Nancy's Musings

Fictions can be more truthful than truthiness. I'm thinking of the entire self-help industry. *narrows eyes* But how does a reader know what aspects of an artwork are true, and which devices of mediation? Real-to-life characters in fiction are still always and necessarily Autons compared to real human spirit/psyche/agency. Places are sketched with a few balanced words. Situations are invented, paradoxes resolved, coincidences explained away (or not, depending on the genre). Even works of pure autobiography are mediated through memory and self-consciousness. And probably a ghost-writer. This is Lacan's chain of signifiers? But I believe in Truth. I believe that even in something as thickly invented as Jasper Fforde's Thursday Next series, truth hasn't been summarily ejected. It can't be. Nothing is entirely . . . untruth. Perhaps I should think about the difference between Realism and Reality. Very much in line with my Doctor Who . . . thing. . . I find myself drawn...

There was a moment. I was very young: maybe about the same time I discovered Doctor Who, maybe a little later. I was into poetry then, and existentialism (after I shifted out of my Wicca phase). I had just finished Whitman's Leaves of Grass , and knew that Uncle Walt was a brilliant poet. The words were raw and gentle, and full of pain. I next opened Kahlil Gibran's  The Prophet and started reading. It was beautiful too, and big-hearted in a way no other poetry ever had been. The philosophy was such a blend of things: as he writes, "Half of what I say is meaningless" but he writes so that the other half will reach us. This is Fiction. Half air, half candy, but you can't breathe it. I was reading in the dark from a mattress on the floor. I put the poetry down and picked up a book of scripture. All the mental muscles that had been flexed and straining to properly digest half-truths suddenly relaxed. I felt peace in my reading as I never had before, and I knew that ...

I am a whovian, and have been since about 1990 (after Old Who was no longer being filmed). I spent the next decade supporting KUED and collecting novelizations, on the odd occasion when I got down to Vegas, the nearest city with a big enough used bookstore to stock them. I waited. When they started New-Who in 2005, I shrugged. I simply didn't have access to BBCA and wouldn't ever in the foreseeable future. After fifteen years, I had developed iron patience about Doctor Who. Every successive year has seen the show grow shinier and flashier and more popular until last weekend happened: the 50th Anniversary of the first airing of the original show. I watched it four times in three days. I'm telling you this because I don't understand what I am in relation to the show. In the 2005 series, Nine meets Charles Dickens and introduces himself as his "Number One Fan," short for "fanatic." Hearing it defined like that, I became instantly uncomfortable with the ...

While watching an episode of Criminal Minds (a show clearly written by ex- English graduate students) I came across a quotation from Carl Jung. It wasn't one of the opening/closing quotations, but Rossi tells Reid (via Jung) that our choice of vocation is linked to our childhood and/or unconscious. So. . . I grew up in a library, and became a Scholar in Literature. It seems so obvious, so simple. Books = book career. It's so much more complicated than that. Why not become a librarian? A book-artist? A typesetter? An editor? An English teacher? And for each of those things, there's an external answer. I worked in a library for sixteen years, several of those as a librarian of one kind or another. I am very interested in book arts. I've tried data entry and word processing. Editing is my second job. English teacher (of a sort) is my first. I am, to some extent, all of those things. And the reason I am working for a PhD is also external: my grandfather got one, and when h...

People are connected. The decisions we make, good, bad, and everywhere in-between, affect everybody connected to us, and even some people a world away. They simply do. It is a fact. Back in the days of the enlightenment, this widely accepted fact gave rise to the most peculiar set of social conventions devised, especially for the aristocratic French, even down to acceptable colors for certain kinds of parties (depending often on what the queen wore). Now, though, we tell ourselves and each-other things like, "it's none of your business." "it's a victimless crime," "don't be nosy" and "what's it to you?" Now, we assume that just because we can make decisions for ourselves, that nobody else has any reason to be bothered by or interested in those decisions. If you've ever been related or married to a person with a serious addiction, you're aware that this is complete bullshit. Life is just. . . messy. And that's just LIFE...

"Impostor Syndrome" is a thing now, with a wikipedia page and everything. Career women from all fields are expressing insecurity about their abilities and performance at work, despite being as or more qualified than their male counterparts. I experience deep insecurity, but I can't call it "impostor syndrome" anymore, though two years ago, it certainly was. The difference is that my fears of inadequacy have become a certainty. I know that I am not as good, and that I don't deserve what I have been given. I have stopped pretending. I won't stop my studies or my work, but I no longer have ambitions for success, only survival. I'm not afraid of work. These things don't come naturally to me, but I can work to be better. I don't write very well, but there are resources available to help me. They say it's not paranoia if people actually are out to get you. It's not impostor syndrome if I really am incompetent. Facing this reality is one of ...

Saturday morning, I was sitting at my desk, probably doing exactly what I'm doing now, or something very like. My phone rang - the generic tone (ABBA's "Ring, Ring") - and I had to dig it out of my backpack. The number appeared, but no name. I answered anyway, because not knowing is worse than the guilt of hanging up on a pernicious salesman. Besides, I don't hang up on salesmen. I can usually get a pretty good conversation out of them, and I get desperate after a long week of reading. "Hello" was all I said. I didn't sound excited, but I don't think I sounded disparaging either. I don't know. Whoever it was hung up. I was sitting at the computer, so I looked the number up in the reverse directory. It's a local landline, but it would cost $15 or more to find out whose. In 1962, Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin made a movie called If a Man Answers  in which her French  mother calls her, and hangs up if she hears a man's voice just to make hi...