Charles Dickens is generally touted as one of the English language’s best writers. Bulwer-Lytton is generally touted as so bad that he actually has a terrible first line contest named for him.  

Yet when passages from the work of each are placed side by side….  Well, I can’t tell them apart – except for the ones from Dickens’s Great Expectations, which I recognized on sight.*  Can you?

*Not because I like Great Expectations; merely because I was forced to read it in middle school, in high school, and again in college.

Added:  Portfolio and Resume pages.

Updated: About page.  Now with more links and less nonsense!  (Only one of these things is true.)

Removed: Submission info.  I’m not taking either guest posts or books-to-review at this time, because Major Life Changes.

To Do: Update the Resources for Book Lovers page, which hasn’t changed in almost two years despite its claim to be “frequently updated.”

Major Life Changes around here include, mostly, being accepted to an MA program in English, which I start in Fall 2013.  I also start teaching freshman comp as a GA in said program in Fall 2013.  We’re moving, and I’m contracting though not closing the freelance writing business.

What does this mean for the blog?  I haven’t decided yet.  It’s likely I’ll start doing a lot more blogging about grad-school-related things and a lot less about book reviews – though I will finish Atlas Shrugged if I ever develop the intestinal fortitude again.

Lately, I’ve been using Tumblr quite a bit to capture ideas that don’t seem sufficiently fleshed-out for blog posts but that will float off into the ether if I don’t put them down somewhere.  There are a bunch of social justice-y ones here.

I’m also working on an irreverent grammar guide for grownups, tentatively titled Dick Kills Jane: An Irreverent Guide to Grammar.  Right now Dick Kills Jane is merely a Tumblr, but you can join the antics here.

What We’re Not Talking About When We Talk About Guns and Rape.

Premise: when we insist the answer to rape is to arm women, we further entrench rape culture. We also ask women to choose between liberty and security – even though guns don’t actually provide security from rape.

I have some wibbliness about what I’ll be called in comments (hey, I saw what happened to Zerlina Maxwell), but I trust Barry Deutsch’s modding skillz. Besides, if I let myself be scared of comments I’d never get any writing done at all.

‘Sup.

He found it under my sewing table (naturally), where I believe it landed after he pulled it out of a pincushion he had confiscated for his own amusement.  I retrieved the pincushion, but didn’t realize the needle and its attached thread had come out until I looked over and saw him swallowing something.  Something with a shiny, dangly end.

Fizzgig, of course, thinks that whatever you don’t want him to have must be THE BEST THING EVER, so the moment I made a grab for him, he ran for it.  By the time The Husband and I grabbed him, the thread he was swallowing was gone, and so was the needle on the end of it.

Whoa!

So we took him to the local emergency vet at 10:00 pm on date night, because what else are you going to do when your cat swallows a sewing needle?  They x-rayed him. The needle was not only in his stomach, it was the length of his stomach.

Yeah.  No way is that passing through his system without death.

So the emergency vet opened him up and removed the needle.  Apart from some Clavamax-induced barfing, Fizzgig – now known on the Twitters as Needle-Swallowing Cat – is doing just fine.  He has, in fact, recovered from surgery far better than I recover from surgery, which makes me a little envious.

Groovin’.

Needle-Swallowing Cat lives a charmed, expensive life.  He’d better remain fluffy and adorable for AT LEAST the next fifteen years, or WE WILL HAVE WORDS.  / incredible threat

This is going to be shorter than I’d like, because I’m having awful hand pain and still have to type a bunch of things tonight.  But I can’t not post it.

In case you missed it, among the awful sexist racist misogynist crap that got shared with 40 million viewers during the Oscars last Monday was a tweet from The Onion, calling 9-year-old Best Actress nominee Quvenzhané Wallis a “cunt.”

Let that sink in for a moment.  SHE IS NINE.  SHE CARRIED A PUPPY PURSE TO THE OSCARS.  AND THE ONION CALLED HER A CUNT.

The Onion later deleted the tweet and issued an apology that’s pretty good as far as covering-your-ass PR apologies go; it apologized to Quvenzhané Wallis for calling her that word and promised to do better in the future, which is miles better than the average “we’re sorry if anyone was offended” nonpology.  So there’s that.  There’s also the fact that the Onion’s defenders are all up in the idea of “satire,” as if a joke can’t possibly fall flat or even cause harm if it’s intended to be funny.  (Right.)

There’s also this: until very recently – like, maybe, today – white feminists were largely silent on the Onion tweet.  We weren’t silent about the Oscars by a long shot – but we didn’t tackle this tweet.  The best we had was nothing; the worst was defending the Onion.

(For a much better-articulated and well-researched background of the white feminist silence problem, see Jessica Luther’s marvelous post at Shakesville.  For some even better background on why the white feminist silence problem is a problem, read the links.)

I am one of those white feminists who hasn’t said a damn thing, except in the ephemeral Twittersphere – which, as Jessica Luther points out, is inadequate for many reasons, primary among which is that black feminists told us it wasn’t enough.  And I don’t particularly feel like making excuses, because the problem is that I, as a white feminist, dropped the ball on this one.

I haven’t blogged about this until now, however, because for days I had no idea what to say.  Partly I was gobsmacked that anyone would call any nine-year-old girl a “cunt” (and don’t tell me that’s not going to follow Quvenzhané around for the rest of her life, because the Internet never dies), and partly I’m woefully under-informed on the ways racism turns certain words and actions into extra-horrible piles of crap.  I’ve never had to know that.  That’s what we call “white privilege.”  So, given that there’s a giant hole in my knowledge, I found it necessary to Shut Up and Listen for a bit.

And then I realized that, despite the giant hole in my knowledge, there is something I can say, and it’s something I can say because (as I said in a tweet to a friend) it’s pretty much the only thing I ever say when teaching writing.  And it’s this:

Words matter. Context matters. Words in context matter.

Was the Onion’s tweet sexist?  Yes.  The word “cunt” is, by its nature, a sexist slur.

Was the Onion’s tweet racist?  Yes.  The sexist slur “cunt,” in the context of talking about a black girl, evokes our longstanding history of sexualizing black girls long before we would ever impose the responsibilities of a sexual being on white girls.

Was the Onion’s tweet jaw-droppingly disgusting?  The Onion called a nine-year-old cuddling a puppy purse a “cunt.”  

The Onion’s tweet wasn’t racist in the same way it was sexist – here, the racism depends on the context, while the sexism is inherent in the chosen slur.  But that’s a distinction without a difference, because both words and context matter.  Both are powerful.  And both can be used to devastating effect.  Both are used to devastating effect against black girls and women every day; our racist “history” is very much here and now.  And we are remiss, every one of us, when we don’t call that out when we see it.

As Flavia Dzodan said: My feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit.