Three Characters

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I like book memes, and I must have slipped past this one when it was mentioned on the Classical Bookworm, but I caught it at Moyen Âge. Even though I wasn’t tagged, I decided to participate.

Name up to three characters…

  1. … you wish were real so you could meet them:
  2. … you would like to be:
    • Hermione Granger (who wouldn’t like to go to Hogwarts?)
    • Claire Beauchamp Randall Fraser (Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander series)
    • Atticus Finch
  3. … who scare you:
    • Voldemort
    • It (especially in his creepy clown guise)
    • Medea

I tag Dana Elayne, Wendy, Roger, Crankydragon, and Steve.

[tags]three characters, literature, reading, books, meme[/tags]

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Still Here

Posted on by Dana
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I won’t apologize for not posting — I know lots of bloggers do that, and my reaction is usually, why are you apologizing? Just post when you post, and if your readers don’t like it, that’s not your problem. That’s probably a bad attitude to have if you want to sustain a readership, but it’s a healthy one to have if you don’t want your blog to take over your life.

I am still here, and I’m posting much more actively these days at my education blog. I suppose that means that I am particularly passionate about my career right now. I have also begun posting at EduStat Blog, at the invitation of David DeSchryver, but for the time being (as school keeps me busy enough), I have been cross-posting blog posts from my education blog rather than writing new posts. I have been asked to read a book, and review it if I like it, and an education company offered to let me try a product. I guess that blog is growing. It made me wonder what kinds of offers some of the more popular bloggers get.

Harry Potter frenzy is reaching a fever pitch as the last book and the movie for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix comes out this July, and I have been keeping busy keeping up with the latest. I post a Harry Potter Carnival at my Harry Potter blog every two weeks, and that has been good for making sure that particular blog doesn’t go too dormant, but I confess I need to put more of my own material on that blog more often than I do. I don’t want to be another news site, as I think there are enough HP news sites out there, and they have far more time and more resources to stay up to date than I do. I have enjoyed sharing these books so much with Sarah, and I have such fond memories of our reading them together. I am looking forward the opportunity to do the same with Maggie and Dylan. I suspect Maggie will be ready in two years or so, but she let me know the other night when I offered to read a bit of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets to her that those books didn’t have pictures.

I have been doing a lot of cooking at home. I don’t have sophisticated tastes, and whatever I fix is family fare, but I guess the frequent practice is making me better. Although I still say my mom does something tricky — like bewitching her pots or something — because I can’t get things to come out just like she does it, even when I’ve watched her and replicated all the steps.

I am thinking seriously about grad school. I have decided where to apply and what to major in. I hope to take the GRE this summer in preparation to apply for admission in spring 2008. I will be majoring in Instructional Technology, and it is my goal to be working as a school IT in about five years. I still have some things I want to do with English.

I haven’t done much with my genealogy research, but I usually save that for summers when I have more time.

School seems to be flying by — weeks flash by in the blink of an eye. Soon it will be over, and I will have finished my 10th year as a teacher. It doesn’t seem that long in some respects, but it others it seems as if I’ve been teaching forever.

My book is still for sale. So far, my parents and my sister have bought it, and not that I’m whining or anything, but it might help my ego if I sold a few more.

[tags]blogging[/tags]

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Historical Fiction

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Historical fiction might be my favorite genre of literature.  Obviously, everyone knows I really like the Harry Potter series, but aside from Rowling and Tolkien, I haven’t been able to get into much fantasy.  I take that back.  Children’s fantasy I really enjoy, but I tried to read Terry Brooks some years back and couldn’t get far.  I don’t really care for mysteries, aside from Sherlock Holmes stories, and I don’t read much nonfiction, either.  I’ve never read a Western.  The only horror I’ve read is Stephen King and maybe, if you consider her horror, Anne Rice.  I have read a few romances, but they don’t grab me much.  Not into sci-fi, but I do like dystopian novels.

What I like about historical fiction is that I can learn a great deal about history while I am enjoying a story.  My two favorite periods are the Middle Ages and the nineteenth century.  In addition to reading historical fiction set during those times, I also like reading literature written during those times and reflective of that time when it was the present.  For example, I am really enjoying Moby-Dick, which was both written and set in the nineteenth century.  I also loved Jane Austen’s novels.  Of course, Sherlock Holmes is a favorite — I think Arthur Conan Doyle really painted a fascinating picture of Victorian London.

If you were to sift through some of my book reviews, the first thing you’d notice is that I do read a lot of historical fiction, but also that I’m kind of picky about it.  I don’t like it, for instance, when authors throw out the rules of grammar to a noticeable degree (and not for effect), or when they don’t try to make their characters sound “period.”  Philippa Gregory is guilty of both offenses, so as much as I enjoy her plots, I can’t wade through her writing.  I really enjoyed Sena Jeter Naslund’s Ahab’s Wife, and I plan to read her Sherlock Holmes story, Sherlock in Love.

I just found out that a contemporary nonfiction account of the sinking of the whaleship Essex was written by Nathaniel Philbrick (who was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize this year): In the Heart of the Sea: The Tragedy of the Whaleship Essex.  I think I’m going to have to read that.  I know reading all of these nineteenth century sea novels has been fun, and I’ve heard this is a fascinating book.

What genre of literature do you like?  Why?

[tags]historical fiction, reading preferences[/tags]

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Ahab’s Wife

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Ahab's WifeFrom one brief mention of Ahab’s wife in Moby-Dick, in the manner that God fashioned Eve from Adam’s rib, Sena Jeter Naslund has fashioned Ahab’s Wife:

[W]hen I think of all this; only half-suspected, not so keenly known to me before—and how for forty years I have fed upon dry salted fare—fit emblem of the dry nourishment of my soul!—when the poorest landsman has had fresh fruit to his daily hand, and broken the world’s fresh bread to my mouldy crusts—away, whole oceans away, from that young girl-wife I wedded past fifty, and sailed for Cape Horn the next day, leaving but one dent in my marriage pillow—wife? wife?—rather a widow with her husband alive? Aye, I widowed that poor girl when I married her, Starbuck; and then, the madness, the frenzy, the boiling blood and the smoking brow, with which, for a thousand lowerings old Ahab has furiously, foamingly chased his prey—more a demon than a man!… I see my wife and child in thine eye (Moby-Dick, Chapter 132 “The Symphony”).

And what sort of a woman would be a match for Captain Ahab? Naslund’s Una Spenser is Ahab’s feminine counterpart — where Captain Ahab is consumed by vengeance, Una learns forgiveness for all; Ahab is destroyed by his hate for the white whale, while Una survives and prospers because of her love. This, then, is a woman to marry Ahab.

You do not need to read Melville’s Moby-Dick in order to appreciate Ahab’s Wife, but I would strongly recommend that you do so, for your appreciation will be much deeper. Una begins her story in medias res, as memorably as Melville begins Moby-Dick: “Captain Ahab was neither my first husband nor my last.” Una is pregnant and decides to travel to Kentucky to have her child. She recounts the two most horrible moments of her life, then takes us into her past when she was twelve and first moved to the Lighthouse home she shared with her Aunt Agatha, Uncle Torchy, and cousin Frannie.

At the age of sixteen, Una runs away to sea as a “cabin boy,” and encounters horrors as her ship is destroyed by a whale and she is forced to survive on an open boat in the water. She endures a disastrous marriage and is forced to use her sewing needle to support herself. She feels immediate attraction to the elemental Ahab, and the two are happily married until Ahab encounters Moby-Dick in the Sea of Japan.

Una crosses paths with many luminaries of her age: astronomer Maria Mitchell, writer and transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, abolitionist Frederick Douglass, and writers Nathaniel Hawthorne and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Naslund’s many literary allusions, from The Odyssey, to Shakespeare, to The Faerie Queene, and many more will delight book lovers.

Naslund has a gift for language, and she breathes life into Una — I wished as I read that I could have really known her! — and makes her setting so real, I felt I was there. I have read some enjoyable books, but this might be one of only a handful that transcend other literary fiction to such a degree that I feel sure it will have a place in the canon of Literature with a capital L one day. And Una Spenser is a remarkable character and proper soulmate for Ahab.

Read other reviews:

[tags]Ahab’s Wife, Sena Jeter Naslund, Moby-Dick, Herman Melville, Una Spenser, Captain Ahab[/tags]

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Shameless Promotion

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If you have a website and are so inclined to promote my book, I have created some code for you. Just copy and paste.

It will look like this:

Purchase a Question of Honor by Dana Swier Huff
Purchase Dana Swier Huff’s A Question of Honor at Lulu.com

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Using Fantastico to Install Programs and Scripts

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My host, Bluehost, allows users to install various software programs and scripts on their websites by using Fantastico, a one-click auto-installation service.  Users can have WordPress and wikis installed via Fantastico.  I have never used Fantastico, but Steve has.  He recently had his personal site blocked because his site was using more than 20% of the server’s CPU.  Bluehost gets very testy about this if you question them on it, as evidenced it their forums.  I have never received one of these dreaded messages, despite the fact that I have more blogs installed on my site, and all of mine are installed on one account (huffenglish.com and danahuff.net are actually both on the same account).  Steve has received the messages three times, I think.  My conclusion, which may or may not be correct, is that he was dealing with inefficient installations from Fantastico.  After I got Bluehost to unblock his account, which was a bit of a task, I upgraded him to the latest WordPress install and deleted any files that looked like they were related to his Fantastico install.  I also deleted files and folders he wasn’t using for any reason.  He has something like eleven folders on his crime blog domain, and he’s only using two.  I let those alone, but I think he needs to clean up his site.  You can sure tell he has ADD, and that’s no lie.  So far, so good.  No more CPU excess messages, no blocked websites.  We’ll see if the trend continues.  If it does, then I’m going to assume I’m right about Fantastico.

[tags]Fantastico, Bluehost, CPU, WordPress[/tags]

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Recipes

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I recently announced on my cooking blog that I will be discontinuing that blog, mainly because I lost interest in it. I thought from the beginning what would really work is a recipe blog. Folks aren’t interested in how much I spend on groceries; they want to know how to make something. I convinced my sister to participate with me, and you can read the Swier sisters’ recipes at Two Steamin’ Sisters. Yeah, about the title: if you have suggestions, we’re all ears. The blog’s title can easily be changed. Check it out!

[tags]recipes, blog[/tags]

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