Yes, it’s animated tumblrs that now help me survive the semester.

Because whoever has put together Office Hours are Over and My Life as a College Professor have basically provided a public service for the rest of us. To wit, a post with the heading, “Department Meetings”:

Or, When It Is the Last Day of Classes:

I’m not sure I’ve ever felt so understood.

Lady writers and their cute little books

Sure, those VIDA statistics showed that lady writers don’t get reviewed — and nor do they serve very often as reviewers. Pish! I mean, can we really trust women and math? The Washington Post‘s Ron Charles reminds us that he once taught a class that had Elaine Showalter’s “Towards a Feminist Poetics,” so … wait, what were you talking about? So hard to pay attention to those shrill, bitter lady-tones.

Great satire:

Less satirically and on a similar topic, Amanda Filipacchi wrote this week in the NY Times that she’d discovered that Wikipedia had re-categorized us lady writers. No longer are we included under “American Novelists” — rather, we are segregated into the convenient and totally equal category of “American Women Novelists.” The rationale appears to be that the list of American novelists was too long. (Isn’t that the thing about information?!)

Isn’t that a relief? Because when I searching for a list of American novelists, of course I mean male novelists.

I would only hope that they further tidy up the lists by separating out the Black American Female Novelists into their own happy (and, again, totally equal!) page. And the Gay American Female Novelists, and Working Class American Female Novelists, and Latina and Possibly Undocumented American Female Novelists. And, oh yeah, Disabled American Female Novelists. Now that would be convenient.

Not.

The art of the condom packet

As much as it gets a big grin from me, using these universal/unisex/ “international symbol” figures makes sex seem a little clinical, doesn’t it?

How to grade papers

“Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — some brilliant person from history

Actually, compared to grading student papers, writing is easy. You want blood oozing out of your pores? Try grading.

Just recently we received a plaintive letter from one of our avid readers:

Dear Feminéma,

I am grading my students’ papers. Is it possible I could die?

Sincerely, Agonized

Never fear, Agonized. I have advice!

1. Let’s get this over with already: the problem of procrastination. Watch this video:

…but only watch it once, because otherwise you’d be guilty of procrastination. Also: do not allow yourself to do anything else, even those things you ordinarily hate doing (cleaning the house; emptying the litter box) which now suddenly look awesome because they are not grading.

2. Let yourself indulge in your oral fixation of choice. I grade papers while consuming an bottomless pot of tea, glasses of water, and a bowl of almonds. I have an entire drawer full of non-drowsy herbal teas for this purpose alone. (Favorites: Good Earth Herbal Sweet and Spicy; Peet’s Hibiscus C Blend.) Why, you can consider a long day of grading to double as a kind of flush of the toxins in your system if you drink enough of this stuff.

Note: Beware of caffeine. It does not help to finish grading if your hands start shaking and/or you find yourself wondering if your heart is beating too fast, and whether you need to visit the emergency room.

Exceptions to my oral fixation rule: all fixations that would actually be nice and helpful, like cigarettes and alcohol. Also street drugs. DO NOT ABUSE NARCOTICS WHILE GRADING. Alcohol only works for approximately 30 minutes as you go through the very first paper; after that it ruins you (i.e., me) for the entire evening.

On my wish list: some kind of prescription drug that removes the pain/distractions from grading. Preferably (but not necessarily) legal.

Higher up on my wish list: a grading Rumplestiltskin (attention such individuals who come in the night to finish all this on my behalf: I have no problem offering up my first-born child).

3. Sit down in your designated grading area, far away from any device that can offer you electronic/internet escape from the horrors about to ruin your day.

How long it will take to grade one longish paper if you ignore your devices: 45 min to 1 hour

How long it takes to grade one longish paper if you do not ignore the Internet: 4+ hours

4. Just shutting off devices is not good enough; you need additional restraint. Let me recommend one possibility, designed by erstwhile American inventor Benjamin Rush for teachers everywhere:

Unable to realize the full tranquilizing brilliance of this helpful design? Yeah, me neither. So I opt for a hoodie. Yes, that’s right. I close the door to my office, pull up the hood on my hoodie, and settle in, as if I am a horse with blinders on.

Warning: anyone else in the house will mock you, sitting there miserably with your hoodie up. Try very hard not to feel shame for your weaknesses.

5. Start with low expectations, no matter what.

My trick is to start with a paper by a student who I think might do okay. NOT my favorite student. Definitely not the dumbest student. If the first 4 sentences do not leave me wanting to shoot myself, I consider this a major triumph.

On the other hand, I once asked a student if he had a spam-bot write his unintelligible paper.

6. Offer yourself rewards for completing a good day’s work in grading.

Like alcohol. But only after a significant number of essays have been completed.

Do not promise yourself a horrible reward like cleaning the cat litter, which will not look fun at all if you can have a nice glass of wine (or three).

Common Pitfalls in Grading

1. Do not let yourself think, “Next time I will grade these papers the minute they arrive rather than wait till the last possible second before I have to return them!” You are lying to yourself. Again.

2. Do not let yourself think, “These papers are awful. Therefore I must be a terrible teacher/ person.” This is the gateway to the hopeless pit of grading paralysis.

Related: do not let yourself think, “These papers are so awful because higher education is being destroyed by the United States’ lack of investment in education overall, by parents’ emphasis on education as purely instrumental, by students’ poor attention spans …” and so on.

Also: do not start taking notes on the op-ed you plan to write on these subjects.

3. Do not let yourself get angry at the students. I know they deserve it. (Oh, sweet Jesus, how they deserve it.) But it will only make you want to post snarky things on Facebook and/or send snarky emails to your professor friends.

What is worst? the factual errors, the utter ignorance (“I suspect Samli is not a Jew because she is raising a pig for Christmas and Jews don’t eat pigs”), the nails-on-chalkboard grammatical clunkers (“After the investigation, her and Geertz traveled to Bali”), or the overall inability to develop strong and logical arguments? Kill me now!

4. Do not start grading and then think to yourself, “Hey, why don’t I write a silly blog post about how to grade papers?”

[Fuck me.]

Feminéma’s fashion korner

Golly, this advice from madeleineishere sure helped me figure out how to dress today!

You’re welcome!

Six cures for the darkness of the season

The days are getting shorter, and the semester has arrived at the truly ugliest and most miserable few weeks. Thus, it’s time for Feminéma to offer advice for those affected by the lack of sunlight in our lives. At the risk of sounding presumptuous, I have a six-point No Depression plan of music, food, and old movies, helpfully delineated below.

1. Acorn squash and crispy pancetta with sage and penne. This is so good and so seasonal right now. Just make it and tell me if I’m not correct. (I followed the recipe religiously except that I used both sage and rosemary. And don’t be fooled by this photo: the pecorino romano cheese on top is absolutely crucial.)

2. The music of Ella Fitzgerald. I want to give a special shout-out on behalf of her album with Louis Armstrong, Ella and Louis (1956), but really any of them will do. Soak up that voice, that range, and those fabulous standards as dusk falls and your acorn squash is baking and the pancetta crisping up in the pan.

Ella with Dizzy Gillespie

3. Pomegranates with any and all Middle Eastern or central Mexican dishes … or just on their own. Of course, in a perfect world we’d all live around the corner from a place that serves a killer chiles en nogada nightly (the fact that most of us don’t is enough to make me question religion altogether). But hey, pomegranates are everywhere in markets right now. So, learn how to open them with this handy video:

…and sprinkle the seeds on hummus, baba ghanoush, a lamb dish, or — if you’re very clever indeed — your own homemade chiles en nogada:

4.  The bluegrass album The Eagle by Steve Earle and the Del McCoury Band (1998). I maintain that it’s very difficult to remain blue while listening to bluegrass music, perhaps because the sadnesses it describes are such simple, easy kinds of sadness (your girl fell for another man, for example). Overall, those trilling instruments — the mandolin, the fiddle, the stand-up bass, the banjo — do something to my soul that’s hard to replicate except in the form of Ella Fitzgerald.

This album makes me particularly happy because seeing these artists live back in 1998 is possibly the best concert experience I have ever enjoyed. They performed around a single microphone (this is old-school, folks) — so every time one of them took a turn as the featured soloist, the rest moved out of the way. It’s masterful.

5. Grapefruit, of course.

I got turned onto the magical healing properties of grapefruit by my Dear Friend, with whom I suffered some of the ugliest parts of our mutual careers. Sometimes she would tell me that it had been a two-grapefruit kind of day, and I would know exactly what she was saying.

It has become a part of my daily routine, what with fresh grapefruit juice relatively inexpensive year-round. But ’round about now I switch to the real thing. There’s something about the ritual of slicing it into portions and scooping up that beautiful flesh that helps.

6. The Lady Eve (1941), that perfect Preston Sturges comedy with Barbara Stanwyck and Henry Fonda. It’s wickedly sexy, the ultimate in silliness, with Fonda as the slightly dimwitted millionaire’s son who gets caught in the snare of Stanwyck’s con-woman clutches. Just watch this scene, in which she watches all the other women on board their cruise ship try to snag him. Stanwyck gets him within minutes, naturally.

“Holy smoke! the dropped kerchief! that hasn’t been used since Lillie Langtry!” she proclaims at one failed attempt to get Fonda’s attention. Stanwyck was one of the first actors I wrote about when this was still a new blog — and she remains a favorite of mine. Never has she been more perfect than as the card sharp who makes her own happiness.

Those of you who suffer from seasonal affective disorder — perhaps in combination with all the other reasons to find this part of the year so hard to survive — will forgive me my light tone, the absurd notion that one could find music or a few ingredients to be a cure. I don’t mean to diminish this condition. But I do believe that there are external things that help me — and perhaps others, too — most of all by making us feel that our own actions might mitigate the worst of it.

Be strong, friends. And put some pomegranate seeds on top.

“The Michelle Obama Diaries” webisodes

Considering I’ve spent this entire blustery, Hurricane Sandy-ish morning dealing with students via email (power’s still on!), watching this 4-minute video has got to be the best 4 minutes of the last month. I could not have subscribed quickly enough to this brilliant new addition to the world. (This actress is awesome.)

“I’m from the South Side of Chicago. Recognize.”

 

Had a long day? Let’s skewer some trolls.

This is my favorite news of the day: a British “feminine hygiene” company called Bodyform (the British love euphemisms about women’s menstrual cycles as much as us Americans do!) strikes back at a hater.

So, it all began when a man named Richard posted this high-larious post on the company’s Facebook page, complaining that all those ads about women skydiving gave men the wrong impression:

Hi , as a man I must ask why you have lied to us for all these years . As a child I watched your advertisements with interest as to how at this wonderful time of the month that the female gets to enjoy so many things ,I felt a little jealous. I mean bike riding , rollercoasters, dancing, parachuting, why couldn’t I get to enjoy this time of joy and ‘blue water’ and wings !! Dam my penis!! Then I got a girlfriend, was so happy and couldn’t wait for this joyous adventurous time of the month to happen …..you lied !! There was no joy , no extreme sports , no blue water spilling over wings and no rocking soundtrack oh no no no. Instead I had to fight against every male urge I had to resist screaming wooaaahhhhh bodddyyyyyyfooorrrmmm bodyformed for youuuuuuu as my lady changed from the loving , gentle, normal skin coloured lady to the little girl from the exorcist with added venom and extra 360 degree head spin. Thanks for setting me up for a fall bodyform , you crafty bugger

To which Bodyform responded by posting the best video ever:

Can I just say it’s the fact that she’s drinking a blue liquid that makes me happiest? And perhaps that little toot at the end?

Did you know? Feminism shrinks penises.

Says Rush Limbaugh, anyway. A recent Italian study has determined that penises have shrunk in size by about 10% during the last 50 years. Why? researchers suggested weight gain, pollution, stress, and smoking — but Limbaugh knows better.

Because if you think about it, what else has happened during the last 50 years in addition to people getting fatter, more stressed out, and suffering more pollution? Why, the feminist movement happened, Rush reminds us! Therefore, physical changes to men’s bodies must be due to “the feminazis, the chickification and everything else”!

If there’s anyone who ought to know about weight gain and stress, it’s Limbaugh — but hey, then he’d have to take personal responsibility, right? Why not, instead, make us all out to be victims? Why not insist that we are a culture entitled to have no feminism or chickification? Why not blame the feminazis for culture’s troubles instead?

Stands to reason, right? And by reason I mean nonsense.

Public service announcement

University faculty: Under new leadership, the Board of Regents of the University has instituted an exciting new program of strategic dynamism under the banner, “Our University Is Rocket Surgery!” Consider yourselves warned that if the BoR decides to eliminate your department, you will lose your job even if you have tenure.

People of color: Be warned that under a new state law entitled What Are You, Anyway?, you must register your precise ethnic identity and place of birth with the new State Department of Birth Certificates and Nationality. Suspicious certificates are liable to be rejected by the new SDBCN. No, this is not ominous in the least.

Facebook users: Be warned that Facebook privacy settings have changed. Due to the religious freedom law just passed by Congress, Facebook now permits your employer to view and cast judgment on your history of “likes.” If you do not wish your employer to receive weekly updates of your “likes,” go to Settings → Privacy → “Likes” Privacy → Contact Us → Register New Membership → Create Password → Logout → Confirm New Membership → Contact Us → Help → and then just follow the logical steps from there.

Bank customers: Be warned that due to an unforeseen security breach, all your banking information including your credit card numbers have been hacked. Go to weloveourbanks.com to register a new username and password. Be warned that hackers can use your login data from one account to access other accounts, so we advise that you change each one to make it unique.

Computer users: Be warned that you should memorize your username and password data rather than keep them on a “cheat sheet” in your home, for burglars can use this information to access your accounts.

Women: In accordance with rising public outrage against low wages and female independence, we have re-instituted the concept of the “family wage” from the American 1830s. Men will be paid amounts deemed by employers to be necessary to sustain their families, while women will receive “pin money” wages that permit them to buy that yard of ribbon they’ve been hankering after, or perhaps an extra loaf or two. We believe this will strengthen the American family and improve the economy all in one blow. (Nota bene: we have also returned to the typical working hours of the 1830s, before they were reduced to the 10-hour day by those evil unions.)

Consumers of food: Be warned that the Federal Department of Agriculture has reluctantly issued a warning about a primary food preservative used on all fruits and vegetables, including those foods sold to food processing plants, by the name of ethylchloroethylisothiamethylzolinone. This substance is now suspected to be the cause of the current epidemics of obesity, high estrogen levels, cancer, autism, migraines, stupidity (birtherism, trutherism, the Tea Party phenomenon, watching Adam Sandler films), and many forms of current-day conservatism. Due to previous misconceptions about its safety, it has also been sprayed on organic foods and has entered the water supply. Please refrain from eating food and drinking water until the FDA announces it is safe to do so.

American citizens: In a contentious 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court has overturned a key element of the Constitution. Under the terms of Supreme Court v. U.S., the Court has found for the plaintiff (i.e., itself) and has determined that the United States is not, indeed, a country “for, by, and of the people” and has therefore struck down the Constitution’s opening preamble, beginning with “We, the People.” The Court is now working to determine exactly who this country is for, anyway. A decision is anticipated by June 2013.