Fourth month

Right-O. Accessing my beloved home linux box from work has dulled my interest in this writing. Oh, well. http://www.h3o.net/start/members.pl?marge is, I SWEAR, using the Netscape channels RDF Site Summary files. HOOOOOWWWW?????

I am so damn unhip. I look at the Must-C award winners -- follow up to see s p a c e g i r l and it's someone's hip homepage. So she connects to chickclick, which reminds me to check out the Philly Web Grrls. I'm swamped by this feeling that I am so not *there*, not part of the cool hip crowd that's made up of all the people who were the not-popular in high school, fringy eccentric types. And damnit, that *was* me. Maybe i *am* just too old.... I was looking at Doc Martins on South Street yesterday and some other funky shoes, and i swear the *child* that was sorta acting as saleschick must have thought i was the wicked old witch of the west. The shoes i like I'd just kill myself if i tried walking in them. When you become familiar with what lower back pain is like, does that signal some universal hip meter to not even bother checking before registering zero?

So now i check my debian mailing list email (Hey Blondie, maybe that's a hint!) and find someone respects & admires emacs as much as i....Right-to, read a little of the debian list and remember i am a unix goddess. Goddesses don't need to be hip.

My box has been on line, so I've spent more time on my home machine from work than on my Tripod page. My current favorite things in my virtual life are the unix command screen and the services offered by dhis.org. Together with a poorly written script on my end they cooperate to keep my work on my machine conveniently available, despite timeouts and phone line noise.

Friday is a good reading day, so i offer a work by one of my favorite poets for review: Hear it again by Ted Huges.

Please say "April Fools!" Tripod changed their filemanager to have icky icky slow icons and, worse by far, some large company has litigation against one of my favorite cartoon strips for defamation & libel. Look, this guy satirizes *all* OS. Pout. That's not a very eloquent expression of indignation, is it?

Yippee! It *was* an April fools joke! Hmmm. I think I still have some indignation, but not as much as Chad Zimmerman

Not an April Fools' Joke: MIT's study of Women Faculty in Science. I read the NYT article a few weeks ago. It stirs up all sorts of mixed feelings. I'm happy MIT recognized the problem and has made real efforts to fight the discrimination. On the other hand, I pick up my graduate school experience, and pause before taking it out of the box. It's not been in there very long, and years of advocating with respect to gender related issues and 'quality of life' isses wore me down. And then, after years in the dark of clinical depression, i began to address my experience ignoring the gender issues and just accepting the fact that the physics academic community & I just weren't going to work out. (The divorce isn't final -- I'm still in the purgatory of not quite finished writing up and not really giving a bloody damn.) Now the second guessing begins again -- even though I'm sure -- while MIT might make strides, the academy as a whole will still be an environment where i will feel like a dillitante.

990311

Notes on Henry James (1843-1916) and Portrait of a Lady(1881). I'm going through UVA's collections. Not many of the items seem of interest except for THIS. Correspondence from the mid 1870's with Hattie E. Hathaway, with much commentary on her 'womanhood.' The curator excerpts these comments: "It is not the literal woman, the conscious person, but the invisible woman, the aromatic, unconscious person, who appeals to your spiritual senses primarily, and your material senses altogether subordinately. But the vehicle of the influence is always grace, a grace so distinctly feminine that no man can help aspiring to it as the express revelation of the divine benignity in our nature." (1874)

Oh, gack. Ought to look up [Emanuel] Swedenborg. In the same letter he refers to God as the true father and society as true mother. OK. The words aren't working for me but maybe he means something else? Society in the sense of all human relations, perhaps? Tying in with the Grace of womanhood above? Father God Creator, Mother Society Grace?

Later letter (8 months): "Society means a union of the individual & universal life, or private & public interests of humanity. You as a woman represent the spiritual or individual element; I as a man the material or universal element."

Possible Resources:
• The Henry James Review 16.2, Spring 1995

My book discussion group will be reading Henry James' Portrait of a Lady. It seems there are no e-text for this one work at Gutenberg. That seems odd. There is an e-text at the Scholar's Guide.

I've not started reading yet.