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The Fine and the Wicked: the Life and Times of Ouida by Monica Stirling

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


Oh, man. Reading early literary criticism and biography is so frustrating because nobody cites sources in a useful way! Stirling is all, "And then Ouida said this," or "Then Henry James said this about Ouida," or "One time at band camp, Ouida . . ." without telling me where she gets any of her information. Sometimes I can go to the bibliography she has at the end and figure out that she's probably quoting from a certain text but sometimes not.

Reading Stirling is a wacky ride. I mean, she explicitly says that her mission is to defend Ouida as an important author and to reclaim her works as entertaining and worthy of reading, but she goes over the top in attributing emotions and motivations to Ouida for which she has zero evidence. She's constantly saying things like (paraphrasing here): Ouida never looked a gift horse in the mouth, and if she had, she would only have commented on the beauty of its teeth. Stirling's prose is ludicrous at times; she's so eager to defend Ouida's behavior that her defenses sometimes don't make logical sense. She also does this weird framing thing where she pits Ouida and Queen Victoria against each other throughout the biography, and it's extremely off-putting to read.

On the other hand, lots of great pictures of Ouida and the houses she lived in plus good biographical details and lots of info about the people with whom she socialized and corresponded.

Ouida just makes me so sad. She was so brilliant, and she was so admired, and she ended up alone and miserable and poor at the end of her life. She had loyal friends even up to her dying day, but she manufactured so much of her own unhappiness through her inability to save money and her anger at the social humiliations she sometimes suffered when she couldn't keep her mouth shut or reacted poorly to what she perceived as slights. I have so much sympathy for her and so much admiration for how much she was able to accomplish despite both external and internal forces that were set against her.

Note to self: I made a mistake in re-reading Ouida's biographies; published in the 1950s, Stirling's is the latest, and I really should have started with Elizabeth Lee's (the earliest at 1912) to better chart the way Ouida's story changes (or not) as time progresses. That's not something I took note of when I read these biographies fifteen years ago.



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The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture In Late Victorian England by Talia Schaffer

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I love this book. Schaffer is such a good writer. I think it's so hard to write academic criticism well. The writer has to straddle the line between knowing her stuff/making a convincing argument and coming off like a pretentious twit who's just interested in proving how large her vocabulary is and how convoluted a sentence she can write. The longer I am in the academy, the less patience I have for dense, impenetrable academic writing. Life is too short to read someone masturbating (painfully, no less!) on the page. Schaffer's writing is not conversational, but it's not convoluted either; her writing is clear and convincing. I get a sense of who she is as a scholar and a thinker; her writing is formal, but she has not attempted to absent herself entirely from the process, a conceit I find tedious in a great deal of academic writing (as if our passions and interests and biases as scholars do not inform our work).

As a Ouida scholar, what mainly draws me to this book is Schaffer's argument that Ouida is a female Aesthete who can be credited with popularizing the witty, epigrammatic language that will later become characteristic of male Aesthetes like Wilde. She also positions Ouida and other female Aesthetes as a direct influence for Modernist writers; her comments about the way that Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own explicitly denies the lives and literary output of late Victorian women writers in order to create its argument that a female literary tradition doesn't exist are quite compelling (and even shocking) in this context. Identifying Ouida as an Aesthete also helps us to understand some of the seemingly inexplicable choices she made in her personal life (the way she dressed, her love of hothouse flowers, etc) as an attempt to live out the principles of Aestheticism.

I really enjoyed learning about female some writers I didn't know anything about (Who's going to immediately start reading Lucas Malet? This gal) and developing a greater understanding of Aestheticism itself. I was also fascinated to learn that Thomas Hardy plagiarized Jude the Obscure from a Lucas Malet novel and no one caught it at the time. Schaffer puts enough of their writing side by side that the plagiarism is undeniable.

Highly, highly recommend this as a very readable work that helps define Aestheticism, tells us about the lives and literary works of both male and female Aesthetes, and helps us understand the relationship of Modernism to the Aesthetic Movement.



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Fallen Angel by Sally Mitchell

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


The major theme of this work is the fallen woman, how she's represented in early Victorian fiction, and how that representation differs from the fallen woman in actuality. Naturally this entails a discussion of how the Victorians defined chastity and the consequences of that definition.

In addition, Mitchell focuses on reading habits of the time period. This is a good examination of the kinds of novels being written by and for women from the 1830s-1880s. Mitchell discusses sensation novels as well as the novels and stories being published in penny periodicals.

I read this book for her criticism of Ouida's novels, which is pretty spare. She only discusses Moths and Folle-Farine very briefly and Ouida's canon as a whole very generally, but her comments are important to note. Her research did point me to a couple primary sources, including contemporaneous reviews, of which I was unaware. I also appreciated the little bit of information Mitchell includes about Geraldine Jewsbury; she was a critic who reviewed several of Ouida's novels, but I didn't know anything about her personally.



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Dark Lord of Derkholm by Diana Wynne Jones

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really liked this book. It was a lot of fun, and I liked the unusual cast of characters.

I did not like, however, that there is a short scene in the middle that alludes to a rape. I mean, I guess you could read it as not going that far, but I don't see how, and it seems really, really unnecessary in what is otherwise a delightful YA fantasy novel. It's literally like two paragraphs long, and the book would have been better for the pruning of it.

With that caveat, I think this was a very enjoyable read.



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Scholarship Assessed: Evaluation of the Professoriate by Charles E. Glassick

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


This report is the follow-up to Scholarship Reconsidered which seeks to begin answering the question: if we're going to expand the definition of scholarship, how should we assess the newly defined scholarship for promotion and tenure purposes?

I didn't find anything new in this report, but I did find some useful suggestions for taking evaluation of teaching beyond student evaluations, and I think the suggestion that promotion and tenure committees (along with the administrators who will make those decisions) receive training in how to evaluate scholarship is a very good one.



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So, over the course of this week, the Boyer model of scholarship got brought up at two separate meetings, so I thought I'd better check it out. Over the last four years, we've consolidated and gone through two level changes, so we're now at the point where we're having to revise promotion and tenure processes yet again. Part of that is defining what we mean by scholarship and which activities will be rewarded by the institution. I think there's going to be a committee. LOL

( Scholarship Reconsidered )

The Matrimonial Trap: Eighteenth-Century Women Writers Redefine Marriage by Laura E Thomason

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I think this book is a really interesting look at the way genteel, primarily English, 18th-century women viewed marriage. While Thomason does examine several novels, most of her source material is drawn from personal correspondence. I hadn't realized that letters at this point in history were simultaneously public and private documents. People had every expectation that their letters might be circulated beyond the intended recipients, even published without their permission. In addition, European governments had begun surveillance of correspondence, often opening and examining letters. Very fascinating the way women took advantage of that dual nature of letters to do some really neat stuff with argument and with authorial voice.

Very informative read.





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Hide and Seek by Wilkie Collins

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


Oh, man. I have been on such a Wilkie Collins high, and I was looking forward to reading this one, but it just didn't do it for me. It was a slog, and reading it felt tedious. One of Collins's gifts is dialogue, and this novel is almost entirely descriptive exposition--lots of what everything looks like and what everyone is thinking and very little of it accomplished through dialogue. I also think that the solution to the mystery of the story isn't telegraphed at all so that it just comes out of nowhere. My edition has some notes at the end which suggest that originally Collins did include more clues but edited them out later; I wish he'd left them in because the conclusion of the story was pretty convoluted even for me, an inveterate lover of sensation novels.



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Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly by Anthony Bourdain




I loved No Reservations and watched its entire run avidly. Anthony Bourdain is extremely charismatic, interesting, attractive, funny, and witty on that show. I also appreciated that the show took such a political turn in the last season or so. Given my love for his TV persona, I expected to really like this book, but it didn't grab me.

Kitchen Confidential is a good look at what being a chef at the end of the twentieth century was like. It's got fascinating insider info and really gets across what a grueling life the food service industry is.

However, I kinda bounced off the persona Bourdain creates for this book. He, and pretty much everyone else around him, are so off-puttingly drunk and high and worthless for so much of the book that I got pretty bored with the degeneracy fairly early on. I also bounced off the casual sexism and homophobia that permeates the kitchens of the restaurants Bourdain writes about. I believe him 100% that this is an accurate depiction; I also believe him when he says he's not sexist or homophobic. But his attitude of "it is how it is with the sexism and homophobia" rubs me the wrong way. I also got my hackles up at (I must admit the relatively few; it's either just one or two) small comments he makes about people with dietary restrictions. Yes, Anthony Bourdain, I have celiac because it's inconvenient for YOU! *sigh* I realize this was written quite some time ago, but knowing that chefs at restaurants are full of contempt for those of us who would like to eat at restaurants sometimes (and sometimes even NEED to) but who have allergies or other dietary restrictions is so maddening. I believe a lot of this has changed; the book now includes an afterword where Bourdain talks about women getting into the boy's club, and I think attitudes toward gluten free menu items has definitely changed because so many places are offering gluten free now.

Tl;dr: Interesting book in which I did not care for the protagonist much.



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The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


I really enjoyed this book. I was first introduced to Pollan's writing in The Botany of Desire, and I liked that book so well that I looked for other books he's written.

The Omnivore's Dilemma raises fascinating and often disturbing questions about how we grow our food, about the way agriculture as an industry is harming our planet, and about the potential ways we might go about solving these problems. As Pollan says over and over again in the book, learning about the way we raise and slaughter meat on a mass scale in the U.S. is guaranteed to ruin the appetite. And yet, Pollan asserts that some of the ways people have tried to circumvent this problem (going vegetarian, only eating organic food, buying meat that comes from animals that were treated well before slaughter) come with their own sets of problems (like the large carbon footprint incurred by shipping organic fruits and vegetables all over the country/world, for example).

This book was very informative, but my favorite parts were the moments of introspection. I particularly enjoyed the part where Pollan turns up his nose at what he sees as off-putting machismo in "hunter porn" and then has to admit to his chagrin later that he can kinda see where those writers are coming from when they write about how hunting engages them on a primal level even while acknowledging how profoundly uncomfortable that realization makes him.

As someone who never ate a tomato from the store until I was an adult and who mostly ate protein as a child that was fished or shot by my dad, I appreciate stories that are about people eliminating the middle man between them and the food they eat.

Very highly recommended.



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1. I've been thinking about writing an essay about why I think evangelical Christians are so willing to vote for Trump. I was raised in that tradition (Southern Baptist), and it makes no sense on the surface why people who not only say they are Christian but who claim to make every decision in their lives based on that Christianity would support Trump, but having been a part of that culture for the first 18 years of my life, I have some ideas about why they're doing so. But I've also been thinking that plenty of other people have written about this, and I don't know that I have anything new to say or offer about the subject, so. IDK

2. We finished our rewatch of Treme. One half of the couple we watched it with used to live in Louisiana and is an accomplished musician who often played gigs in NOLA. So that added an extra layer of fun to the rewatch; they'd often comment about places featured, or he'd have stories about the musicians in the episodes. ( SPOILERS )

3. We are almost done with Downton Abbey season two. We finished all the regular episodes and only have the Christmas Special left to watch.

( SPOILERS )

I can't wait to see where the story goes. I am actually sad that Walking Dead is resuming because it means no more Downton Abbey for awhile.

4. executrix sent me a biography of Jane Austen (Jane Austen: A Life by Claire Tomalin) which was really interesting. I knew nothing about her life, so everything was pretty much new to me. This is a very thorough, heavily researched book which I would recommend to anyone interested in her. I have to admit that from time to time I got a little confused because the cast of characters, so to speak, is so large and so many people in her family and life shared names; I just wanted to read it for entertainment and not take notes or anything, but reading it that way did mean that I was a little bit lost from time to time.

I have two main takeaways from the book. First, how horrible that so many of her letters and documents were destroyed. I wonder if they were truly scandalous (I doubt it), or if that notion of privacy (that regardless of their content, the public at large shouldn't be able to read her letters and that wanting to do so was born of prurient interest) which was beginning already to erode with the explosion of celebrity culture and mass media was largely responsible.

Second, I wonder if she was happy to stay single or if she considered her life tragic. The book posits that her first, truncated romance with Tom Lefroy was very dear to her and that she was very hung up on him and hurt when he was essentially forbidden to see her. Tomalin offers some evidence that Austen was thinking about him three years after that romance had ended. It also mentions that she initially accepted and then turned down a proposal from a man she was friends with but had no romantic feelings for. My take on it is that she'd watched all the women around her have ungodly amounts of children and a number of them die in childbirth and maybe she was grateful to escape that horror. IDK I mean, it can certainly be both. What do y'all think (about anything relating to her life)?

I just finished rereading volume one of Saga and reading volume two for the first time. I know what I want for Christmas. :) I really like how funny and irreverent these comics are and how strongly they tug at my heartstrings. No spoilers for future volumes, please, but I'd love to talk about the first two volumes with those of you who have read (second volume ends with ( SPOILERS )

).

I also finished reading a book executrix sent me called What We Wore: An Offbeat Social History of Women's Clothing, 1950-1980. It consists of four chapters--one each on the fifties, sixties, and seventies--followed by a very short chapter about the role of magazines like Mademoiselle in disseminating fashion. The book is very focused on what young people were wearing, mostly focusing on high school and college-aged women along with what young women would have been wearing as they started their careers. The longest and most comprehensive chapter is on the fifties, but each chapter contains lots of photographs and ends with snippets of interviews with women about what they wore during each era. Some of the women are celebrities whose names I recognize, but I think most of them are just regular people. I can see this book being an invaluable resource for people who want to write about young women in those decades. Anybody can google images of clothes from each era (and I suggest you read this book with google images handy because the author talks about a lot of styles and people that aren't pictured), but what What We Wore contextualizes the clothes: why were they worn that way, what inspired them, how did people who couldn't afford certain clothes go about imitating the style, what physical or other consequences wearing certain garments entailed, and the little quirks of dress that no series of google images could impart (like how many petticoats girls were wearing under their skirts in the fifties and how they cut up their legs or what wearing certain pins meant, etc). I think the book ended abruptly; I read the last sentence and then turned the page to find that it had ended. Other than that, I highly recommend this book for anyone interested in fashion from those time periods.