Kate McDowell on Storytelling

Our reading group, which I help to facilitative every other Friday, is called Reading Around Race.  The "around" here means mobility as opposed to stasis.  But, really, we don't go around any of it, we go through it all, as together as we can be given our different positions in society, life paths, and roles within the university that brings us together. This week, we read Honma's article "Trippin' Over the Color Line," which is a resounding critique of LIS as a discipline that doesn't acknowledge its own whiteness.  While I can pick at his conflation the academic side of LIS with the ALA (that demonstrate to me that his knowledge of the field is partial, though he is as well-informed critic as any field might hope to have), basically, his argument that silence around whiteness causes trouble in library and information science education and professional work is sound.  I think of the hundreds of local projects that contradict the overall characteri...

Radway's article, read but not blogged.  Readings on whiteness, including all of Jensen's book, read but not blogged.  Ranma 1/2 and other texts for the fantasy class, read but not blogged.  I'm tempted to say, YOU try being a children's librarian-untenured professor-researcher-faculty member-storyteller-reading group leader-spouse-mom to an ailing cat...  But then I see this quote, and I realize:  Why explain? "Life is short, even for those who live a long time, and we must live for the few who know and appreciate us, who judge and absolve us, and for whom we have the same affection and indulgence. The rest I look upon as a mere crowd, lively or sad, loyal or corrupt, from whom there is nothing to be expected but fleeting emotions, either pleasant or unpleasant, which leave no trace behind them. We ought to hate very rarely, as it is too fatiguing; remain indifferent to a great deal, forgive often and never forget." - Sarah Bernhardt I'll be...

This is a case of, despite having drafted a really serviceable paper in about 2004-2005 and having gotten positive feedback from a major journal on the draft, I'm just wanting to set this project aside.  And so I turn in two books related to it: The Queer Child by Stockton and Ways of Being Male ed. by Stephens (chapter by Flanagan).  I already turned in (but xeroxed the last chapter of) Out of the Closet by Flanagan, which was the main text that the editors referred me to in considering my paper. So, when I get back to this project (I won't say "if," but it's obviously implied by the relentless rigors of my schedule), here's what I want to do:  a listing paper.  Not English scholarship, but LIS.  An analytic approach that nonetheless really scopes out what has happened in the field in the last however many years.  I'm still very interested in the main premise of the paper:  that children's cross-dressing in children's literature is often accom...