Years later we'll remember the bathtub,
the position
             of the taps
the water, slippery
as if a bucketful
             of eels had joined us . . .
we'll be old, our children grown up
but we'll remember the water
                          sloshing out
the useless soap,
the mountain of wet towels.
'Remember the bathtub in Belfast?'
we'll prod each other ---

                          "Love in a Bathtub," Sujata Bhatt.

What's the coolest thing you own?

Tags: questions

No work is more fun for me than editing, and I've never had more fun editing than I did last December when I worked on Terri Senft's Camgirls: Celebrity and Community in the Age of Social Networks.

Camgirls is a book about women who live their lives in public on the web, and it concentrates on webcams in their heyday, but that's really just its hook. It's a book about how celebrity and community operate online. It's a book about LiveJournal. (Terri has been participating in and observing LiveJournal culture as tsenft for eight years, and she's got a huge amount of smart stuff to say about how LJ operates as a tool for building connections between people.) It's a book about feminism, about sex work, and about how gender is lived on the internet. It's a book, fundamentally, about the construction and presentation of the self in the online era --- about how we establish and maintain ourselves as people and as personae when we live our lives online.

It's a hell of a book. Really. I bought two copies, so that I can lend one out and not worry about getting it back. Go get yourself one. If you do, and you regret it, mail it to me. I'll pay you for it, reimburse you the shipping, and find it a good home.


Update: Forgot to mention --- If any of you are interested in reviewing Camgirls, or if you or anyone you know is teaching a course in cyberculture or women's studies for which you might be interested in assigning it, let me know. I'll get Terri to hook you up with a PDF reader's copy.

Further Update: So it appears that Camgirls is not yet quite available. Consider this a pre-publication endorsement, and I'll post again when the book is actually on offer. I'm still happy to make arrangements to get PDFs out, though.

This week's New Yorker cover would have been perfect next January.

Tags: obama

I learned today that Elvis has two words I didn't know she knew: "pizza" and "butt-goo."

Update: By "butt-goo," I should make clear, she was referring to ointment, not anything repulsively excretory.

Tags: elvis

In 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt got 53.4 percent of the popular vote for president. Since then the Democratic candidate has matched that total just once, when Johnson won in a landslide in 1964.

Other than LBJ, only one Democratic candidate has won a popular vote majority in the last sixty years --- Carter got 50.1% in 1976. Truman and Kennedy and Clinton won four races between them, but none of them ever got to 50%.

The presidency is a pretty hard nut for the Dems to crack, but they have a really rough time getting past fifty percent.

Casey was explaining her technique on a videogame we were playing the other day, and she said it was "aspiretic eurfidetic." I'm totally going to work that into my dissertation somehow.

Here's the Elvis update I promised a while back. Just random notes I scrawled at dinner one night, more for Elvis to look at later than for any of you.

( Jump! )

Tags: elvis

So I've been really busy recently --- took a work trip to Vegas, am elbow deep in the book, trying to get back in the groove with the last round of pre-defense dissertation edits, warily eyeing the syllabus for this fall's class. There have been some interesting personal and professional developments for the upcoming academic year that I'll be talking about eventually. And our sitter is on vacation for a week and a half, so I've been home with the kids.

It's been fun, though, being with the kids. The other day I made a half-hour-long recording of a conversation between me and Casey that started with Rosa Parks, meandered past Thurgood Marshall to the concept of race, and from there proceeded back from the early settlement of New York City to the theory of evolution, the Cretaceous–Tertiary extinction event, and whether elephants, like birds, are the lineal descendants of dinosaurs.

Elvis is pretty damn cool too, I'm being reminded. I think I said something in my last Elvis post about how no parent can ever be at all certain how many words his toddler actually knows, but spending a couple of days in a row with E has really been an eye-opener. She has a lot more words than I'd realized --- I have no idea how many, but it's got to be several dozen.

A couple of weeks ago I was participating in a focus group downtown, and I went out for dinner by myself before the event. I took a notebook and pen and wrote out the Elvis update I'd been meaning to post, and then promptly lost track of the notebook. By the time I unearthed it, I was well into the crush of work I mentioned above. But since I've been with the kids all day, C1 is letting me hide out a bit while she preps dinner, and I'm going to transcribe the thing.

...But not just yet, it appears. Elvis is melting down, and interfering with dinner prep. I'm needed. Watch this space.

Tags: casey, elvis, family, work

C1 informs me that the NY state legislature approved a bill yesterday giving unmarried couples with no children access to Family Court in domestic violence cases. This law will make it easier for lesbians and gays, as well as unmarried straight people, to secure orders of protection from their abusers, and strengthen the provisions of those orders when granted.

C1's agency has been fighting for this law, the "Fair Access to Family Court Act," for twenty years, and yesterday it passed.

Tags: gender, politics