Susan Vreeland

Posted on by Dana
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I had the wonderful opportunity to visit the Decatur Branch of the Dekalb County Library last night to hear Susan Vreeland read selections from her novels at an event sponsored by the Georgia Center for the Book. She is a wonderful reader. Not all writers are. She is a retired English teacher — a 30-year veteran of the classroom. When she signed my books, I told her we had that in common, and she said, “Good for you!” She encouraged me to check out the teacher’s guides she wrote for her novels at her website. After I left, I remembered that her books were published under the aegis of Penguin-Putnam. I should have mentioned the Beowulf teacher’s guide I wrote. I hate when I get tongue-tied and stupid around authors.

I reviewed her bestseller Girl in Hyacinth Blue not long ago, and I am really looking forward to Life Studies, a collection of short stories in which Vreeland speculates over “[w]hat else went on in great artists’ lives beside their painting [and] [w]hat goes on in ours as a result of art?”

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Trivia #5

Posted on by Dana
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No one got last week’s question: Which poet did not speak for the last fourteen years of his life? It was Ezra Pound.

Good luck with this one, everybody:

Which contemporary novelist and poet lost visibility in her right eye when one of her brothers shot her with a BB-gun as a child?

Answer: Alice Walker. Credit goes to Dana-Elayne. C’mon, folks, you are giving the English teacher an unfair advantage. Use Google, for crying out loud! She was even on vacation, and you all still couldn’t beat her to the punch!

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MT Amazon and Book Queue Too

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Well, I have MT Amazon and Book Queue Too working. In the sidebar to the right, you may notice a difference. I tweaked the link so that you can mouseover the book image to see the title. I think this will be more versatile that All Consuming. In the future, I plan to create a books page with all the books I’ve mentioned in this blog with links to their reviews. I’ve been trying to figure out how to do more with books in this blog. I was interested in Book Queue, but you need a CueCat to use that plugin, and I didn’t want to be bothered if there was another way. I think I’m going to like the way these two plugins work together.

In other news, I heard from oldest friend Darcy. It was a joy to get her e-mail. If you’re reading this, hi Darcy!

A week ago, I assigned my students to write a story or play in which they set up Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson on a blind date and record the results. They were really good! I love that assignment. I know you’re shocked about this, but students rarely imagine Walt and Emily would have a good time. Three of the boys recorded their script and actually made a video. It’s easily one of the most hilarious things I’ve ever seen. How do you put a grade on that? I felt like Ralphie’s teacher in his theme fantasy: A+++++++++. My heart’s all a-flutter! Who knew Emily could put away five Big Macs, two fries, three Frosties, and a supersize cola? Man. And they managed to make allusions to the aforementioned A Christmas Story, The Scarlet Letter, Henry David Thoreau, Rapunzel, and my husband’s opera singing.

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We’re Rollin’

Posted on by Dana
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Tech support from my host wrote me back today. I guess I have to take back my premature rant, because this actually went very smoothly. Maybe the incident from this summer was an anomaly. They installed Storable perl module, so now I’ve got MT Blacklist, MT-DSBL, Real Comment Throttle. Once I read the documentation and figure out what I can do with it, I’ll be using Book Queue Too instead of All Consuming to keep track of my booklist. I like All Consuming okay, but it is off-site, and having things in one place might be easier.

Oh, and here’s a clever poem via Roger Darlington’s blog.

</geekout>

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Server Woes

Posted on by Dana
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I swear, one of the first things I am going to do come March is move to a new server. I don’t know why my server has to be such a pain in the ass. On the one hand, I feel I shouldn’t complain, because my server hasn’t ever been down that I know of, and they generally try to help. On the other, they upgraded to new servers without giving me a reasonable warning (my “warning” went into my junk mail folder — I didn’t get it for a few days). They told me they had configured MIME type on the server to render CSS so it would properly render CSS in browsers besides IE, but they apparently still haven’t done that, because we had problems when 1) I tried to intall MT 3.14 and noticed the user interface was whacked, and 2) Steve tried to install a new style sheet on his true crime blog. By the way, if you have this problem, a very simple line of code exists to work around it. At the beginning of your style sheet, put the following text: <?php Header (“Content-type: text/css”);?>. That will enable all the smart Firefox users to see all your pretty CSS instead of plain text. By the way: I don’t know if that messes up validation or anything — frankly, I’ve given up on trying to make sure this site validates.

So why am I complaining now? My server has Perl 5.6 instead of 5.8. I don’t have Storable perl, so I can’t use a buttload of the coolest MT Plugins. I put in a help ticket with my server host, but considering they acted like they didn’t understand what I was talking about with the MIME type, I’m not holding my breath. DreamHost gets such praise…

What do I like about my server? Unlimited bandwidth. Very, very reasonable prices. You just can’t leave those two very important variables out of the equation.

I just wish they knew what they were doing all of the time.

Shoot. I feel bad even complaining, because I know they’re not native speakers of English. I’m sure a lot of the problem is the language barrier.

I guess I’ll wait and see what happens with the perl upgrade. I’m thinking if they can’t get that figured out, then it’s adios Maxipoint.

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Upgrade

Posted on by Dana
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Okay, upgrade to Movable Type 3.14 seems to be successful. So far, I like the new features. An upgrade was necessary because I just couldn’t take advantage of the new plug-ins with 2.66. Also, 3.14 has more safeguards against comment spam. To that end, from now on, comments will be moderated. Unless you sign in with a TypeKey registration, your comments will not be automatically posted. However, you no longer need to type in the number “captcha” in order to sign the comments, which eliminates the need for JunkEater — seems like too many spam comments were getting past them, anyway.

I am indebted to Learning Movable Type: TypeKey Authentication for Comments, The Tweezer’s Edge: A Replacement for <MTCommentFields>, and AnziDesign: Migrate Your MT 2.x Blog To Movable Type 3 for valuable assistance in this conversion.

Soon, I will be implementing further spam-protection measures as described in MT’s Guide for Fighting Comment Spam.

Why am I telling you this? Things may be wonky around this site until I get it all fixed up, and also I thought you might like to know about the change in comment policy. I hope it doesn’t inconvenience anyone too much.

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Best of Blogs

Posted on by Dana
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Awards go to the popular. There are a great many excellent blogs that will never be nominated for a Best of Blogs Award. That said, go check out the nominated blogs. Sometimes people are popular for a reason.

Big English department presentation at the faculty meeting tomorrow. I am a little nervous, but I also feel we have a good presentation lined up.

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New Year’s Resolution and Trivia #3

Posted on by Dana
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My friend Greg’s death has inspired me to do something I don’t do, and generally don’t believe in: make a New Year’s resolution. I am going to do whatever I can to touch base with old friends. I don’t want to feel, at the end of my life, that I didn’t do everything I could to try to maintain my friendships. Over the last several years especially, I have let my life concerns get in the way of being a proper friend. Then I looked around and discovered I didn’t really have any friends. Oh, you all who come by and read my blog are nice, and it isn’t that I don’t consider you friends. In fact, you’re my only friends, really. Frankly, I think it is sad that my only friends are people I’ve never actually met. You have to admit that is sort of sad. It isn’t that I don’t want to make new friends, but I haven’t been a good enough friend to the old ones… no wonder I looked around and was alone. I don’t want to be that way anymore. This blog is a great opportunity to communicate, and I want to use it. I want to say, when I comes time for me to die, that I was here, and I want my friends to remember me, too. And I can’t find any pithier way of saying it: life is too short to do otherwise than live it.

After September 11 happened, I remembered how awkward it was to go on with life. To laugh. Of course I am not saying that the death of a person I was friends with 7 years ago is comparable to that tragedy — or even the tragedy being played out as I write — at this writing, over 140,000 confirmed deaths are attributed to what has to be one of the worst natural disasters on record. Things like this, though — the death of a loved one or even an acquaintance, tragedy, reminders that we are mortal — all serve to make us feel, well, guilty. We live. And we’re probably not doing it up right, either. On the other hand, levity feels wrong. I will never forget that SNL skit Will Ferrell did maybe a month after 9/11. TV comedy seemed dead in light of the events in the news. How were we going to laugh again? Ferrell played a businessman who worked in an office that decided to slacken the dress code to enable workers to express their patriotism. And Ferrell wore a red, white, and blue thong to work. I laughed so hard. Every time I see it, I laugh again.

It’s Friday, and I have this newly established literary trivia thing — it’s actually fun for me. I wondered if I should post a trivia question here, right after a post about Greg’s death. Then it occurred to me. This is the sort of thing he would have enjoyed. So, to that end:

Which famous poet had a club foot?

Answer: George Gordon, Lord Byron. Credit goes to Dana-Elayne.

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