could until it couldn’t down to the parking lot dumpster, out of sight of my <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2008/06/extra-credit-movie-madness.html" target="_blank">movie screen windows</a> for 10 years in my own, owned home. Lynn, Lynn, the city of sin, I didn’t go out the way I went in.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">These days I sit on a hand-me-down office chair at a fold-up desk in the corner of my brother's living room, watching fearless squirrels mangle bird feeders intermixed with scenes of black- and tufted-crested titmice and chickadees gathering for sunflower seeds every few hours just inches from the window.</span></div>
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<div dir="ltr" style="line-height: 1.38; margin-bottom: 0pt; margin-top: 0pt;">
<span style="background-color: transparent; color: black; font-family: Arial; font-size: 11pt; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: 400; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline; white-space: pre-wrap;">Two years ago I moved to Texas. One year ago I sold my condo in Massachusetts. These past two years have been more liminal than the air mattress adventure of 2005-2006, when then I knew the measurable goals and final move-back plans, with my very own new home on the horizon. I have lived in the familiar homes of my family, become entangled with their cats, and acclimated to the sounds of suburbia and the edge of the countryside.</span></div>
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-47273197660526139082017-04-12T16:28:00.000-05:002017-04-12T16:28:29.681-05:00Turn around, bright eyes (but don't look at the map)Every now and then we are minding our own business, getting our work done, making our stuff, when a stupid jerk starts yakking away about how we are just going to embarrass ourselves<i> </i>or <i>we simply can't make what we're trying to make</i>. The voice is coming from inside our heads!! and it is like a cat pushing our papers off the table, but with greater malicious intent and, significantly, way less self-esteem.<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: left;">
My friend - no really, it was a friend, not me - and mutual tweet-follower <a href="https://twitter.com/sudomichael" target="_blank">Michael</a> tweeted a call for help this morning (hi):</div>
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How do you guys beat your inner critic? How do you shut that jerk up? What're your favorite strategies? Asking for a- me, it's for me.</div>
— Michael Edwards (@sudomichael) <a href="https://twitter.com/sudomichael/status/852043537088524288">April 12, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
How do we out-wit the voice?<br />
<br />
So, a few trusty practices came to mind pretty quickly. Not because I don't have to sit and listen to the inner critic literally every (okay, every other) day as I write, but because I do. There are these things that do happen to work sometimes.<br />
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Go back and look at (a) Something I made awhile ago that was probably pretty good. When I see it is great, I can keep going. and/or ... <a href="https://t.co/nevl7YOkuV">https://t.co/nevl7YOkuV</a></div>
— rinila (@rinila) <a href="https://twitter.com/rinila/status/852196799674818563">April 12, 2017</a></blockquote>
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<script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script><br />
<br />
1. Remember a project my gut tells me was done well and re-view it. That will shut the "meh, why bother" voice up at least for a while.<br />
<table align="center" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTxrVAsIw8eVDo1lZBQy_yPO4W_8ooAQX7fb82Ojn8QTBj2yynSO5iRNpzmMlATC_HXJw2T_MW-EwtdWy_J0O1cFGoEarP4QfptuIEFRq4QNUabqSBB_wzUAWaPUbRwauxtTS4TQ/s1600/11903711_10153263383309830_1321466926041611715_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgTxrVAsIw8eVDo1lZBQy_yPO4W_8ooAQX7fb82Ojn8QTBj2yynSO5iRNpzmMlATC_HXJw2T_MW-EwtdWy_J0O1cFGoEarP4QfptuIEFRq4QNUabqSBB_wzUAWaPUbRwauxtTS4TQ/s320/11903711_10153263383309830_1321466926041611715_n.jpg" width="292" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><div style="font-size: medium; text-align: right;">
- <i>Rini's Personal Writing Archives, Four-Year-Old File</i></div>
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<div style="text-align: left;">
2. <a href="https://twitter.com/rinila/status/852197198053953536" target="_blank">Remember </a>what some people (or gatekeepers) said about something I did and re-view their responses. That will give the voice someone else to argue with while I get back to work.</div>
<br />
Then another friend of the Original Poster suggested (in addition to tried and true setting small goals and checking them off) a tactic that has <i>had the opposite effect on me</i> sometimes. He recommended reflecting "on the personal trail you are blazing," but I find that zooming out and looking for proof of Good Work in a big picture trajectory actually invites the mean voice to say, "So this map doesn't impress much, does it? You're no closer to the X than you were five projects ago. Wait, <i><b>I can't even see the X</b></i> -- what treasure are we searching for anyway?"<br />
<br />
<br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<span style="background-color: white; font-family: Georgia, Times New Roman, serif;"><span style="font-size: 15px;">Turn around</span><span style="font-size: 15px;">, every now and then I get a little bit tired</span></span></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
Of listening to the sound of my tears</div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<a href="http://www.bonnietyler.com/discography/faster-than-the-speed-of-night/" target="_blank">Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit nervous</a></div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<a href="http://www.bonnietyler.com/discography/faster-than-the-speed-of-night/" target="_blank">That the best of all the years have gone by</a></div>
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Turn around, every now and then I get a little bit terrified</div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
And then I see the look in your eyes </div>
<div style="text-align: right;">
- <i>Bonnie Tyler</i></div>
<br />
That can be a trip-up for the upwardly or treasurably mobile among us. The thing for me is to do The Thing that is being done now well, and to remind myself that a Thing or Two has been done well before, so don't get all mired in the map. Just this one thing now, okay.<br />
<br />
<i>Of course, life and creativity and productive work are none of them just a bunch of unconnected things.</i> I am fortunate in that I have never been especially stuck on the single, ever-forward-moving path idea. But I understand its temptation and its authoritative claims for a lot of maker-workers, and Purpose driving - maybe for some, even, a 15 Year Plan - has its virtues.<br />
<br />
There is a third Silence the Downer Inside tactic I practice even more regularly, and that is the <i>move so fast my mind can't mess me up</i> move. This is when I do what it takes to build some momentum - in my case, in writing - and pound out 750 or 1,000 words or more in one breath. I usually tell myself going in that "it doesn't matter if they're good or not" but that's all I'll say to myself about it because this exercise is not about self-affirmation, it's about action. Most of the time when I exhaust that burst of productivity, <i>I look back over it without trepidation and find there is good</i>, usable stuff right there and as a bonus, the Critic Inside got distracted and is taking a nap or something.<br />
<br />
A caveat, for me, is necessary when it comes to pitching and self-promoting -- as in a job application, book proposal, letter of interest... They're a tricky Thing when it comes to revisiting and powering through, because the whole Thing is to deny the critic within and without.<br />
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj557Y2hZdATxWXmVFFlL_GhGY2Efrb8BIHlv7WqJ4iGi9PO4IddmtkhtaIZtTPrASbGo5KWifm6pGXoouwFSVuCp5h0Wc72c8FUyxHvjkmmLqCH5Afe4NQAm9YHEmd0F_Ial4ZBQ/s1600/11887916_10153253632704830_3680349246507805818_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="237" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj557Y2hZdATxWXmVFFlL_GhGY2Efrb8BIHlv7WqJ4iGi9PO4IddmtkhtaIZtTPrASbGo5KWifm6pGXoouwFSVuCp5h0Wc72c8FUyxHvjkmmLqCH5Afe4NQAm9YHEmd0F_Ial4ZBQ/s320/11887916_10153253632704830_3680349246507805818_n.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<br />
I'd like to get better at stopping and taking more time to represent Me, rather than Perfect Pitchy Me in these projects. Because sometimes I see or <i>think up something I want to do and I'm in such a hurry</i> to get my "Pick me!" in front of the Picker's eyes first that I bulldoze right over the good that comes from self-criticism -- the humor, the carefulness, modesty.<br />
<br />
So, that's my take on <b>what to do to do good stuff</b> when I doubt the stuff is good-able.<br />
<br />
You? Hit Michael's tweet up (if he's still looking), or share around here with us and me.<br />
<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-84701463894871698502017-04-05T15:44:00.000-05:002017-04-05T15:49:19.869-05:00Of Women and Sports Fans<div class="" data-block="true" data-editor="2uo40" data-offset-key="ek199-0-0" style="white-space: pre-wrap;">
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<span data-offset-key="ek199-0-0"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Oh hi <b>sportball fans and non sportsy friends</b> and people. I am working on a thing. <i>Maybe you could help.</i> </span></span></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="background-color: white; direction: ltr; position: relative; text-align: left;">
<span style="color: #444444; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What would it take for you to watch professional or national collegiate women's games on TV?</span></blockquote>
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<span style="background-color: white;"><span style="color: #444444; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: large;">What would it take for you to get excited about a professional or national collegiate women's game or tournament?</span></span></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">I am particularly interested in (a) basketball, (b) hockey, (c) softball, and (d) soccer.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><a href="https://www.thenation.com/article/why-dont-people-watch-womens-sports/" target="_blank">There's been</a> a <a href="https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2015/06/women-and-sports-world-cup-soccer/395231/" target="_blank">bunch of stuff</a> written and said <a href="http://www.espn.com/page2/s/hays/030822.html" target="_blank">about "Why</a> [Men and/or We] Don't <a href="http://www.parent.co/why-we-make-our-sons-watch-womens-sports/" target="_blank">Watch Women's</a> Sports." I'm interested in some additional current, personal perspectives from real sports fans and non-sports people alike.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
If you wouldn't hate briefly sharing your thoughts and feels, please do. No long, deeply analytical replies necessary! Comment on this post, FB or <a href="https://twitter.com/rinila/status/849725445281005568" target="_blank">tweet me</a>, or <a href="https://goo.gl/forms/sMlYZZJQiSwCN2dI3" target="_blank">take my survey</a>!</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">Feel free to state what seems to you like an obvious or not-new reason or point, <b>if it's true for you</b>. Or, hit me with some insight or personal perspective if you got it.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
I'm into answers that are true for you, not (in theory or "<i>well actuallyness</i>") for Our Society. For you. </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
Also, if you can stretch your imagination beyond <i>"I'd watch if there were more on TV,"</i> that's super helpful, too. But, for sure, note that as a factor if it's true for you, then consider as well: What if there were, at least for a trial period to gauge ROI, more coverage available?</span>_______________________________________________________________________<span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;">
</span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="9hvtr-0-0"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>If it helps to keep in mind, I watch 10-15 professional or national collegiate (men's or women's) sportball games a year, but I read about them every day, not least of all on my great friends' social media. My interest and questions are honest and sincere (if not entirely earnest). </i></span></span></div>
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<span data-offset-key="9hvtr-0-0"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i><br /></i></span></span></div>
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<span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif; font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i>Related reading: </i></span><span style="color: #1d2129; font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><span style="font-size: 14px; white-space: pre-wrap;"><i><a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2016/04/once-upon-time-there-were-girls-who.html" target="_blank">"When Girls Became Lions" book (review)</a>. </i></span></span></div>
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-5727030000354659752017-04-01T18:32:00.001-05:002017-04-01T21:07:03.266-05:00Listing Some Books, Episode 3: The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Edible Bugs<a href="https://www.nytimes.com/column/book-review-podcast" target="_blank">The Book Review</a>, by The New York Times, is my most satisfying podcast habit presently. It has in-depth conversation about one specific book and author, followed by a roundtable discussion of several books, highlighting what the participants are currently reading, thinking about, abandoning, or paying attention to.<br />
<br />
When I listen, I jot titles and authors down for future consideration. I may be moved by the topic, the personality of the author being interviewed in the first segment, or the presentation of emotional or intellectual response by the critics and readers in the last segment.<br />
<br />
A few weeks ago, <a href="http://www.mohsinhamid.com/books.html" target="_blank">Mohsin Hamid's</a> voice drew me. As he <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/column/book-review-podcast" target="_blank">talked with host</a> Pamela Paul about his latest novel <a href="http://www.powells.com/book/exit-west-9780735212176/18-0" target="_blank">Exit West</a>, he sounded warm, self-reflective, sensitive to complex perspectives, and familiar. It turns out, I'd heard him in the car just a <a href="http://www.npr.org/programs/fresh-air/2017/03/08/519229302/fresh-air-for-march-8-2017" target="_blank">few days before on Fresh Air</a> talking about his book with (the hypnotic-voiced) Terry Gross.<br />
<br />
This latest writing experience, he said, was different for him <b>because he told the story more than he wrote the novel</b>.<br />
<br />
I had probably written his name down before he finished his first sentence about that concept: story in relationship to style. I am a sucker for meta-art and -stories, especially when they're good.<br />
<br />
So I checked the local library (via the <b>super amazing wonderful</b> <a href="https://www.libraryextension.com/" target="_blank">Library Extension</a> I've attached to Amazon and Goodreads), and found one of Hamid's earlier novels available for electronic checkout.<br />
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I am <i>currently reading and about 25 percent through</i> <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11338039-the-reluctant-fundamentalist" target="_blank">The Reluctant Fundamentalist</a>. Subject-wise, in its story of a Pakistani man's experience of September 11, 2001 as a young business analyst in New York, the 2007 novel offers a lot for my tastes as a reader. Globalized identity, religious tension, academic-intellectual life -- all are topics on my lists.<br />
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Then there is the device. <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/dec/23/reluctant-fundamentalist-mohsin-hamid-review" target="_blank">The Guardian called the narrator's voice</a> (or its effects?) "quite mesmerizing." But so far <b>I've felt more contrived at</b> than engaged. The Pakistani man tells his story - so far - entirely as a one-side conversation with the American he encounters on the streets of Lahore. So far, I don't get it and I don't feel it, if <i>it </i>means some kind of transcendent novel-reading experience owing to the means of storytelling.<br />
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I know the story will be - it isn't yet, really - compelling in an inevitable way. It promises to be part love-story, but probably even more so friendship, betrayal, and an <i>un-simply-named quality</i> that any story of 9/11 (implying surrounding consequence) must have. But the one-voiced, excessive-conversation-based storytelling so far mutes the character for me.<br />
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For the first couple of nights I approached the book, I read a chapter each evening. . . because it felt like a Thing to Do. A device, almost, for reading the device. And the chapters are sensorily vivid with street and institution sounds and images and smells and temperatures. So I am there, at least for the moment. The character-voice is more than what he has shared so far, no doubt. And I can't deny the trustworthy personality that includes an occasional and funny throwaway Top Gun reference. It-he will evolve: he's nervous in the present, in subtle contrast to increasingly - if youthful - assuredness in the narrative's past.<br />
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So I have renewed the book from my library and will probably move through it with more speed now that I've come this far, in reading and reporting. There is also my comfortable resistance to judging a meta-style story's gimmick before the end. Happily I have experienced "that click" when in the end, the way the art was made, made the art just right in its final turns. Sarah Polley's 2012 <a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2366450/" target="_blank">documentary Stories We Tell</a> rested that case for me when I viscerally went from "c'mon, what are you doing and why are you doing it" to "oh! yes" with the kind of force where I can still picture myself as I was watching. Maybe, then, the monologue-on-the-street novel and I will connect before I'm done.<br />
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<i>Most nights this week I have also been listening</i> to Daniella Martin read her <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/18318825-edible" target="_blank">Edible: An Adventure into the World of Eating Insects and the Last Great Hope to Save the Planet</a> before I go to sleep. Given the relative randomness of its topic in my usual scope of interests and the quality of the writing, I'm thinking I must have picked it up as an Audible Daily Deal or some such recently. I cannot remember, and it was never On a List. But it's making a pretty interesting case and the author's dorkiness is growing on me and last night it made me nostalgic for my tarantula-eating days in Cambodia 13 summers ago and waterbugs in China not so long ago.<br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:</u><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">Came across</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: via a podcast, a radio show, library availability, and probably a passing sale.</span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">Caught attention</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: because of voice, religion, academia, and curiosity.</span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">And then</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: Renewed to finish reading (and, in the case of eating bugs, will put on my Lifestyles to Consider list).</span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">Accessed</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: Library, Audible sale.</span><br />
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: molengo; font-size: 16px;">Listing Some Books Episodes all done for this go-round!</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;"><i> Previous: </i><a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-2-you-cant.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Two comedic cultural essay to-be-read-list books</a><i> and </i><a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-1-dark-money.html" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Recently finished Dark Money (with meta)</a><i>.</i><br /><br />Happy booklisting!</span><br />
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<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-51338355723112805792017-03-30T19:13:00.000-05:002017-03-30T19:45:41.023-05:00Listing Some Books, Episode 2: You Can't Touch My Hair and I'm Judging YouPodcasts and #hashtags, newsletters and friends, books on cool topics and shelves in bookstores -- these are a few of my fav-or-ite things that move me to <b>add new titles</b> to my array of "to read" (and "to check into and maybe read but also probably not") lists.<br />
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This week I am blogging a few books from my current (March 2017) lists. In our last episode, I reported finishing reading Jane Mayer's <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-1-dark-money.html" target="_blank">chronicle of billionaire buried politicking in Dark Money</a>. <i>Now I am thinking about titles that haven't even made it to my bookshelf yet.</i><br />
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<b>2a and 2b. </b>Wikipedia Brown's (@eveewing) <a href="https://twitter.com/eveewing/status/846718952940212224" target="_blank">#ActualBlackWomen favorite books thread</a> on Twitter:<br />
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<b><i>a. <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0143129201/ref=wl_it_dp_o_pd_nS_ttl?_encoding=UTF8&colid=308KHN1PP4OEJ&coliid=I10M1WDUE9PCI5" target="_blank">You Can't Touch My Hair:</a> And Other Things I Still Have to Explain</i>.</b> <b>By <a href="http://www.phoeberobinson.com/" target="_blank">Phoebe Robinson</a>, with a highlighted forward by <a href="https://twitter.com/msjwilly?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor" target="_blank">Jessica Williams</a>.</b><br />
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I feel like I shouldn't have to explain what the book is about, since I have provided the title and I have no more read the book than you have. Possibly less. Eve's invitation for recommendations of (recent) books by black women brought out a few mentions of this essay collection. That and a few other points prompted me to do two things:<br />
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(1) Look it up on Amazon. Which, thanks to <b>the seriously greatest thing ever invented</b> - <a href="https://www.libraryextension.com/?utm_source=extension_header&utm_campaign=installed_extension&utm_medium=web" target="_blank">Library Extension</a> - simultaneously tells me if my local public library has a hard and/or electronic copy available.<br />
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(2) Confirming that it looks like something I would like to read and finding my library can't help me out, I added it to my running Kindle wish list (that could feed into a later-library-borrow list, an audiobook list, or a I-don't-remember-wanting-this-book:Delete list).<br />
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From the Amazon blurb:<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; color: #333333;"><span style="font-family: "georgia" , "times new roman" , serif;"><i>"Being a black woman in America means contending with old prejudices and fresh absurdities every day."</i></span></span></blockquote>
This is probably a book I will actually read sooner than later, unlike most books on lists and shelves. The intersection of race and feminism and comedy put it in that <b>sweet spot of levity + reality</b> that feels like oxygen some days. Also its currency pulls me in -- both as a book I've seen mentioned in other tweets and lists since its release last fall and because the <a href="http://www.wnyc.org/shows/dopequeens" target="_blank">author's podcast, "2 Dope Queens"</a> shows up as a popular and rec'd title every time I open my listening app. The pod's not on a list yet.<br />
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And, the double-edged rhetoric of "I shouldn't have to explain" hooks me like cat. I'm glad <i><b>we do still sometimes love enough to explain</b></i> when it seems like if we - the explanation needer - could pay real attention, we might already understand.<br />
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<b><i>b. <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Im-Judging-You-Do-Better-Manual/dp/1627796061/ref=pd_bxgy_14_img_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1627796061&pd_rd_r=541DNDRD65E45BS2ZB3H&pd_rd_w=RfjFC&pd_rd_wg=zpLRG&psc=1&refRID=541DNDRD65E45BS2ZB3H" target="_blank">I'm Judging You: The Do-Better Manual</a>. </i>By <a href="http://luvvie.org/" target="_blank">Luvvie Ajayi</a>. </b><br />
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Speaking of advice and explanations. This one showed up even more times on the Black Women Authors thread, and on a pile of Best of Last Year lists. It went right on another soon-to-be-converted "to read" list: <i>the public library has a hard copy</i>!<br />
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I ended up adding I think five books from the Wikipedia Brown twitter thread and scrolled by another five or so I had read within the last year, which probably got on the to-read list because of another #hashtag, conversation, or list. Including a few less recent but I-recommend ones such as <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/17184818-americanah" target="_blank">Adichie's Americanah</a>, my first (not last) Octavia Butler book <a href="https://www.blogger.com/I%20blogged%20about%20choosing%20new%20books%20to%20read%20and%20putting%20them%20on%20lists%20and%20possibly%20reading%20them%20and%20stuff.%20%20http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-2-you-cant.html%20%E2%80%A6%20%E2%80%A6" target="_blank">Kindred</a>, and <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13504943-incidents-in-the-life-of-a-slave-girl-written-by-herself" target="_blank">Harriet Jacob's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl</a>.<br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:</u><br />
<br style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;" />
<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">Came across</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: via a call for recommendations by a writer-voice-woman I admire and follow on Twitter. Knew the names and titles from previous un-followed-up references.</span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">Caught attention</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: because of intersecting of multiple points of interest for me: </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">race</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">, </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">comedy,</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;"> </span><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">women, popular media, calling out b.s</i><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">.</span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">And then</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: Trip to the library <i>WHICH NEVER FAILS TO WIN THE DAY.</i></span><br />
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<u style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">Accessed</u><span style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: "molengo"; font-size: 16px;">: Might go audio on the first.</span><br />
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<i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">Listing Some Books Episode 3 <b>up next</b>: Currently reading lists</i><i style="background-color: white; color: #444444; font-family: Molengo; font-size: 16px;">. Previous: <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-1-dark-money.html" target="_blank">Recently finished Dark Money (with meta)</a>.</i><br />
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-35320958212809527482017-03-28T17:06:00.000-05:002017-03-30T19:15:57.913-05:00Listing Some Books, Episode 1: Dark MoneyIf I were writing a song about a few of my fav-or-ite things, <i style="font-weight: bold;">books</i> and <i style="font-weight: bold;">lists</i> would rank higher than brown paper packages tied up with string.<br />
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This week, I am going to blog a few books from my lists of this month. First, I'll share a couple of thoughts about the books. Then, on the meta side, I'll think about <i><b>how and why I come to pay attention to the books I do</b></i> and what I take from the experience of reading and listing. If any of this makes you think of a book you've read, would recommend, would anti-recommend, have heard of, have on your list(s). . . sharing is caring.<br />
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<b>1. <a href="https://smile.amazon.com/Dark-Money-History-Billionaires-Radical-ebook/dp/B0180SU4OA/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1490733397&sr=8-1&keywords=dark+money" style="font-style: italic;" target="_blank">Dark Money</a>. Finished. Semi-Recommended.</b><br />
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An eerily familiar list of names winds through this expos<span style="background-color: white; font-family: "helvetica neue" , "helvetica" , "arial" , sans-serif; font-size: 13px;">é</span> of the ways that very rich, self-interested people openly and hidden-ly manipulate specific government policies and public information. Published in early 2016, the book names <a href="http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/how-the-kochs-brought-us-president-trump_us_583df558e4b002d13f7a8771" target="_blank">at least half a dozen figures I had only heard</a> of since the political rise of Trump. (He has only a small role, himself.)<br />
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Jane Mayer's extensive research accomplishes important stuff in a book that risks being dismissed as "one-sided," or worse, melodramatically shallow. Most significantly for me, she spells out specific, direct consequences of dark (or, in some cases, sort of transparent) money. Climate change - <i>regulations, reputations</i> - gets enough detailed discussion of donors' influence on members of congress to make me <b>educatedly mad</b>.<br />
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<a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1840694401" target="_blank">I rated the book just three</a> stars out of five on GoodReads mainly because I could have done with just an updated long-form magazine piece. In fact, it began as just that -- but I never read the <a href="http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/08/30/covert-operations" target="_blank">original article</a> because I can't seem to get myself to read many magazines electronically or paperwise in the last few years. So, it's good it was a book because I am glad I was exposed to the systems and outcomes of dark money. But, it got a bit redundant (at least for me, at my level of interest).<br />
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One of the reasons even 400-page books win out over 15-page magazine stories has to do with my thing for motivational-lists. In this particular case, I use GoodReads to motivate me to keep going both in finishing a long book I'm interested in (but might walk away from because of eleventy other shiny things in my space) and in moving through my to-read piles.<br />
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<b style="font-style: italic;">If you can point me to an app that lets me list and track and rate/notate all my media (books, movies, podcasts, articles) consumption in one spot, please do so in the comments or </b><a href="https://twitter.com/rinila" style="font-style: italic; font-weight: bold;" target="_blank">tweet </a><i style="font-weight: bold;">me. I'll put you on my Nice, Helpful People list. </i>I use <a href="https://www.diigo.com/index" target="_blank">Diigo </a>and <a href="https://evernote.com/" target="_blank">Evernote </a>to track blog posts and magazine/newspaper articles read/to read and find neither one friendly enough to keep up with.<br />
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<u>Tracking points for this week's "Listing Some Books" blog series:</u><br />
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<u>Came across</u>: via some forgotten tweet. <i>Or probably a Best Books end-of-year </i><b style="font-style: italic;">list</b>.<br />
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<u>Caught attention</u>: because of its intersecting of multiple points of interest for me: <i>politics</i>, <i>economics,</i> <i>popular culture names</i> (Kochs)<i>, current buzz</i>.<br />
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<u>And then</u>: I'm not planning to pursue the book's subjects further in any focused way. I learned about how parts of our culture work, I became familiar with powerful people and movements, and I got clued into following as related things develop (through general news coverage). <i>It's not on my <a href="http://austinkleon.com/2017/02/03/study-something-you-love-in-depth/" target="_blank">To Dig list</a>.</i><br />
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<u>Accessed</u>: the e-book from my public library and ended up buying it to finish when I kept getting bumped to the end of the wait list for renewal.<br />
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<i>Listing Some Books Episode 2 <b>up next</b>: <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2017/03/listing-some-books-episode-2-you-cant.html" target="_blank">A few books added to my "To Read" List</a> this month.</i><br />
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<i><br /></i>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-26412755511413617162017-03-14T16:46:00.000-05:002017-03-14T16:46:57.012-05:00Attention, Please: Empathy Produces Curiosity<br />
One of the first things two separate rheumatologists said when disinterestedly diagnosing me with fibromyalgia was: "Well you seem to have all the markers, except you're not overweight."<br />
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Since then, every medical professional I've encountered who has been aware of my diagnosis and ongoing nonspecific symptoms has made a point of the fact that I don't need to lose weight. As if having that one additional marker would have cleared everything up earlier and absolutely and saved us all the trouble.<br />
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I received my fibro diagnosis at the apparent end of more than three years of overall deteriorating health and diminishing efforts to both name and treat my symptoms. For a while, I was giving blood for new tests and attending appointments with medical specialists more frequently than I was sleeping, it felt like.<br />
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My primary care doc was kind and committed. When I'd show up at her office every few months because I couldn't bear just carrying on without some kind of relief - even if just in the form of professional commiseration - she'd test again for Lyme and Lupus; ask again what, when, and how; and offer another referral, along with the occasional drug. At last she said, "Your next move is to see a rheumatologist," and sent me off to one of the remaining medical centers in our area I hadn't been inside yet, carting my inflammation-marked blood work, pain, and debilitating exhaustion.<br />
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That's when, in successive appointments a week apart - with more needles and vials in between - I was told, in not precisely so many words, that I could make all this much neater and more satisfactory if I weighed just 20 or so more pounds. In fact, at the time of these appointments, I was feeling the worst and was at the low point of an unintentional drop of close to 25 pounds. (Within a little over a year afterward, I had gained most of the lost weight back and plateaued within a high-normalish range for my middle age.* I was also coincidentally feeling better for longer periods of time.)<br />
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This is not meant to be an essay on the relationship of body weight to health. I have really nothing of value to offer about that. But I was prompted to pay attention to it this week when I read an upsetting piece in The Establishment about "<a href="https://theestablishment.co/just-lose-weight-and-other-lies-my-doctors-told-me-16e71dddb836#.1s36bc6t7" target="_blank">prejudiced prescriptions of weight loss</a>" that have caused serious harm. The <a href="https://twitter.com/martinadonkers" target="_blank">author </a>describes a series of medical misdirections given by physicians who did not pay attention to what she was saying, feeling, or exhibiting, or to their professional and personal obligations to find out more than what they immediately noticed: the patient was fat. I recommend reading the piece.<br />
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In addition to learning about the experience of the author and a few others she reported, I was struck by how frustratingly familiar the kind of response physicians provided was. Just a couple of weeks ago I was in the office to see my new primary care doctor (soon after my fibro diagnosis I happened to move out of state) about another medical issue. Although my appointment was to address a topic she had pursued, one of rather minor interest to me but she's the doctor so I'm game, I managed to mention: "I have been experiencing what I guess is a flare-up of the fibromyalgia for about six weeks now." I said that I was taking the medication prescribed by another specialist she'd recommended, but. . .<br />
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Then I didn't actually squeeze in any more details, such as that this was the worst I'd felt physically in over a year and for the longest stretch of time, before she responded: "So that's under control now? Good." Literally either not hearing - or caring - that I had just stated the opposite.<br />
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This might not even be a post about fibromyalgia or any other common diagnosis and how doctors need to slow down and pay attention to us and what is the deal with our so called health care system if nobody bothers to care. I am blessed to have, for now, excellent insurance and access to so many professionals who have helped me and lots of people I love and even more people whose stories I don't know, but if given the opportunity to know, I hope I would receive with openness and not ready platitudes or prescriptions.<br />
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Martina's piece rightly named the problem prejudice, which by definition bypasses both curiosity and empathy. I get it: we are busy (for example, doctors), we are needy (i.e., patients), and we are way too often repetitive (well, everyone - it's how communication and connection work). But we are not ever redundant. Yet, when we are not careful, care-full, we can't really care well.<br />
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It's a devastating feeling to sense that I am redundant to the person I am with, especially if I trust and am vulnerable with them. One of the least things I can do when I am hearing or reading about an experience someone is having - one that they are inviting me to care about - is to listen and take action to learn more, even checking to see if the knowledge (perhaps expertise!) I brought to the conversation is relevant.<br />
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__________________<br />
* I'm referencing <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/healthyweight/assessing/index.html" target="_blank">popular medical ranges</a> defining normal ("or Healthy"), obese, and overweight based on BMI. However: (1) as the Establishment piece notes, there's not necessarily agreement on what those terms mean or their health consequences; and (2) those normal weight charts don't reflect <a href="https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/body-measurements.htm" target="_blank">real life statistics</a> for demographics in the U.S.<br />
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<i>For a whole other bit on paying attention, <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2015/01/pay-attention-imitation-game.html" target="_blank">there's this</a> on The Imitation Game.</i><br />
<i><br /></i>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-62551842852094092562016-11-10T23:17:00.000-06:002016-11-10T23:26:16.020-06:00Two Things I am Not Trying to Understand<div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">These two things I am not trying to understand.</span></div>
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<li><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Supportive, positive, intentional association with the views and practices of a man who promotes a false flag discussion of Sandy Hook.</span></li>
<li><span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Intentional use, repetition, and promotion of rhetoric supportive of institutional and personal abuse of women, African Americans, Latinx individuals, Muslims, and refugees.</span></li>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Since the United States voted this week to elect the man who will be our new president in two months, we have heard and read many sentiments and statements. We've heard much about needing and wanting to understand each other, to learn why people we know and disagree with voted for someone whose actions and words we characterize as abominable, dangerous, or unfathomable.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I have said that now is not the time to invest further in understanding why the unfathomable was done.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I believe and strongly, painfully feel this because there are two things that I know go beyond a lack of understanding on my part. I don't want or need to understand why someone that I know - as a human and often as a friend - supported the national, world, and cultural leadership of our president elect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">May I be clear: </span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I do not say this is "not my" president elect. That is, he is my president elect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I do not say that I cannot respect, empathize with, care about, or learn from my friends whose vote supported our president elect.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I do not say that a friend who practiced her or his civil right in support of the president elect believes that no children died at Sandy Hook, no teachers died, no parents grieve, no grandparents mourned, no siblings... Nor do I say that such a friend believes abuse is good or that hateful rhetoric is a positive trait in a leader.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I do not say that a citizen must or does agree with everything a candidate says, does, or promotes.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I do not say that a candidate for U.S. president must or does agree with every person or group who campaigns for him.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I am saying that there are things about which I will not compromise because these things are so wrong and simultaneously so integral to the character - at least as it is portrayed - of a leader.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I am saying that, given the length and mass-social mediation of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign, I do not believe or have hope that I will hear something new addressing a good, worthy reason to act in favor of a leader who practiced the two things listed above. I don't feel a sense of responsibility or desire to listen to explanations that don't acknowledge the evil in those two practices.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">I am not linking to online sources which have received mass, repeated, and diverse attention during the many months before this week. They not only are there, they have been there; now is not the time for us to re-state and re-link to examples as if fresh data or a fresh debate is that one thing we need. (If you are genuinely unsure what the number one point I list above is, and you want to expose yourself to that information, you can do a google or human-conversation-search for Al*x J*nes. [Fill in the vowels.])</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Good will not come from our discussing the relative significance of the two practices listed above. Perhaps right now we might not need to know for whom our friends voted (or why). We do need to know how each other hurts and what each other celebrates. This is one of our high callings.</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "trebuchet ms" , sans-serif;">Let's try to understand the economic and other social struggles and pain the federal government may be able to lessen, and how we can participate in that work of justice and relief. Let's acknowledge, even if not in fraught conversation between you and me, that there is nothing good to say in excuse for two unfathomable practices of our president elect.</span></div>
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-27608215866885023072016-04-28T12:08:00.001-05:002016-04-28T12:08:12.107-05:00Take some time; then talk and tell the story.<div class="article-content" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">
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<span style="font-style: inherit;">"</span><i>WE'RE SURE A LOT OF VOICES WERE TELLING HER JUST TO BE QUIET."</i></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLt5s0iTSiP0bnWxDkgxGei1jxAk7OIMGJRp_D0SPQ5TRrx2d2dreavaWVpam1NkLf37uoMMTXo_c19k49rcbH8BQ-RBwOJe-6MQcz8VmnlTq-vuxj8wOk5-XnpBTpkUktxwEmpg/s1600/kelly-live-800-1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjLt5s0iTSiP0bnWxDkgxGei1jxAk7OIMGJRp_D0SPQ5TRrx2d2dreavaWVpam1NkLf37uoMMTXo_c19k49rcbH8BQ-RBwOJe-6MQcz8VmnlTq-vuxj8wOk5-XnpBTpkUktxwEmpg/s320/kelly-live-800-1.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
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<span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;">The recent drama and real life of morning TV talk show "Live! with Kelly and (Michael?)" has a couple of simple and important lessons to offer. Singer-songwriter duo </span><a href="http://www.jillandkate.com/" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">Jill and Kate</a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> spell them out in their blog post,</span><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> </span><a href="http://www.jillandkate.com/blog/2016/4/26/uk976hsya1ybeb366ei8wil2974114" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">"Why We Care About Kelly Ripa's Return."</a><span style="font-family: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit;"> </span></div>
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We definitely have no problem <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">communicating</em> <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">in quantity</em>. But, <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">quality communication </em>in a professional situation isn't so common or easy.</div>
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Kelly Ripa took a couple of days off from her show after learning, literally at the last minute, of her cohost's upcoming departure for a new morning talk show. A lot of people wrote a lot of words in a little time after <em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">they</em> learned the news. Kelly only said she wouldn't be at work the next day.</div>
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When she was back on the air a few days later, she transformed melodrama to a lesson in respectful communication. She spent a little time thinking and waiting so that she wouldn't say something she regretted -- in an always-now-first-immediate-authoritative culture of barely moderated social communication.</div>
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Then, she came back. And she talked. She talked about tact, and respect, and acknowledgment. She talked about the absence of these and how they can be achieved.</div>
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Some workplaces are awful, unproductive environments because colleagues either speak <strong style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">too rashly</em></strong>, speak too <strong style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">evasively</em></strong>, or cultivate a culture of <strong style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">oppressive silence </em></strong>where to speak at all (about difficult, relevant situations) is subject to penalty. We can't get things done if we say things without honest intention (that is, all heart, no mind). We can't thrive, professionally, if we say things without honesty (that is, with disingenuous rosiness and active denial of true problems and their consequences). We can't survive if we don't say what is happening and has happened and if we coerce others to keep silent "so we can move on."</div>
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Truth-telling is complicated and it is critical. It's also productive: telling our stories in support of improved (workplace, social, relationship) life and health.</div>
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(<em style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;">I had the privilege of teaching and advising Jill and Kate back in their undergrad days. I recommend reading <a href="http://www.jillandkate.com/blog/2015/12/8/then-we-got-fired-31daysofblogging" rel="nofollow" style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; color: #8c68cb; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-style: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: none; padding: 0px; text-decoration: none; vertical-align: baseline;" target="_blank">their story</a> of consequential workplace truth-telling and breaking silence.)</em></div>
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<span style="background-attachment: initial; background-clip: initial; background-image: initial; background-origin: initial; background-position: initial; background-repeat: initial; background-size: initial; border-image-outset: initial; border-image-repeat: initial; border-image-slice: initial; border-image-source: initial; border-image-width: initial; border: 0px; box-sizing: border-box; font-family: inherit; font-stretch: inherit; font-variant: inherit; font-weight: inherit; line-height: inherit; margin: 0px; outline: 0px; padding: 0px; vertical-align: baseline;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">Image from <a href="http://livekellyandmichael.dadt.com/" target="_blank">Live!</a> and <a href="http://www.people.com/people/package/article/0,,20981907_21002497,00.html">people.com</a>. Cross-posted on <a href="https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/take-some-time-talk-tell-story-rini-cobbey?trk=prof-post" target="_blank">LinkedIn</a>.</span></span></div>
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Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-4684822207482288302016-04-21T14:36:00.002-05:002016-04-21T15:32:11.743-05:00"to cause you any sorrow / to cause you any pain" - PrinceJust yesterday I was having coffee with a former student of mine, one of my quite favorite things to do. We were talking about how things have changed, as they're wont to do especially for young people who've now Real Worlded for more years than they Colleged.<br />
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Then one thing that never changes joined the conversation: Alumni remember my "dead celebrity project." Yesterday I reminisced about how a former student I didn't have a deep bond with sent me a lovely note and a newspaper clipping when Mr. Rogers died. I told my coffee mate how I was surprised at the breadth of social response to Robin Williams, and we talked about why <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2016/01/fame-david-bowie-died-day-one.html" target="_blank">David Bowie</a> was so significant.<br />
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Today, my brother* texted me: "Sorry about Prince."<br />
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Thirty minutes later, another text, from a friend and former student: "I think this is the year to finish your book."<br />
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I'm working on it. I write about social responses to the death of celebrities. The interest got me in the late summer of 1997 (just that date will prove some point if you fill in the blank without much effort). Since then, I've tracked, theorized, listened, researched, and absorbed a lot of answers to, <a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2016/01/whos-yours-where-i-was-when-river.html" target="_blank">"Who's yours?"</a> -- sometimes without my even asking. It's fascinating and overwhelming and I really think it's important. Why and how do we respond to the death of someone famous? When do we grieve? With whom are we mourners?<br />
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First, though, we respond. I respond.<br />
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I follow a tech activist and entrepreneur whose diverse Twitter feed regularly celebrates his favorite Artist. I recommend Anil Dash's <a href="https://twitter.com/anildash/status/723217190032388096" target="_blank">thread</a> (still active as I write) responding to Prince's death (and art and life). Anil's kind of a Tech Twitter celebrity, I guess. His loss, and his writing's sunlight on our loss moves me.<br />
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I think Prince spent so much time & energy insisting he was ageless and immortal that maybe I bought it a little bit. I grieve over that.</div>
— ଅନୀଲ (@anildash) <a href="https://twitter.com/anildash/status/723221165590888452">April 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
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When a celebrity dies and we, society, respond, I observe as in Real Time (and then later) we process, connect, learn, and express what we feel and a little of why we feel it. I am always grateful to hear your thoughts and your feelings.<br />
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A person died. An icon died. We respond. We grieve. RIP Prince.<br />
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Now trending in our online dictionary: 'icon', 'iconic', and 'iconoclastic'. <a href="https://t.co/vbKDoK8mIG">https://t.co/vbKDoK8mIG</a></div>
— Merriam-Webster (@MerriamWebster) <a href="https://twitter.com/MerriamWebster/status/723223770949885954">April 21, 2016</a></blockquote>
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*(My brother's at a librarians conference, during a big children's book award ceremony, where someone at his table read the news of Prince's death and then everyone at his table checked their phones. The winning book's about the history of hip hop.) </div>
<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-84256284839670820292016-04-19T13:41:00.000-05:002016-04-19T13:41:55.182-05:00Buddy the Elf vs. The Manager?<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">In a 2015 <a href="http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2015/08/do-what-you-love-work-myth-culture/399599/" target="_blank">Atlantic interview</a> ("'Do What You Love' Is Pernicious Advice") about work and wellness, Atlantic editor Bourree Lam and Miya Tokumitsu, </span><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">author of the book </span><em style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;"><a data-omni-click="r'article',r'link',r'0',r'399599'" href="http://www.indiebound.org/book/9781941393475" style="color: #458cd5; outline: 0px;">Do What You Love And Other Lies About Success and Happiness</a>,</em><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;"> talk about why we work, and what passion has to do with it. </span><br />
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<i><span style="font-family: 'Lyon Display', Georgia, Times, serif;">Lam</span>: Why do you think people need an excuse to work? Why can’t we just go to work to make money?<br /><span style="font-family: 'Lyon Display', Georgia, Times, serif;">Tokumitsu</span>: I have wondered that. And one of the things I want to do is celebrate the job that just pays the rent. I feel like that is so maligned in our present culture.</i></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">In a 2016 <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3056114/hit-the-ground-running/why-making-a-career-leap-might-be-a-bad-strategy" target="_blank">Fast Company essay</a> (reposted on <a href="https://medium.com/@jeffgoins/why-quitting-your-job-to-chase-your-dream-is-a-terrible-idea-a3269e281eda#.hay0gps6e" target="_blank">Medium</a> as "Why Quitting Your Job to Chase Your Dream is a Terrible Idea"), Jeff Goins, author of <a href="http://www.fastcompany.com/3056114/hit-the-ground-running/why-making-a-career-leap-might-be-a-bad-strategy" target="_blank">The Art of Work</a>, advises against leaping for love of work.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;"><i>"I took the leap." This is the phrase we love to repeat when talking about big success. It's a table of of risk and reward, one we hear constantly from the mouths of wealthy entrepreneurs, big-name movie stars, and successful artists. But it's a lie."</i></span></span></blockquote>
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<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxTy5QO59uCobCZUjfIp9LTWW53DsNCmyGQZFonbZi1cKf3vsXiSVcc3sLFByv9eQmkNx41peU5Mzd7TZvfY43-pdpRjhsuK8yQnmCPCyAt1TxxBD40WNJ-bl-wewLhyfC09r9LA/s1600/20150802_152348.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="180" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhxTy5QO59uCobCZUjfIp9LTWW53DsNCmyGQZFonbZi1cKf3vsXiSVcc3sLFByv9eQmkNx41peU5Mzd7TZvfY43-pdpRjhsuK8yQnmCPCyAt1TxxBD40WNJ-bl-wewLhyfC09r9LA/s320/20150802_152348.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">I recently left a job I held for 15 years, often doing what I loved (with excellence, progress, and success) alongside what I didn't like so much. It was one of those mythical "more than a job" jobs. A genuine, murky, motivating vocation tapestry, interweaving business with unmeasurable relationship. (We market Education as such.) Trickling through the journey from entry level to middle management was an undercurrent of Something Else: I wished I had more <b>time and energy to practice</b> what I taught and go along where I lead.</span></div>
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">(It happens, not entirely coincidentally, that a few of my friends-who-happened-to-be-colleagues and couple of good friends-outside-of-work are in new chapters of New Job/Life now, too. For each, it's also been the trek of career and work/life shift: new professional occupations demand new education, new kidcare, new geography, new thinking about vocation and paying the rent. If Freelance Empathizers garnered paychecks...)</span></div>
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">"Work" is almost always the fulcrum in the balancing act of the circus of life. </span></span><br />
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"Choose a job you love, and you will never have to work a day in your life." - Confucius <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/Intel?src=hash">#Intel</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/joblove?src=hash">#joblove</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/quote?src=hash">#quote</a></div>
— Intel (@intel) <a href="https://twitter.com/intel/status/256829209270448129">October 12, 2012</a></blockquote>
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;"><script async="" charset="utf-8" src="//platform.twitter.com/widgets.js"></script> </span><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">We know that the platitude "if you love what you're doing, it's not work!" is balderdash, not least because we skim all those "____ is <a href="https://twitter.com/search?q=%22not%20a%20talent%2C%20it%27s%20a%20skill%22&src=typd" target="_blank">not a talent, it's a skill</a>" and "You have to <a href="http://www.pickthebrain.com/blog/10-amazing-success-lessons-from-michael-jordan/" target="_blank">put in the work to achieve</a> the ___" headlines. But such "work" means effort, not necessarily employment. </span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">A few months now into my chosen work/life shift, <b>I have no platitudes</b>, and for sure no 17 Steps to Make Work Your New Favorite and Make Your New Favorite Work. I know it's not as simple as Goins' word to go slowly and build a bridge (don't take a leap) to Your Dream Work, nor as Tokumitsu's exercise:</span></span><br />
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<span style="background-color: white; font-family: 'Lyon Text', Georgia, Times, serif; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;"><i>I’ve tried this little experiment when I meet people in non-work situations and try to see how long I can talk to them without asking about their work or have them ask me about my work. It's actually really hard to last longer than four minutes.</i></span></blockquote>
<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">(Although, and how!, that one resonates right now.)</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">I can say that while I work on what I want to do alongside what I don't want so much to do, I also want to <b>do and be well</b> and I know at least one thing: I work most days to build a bridge from my leap to my work and a part of my job right now (which doesn't pay the rent) is to think about what profession means as both avowal and avocation.</span></span><br />
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<span style="font-family: Lyon Text, Georgia, Times, serif;"><span style="background-color: white; font-size: 18px; line-height: 30.0001px;">In the next couple of weeks, I'll share some of what I'm learning (Learning's my favorite! I just like learning!) about what works in my job of working toward new work.</span></span><br />
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<br />Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17592795.post-85560986384843476182016-04-18T16:22:00.001-05:002022-11-15T20:18:29.854-06:00Some essays<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif">Outside (though sometimes cross-posted on) this blog are a few essays I've written about movies, art, and education, mostly.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1399739057" target="_blank"><b>Letters to a Young Artist (review)</b></a>. Here's a brief and admittedly gushing Goodreads review of Anna Deveare Smith's no-nonsense book about art and process and education.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="http://www.gordon.edu/article.cfm?iArticleID=1544&iReferrerPageID=1464&iPrevCatID=31&bLive=1" target="_blank"><b>Arts, Liberated</b></a>. This piece, published in my former college's magazine, is kind of a philosophy of education and its friend, working. Sometimes I revisit it to remind myself of how amazing the students and alumni and friends I know are.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><b><a href="http://www.salemnews.com/opinion/column-compromise-and-the-purest-man-in-america/article_323eebe6-d345-5702-9772-ff1f5dd5a890.html" target="_blank">Lincoln: Compromise and the Purist Man in America</a></b>. In my review of the 2012 film, Lincoln, I reflect on the unavoidable, yet ever unsettled question of how cultures can and must change, in the context of tradition, rightness, leadership, and compromise. (Someday I might get around to writing about the movie from a different angle: the role of hands and Day-Lewis' genius in embodying Lincoln.)</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Vdg1gXbzpcJOQW9Lzhlw0WNJESgxv3En/view?usp=sharing" target="_blank">Book Reviews in <i>Projections</i> journal</a>. I believe audiences intuitively respond to popular movies - and their surrounding elements, such as celebrity stars - in political as well as aesthetic ways. This 2009 essay discusses two books about Bollywood which deal with that idea.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="http://www.rinicobbey.com/2016/04/once-upon-time-there-were-girls-who.html" target="_blank">When Girls Became Lions (review)</a>. In reviewing this 2014 novel about Title IX and a marathon trek to support girls' participation in sports, I highlight the book's mystery and story.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="http://blogs.gordon.edu/facultycentral/2012/08/23/summer-film-review-the-bourne-legacy-fun-pretty-and-impossible/" target="_blank"><b>Bourne Legacy: "I really have no idea what's going on."</b></a> Sometimes even ubiquitously analytical <i>I</i> know a movie's meaning and merit are less significant than its carefreedom. So, I analyzed a funnish movie that's happy with its nonsensical plot and uninterested in its critical potential.</span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><a href="http://www.salemnews.com/opinion/my-view-merry-with-a-touch-of-melancholy-makes-for/article_f1c43ef1-bc80-588e-9df5-a5f443067996.html" target="_blank"><b>Merry, with a touch of melancholy, makes for a good Christmas</b></a>. Asked to write (during the season) about Christmas movies, I got a little moody. </span><br />
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<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /><i>Subject to updates, as Life and Language always should be.</i></span>
<span face=""helvetica neue" , "arial" , "helvetica" , sans-serif"><br /></span>Rinihttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10825557904007699185noreply@blogger.com0