Fear of a Female Planet

Just a typical Saturday night, eating ribs, watching football, knitting, and reading.

They had a ridiculous deal on ribs at the store, so we decided to try making them ourselves for the first time. Nomnomnomnom.




I have a dubious amount of sock yarn, so I found an interesting enough pattern that is toe up and the pattern can stop or continue indefinitely (harder to find than you would think). This pattern is British or stupid or both, so I did my own toe cast on and wrote my own chart.



Finished the night by finishing The Wastelands, but I have to read Lean In for book club before start rereading Wizards and Glass.

Today, a long run and a visit to the art Museum!

Essay: There Will Be a Quiz
By JOE QUEENAN, The New York Times, April 6, 2008

Freelance writers are always looking for ways to scare up a few extra bucks, so recently I tried my hand at writing some of those “Questions for Discussion” that appear at the back of many paperbacks. I got the idea after reading Andrei Makine’s novel “The Crime of Olga Arbyelina,” the hard-luck saga of a Russian émigré with a hemophiliac son who pops up in France after World War II, hoping to put her life back together. Rumored to be kin to the luckless royals who ran afoul of Lenin and the boys back in the old country, Olga endures a life of uninterrupted misery and heartbreak.

The novel’s story line isn’t all that hard to follow, so by the time I reached the end, I had a pretty clear idea that Olga hadn’t gotten a fair shake in life. Be that as it may, I was startled when I turned to the back of the book and encountered eight questions prepared for book clubs that might be interested in discussing the novel further. Question No. 5 ran like this: “Olga has been driven from her homeland by the Bolsheviks, raped by a soldier, abandoned by her husband, treated with indifference by her lover, drugged, sexually violated and impregnated by her son. Does the novel lay the blame for Olga’s fate on the shoulders of the men in her world? Would you?”

At first, I thought this question might be a fluke or an oversight, but then I paged through a pile of other novels containing similar supplementary materials. Now it became clear to me that seemingly off-the-wall questions were a staple of the genre, deliberately included to shake up the musty old world of literature and force readers to think “outside the box.”

( If Heathcliff were alive today, would he mention Cathy’s death on his Facebook page and change his relationship status to It’s Complicated? )

I decided to start Robert Graves "Goodbye to All That" in honor of the start of war.
Graves was a poet, war hero, and anti-war protester (along with Siegfried Sassoon). He was a very angry man.

( Poetry )