Kimberly Hirsh

Finished reading: Mr. & Mrs. Witch by Gwenda Bond 📚

Loved it. Scorchingly hot, fun secret agent hijinks. Highly recommend.

I am reading Gwenda Bond’s Mr. & Mrs. Witch right now and one of the 🔥 scenes actually made me cry because it was so beautiful and made me so happy. 📚

Want to read: How Romantics and Victorians Organized Information by Jillian M. Hess 📚

🔖📓 Read Automated transcription and some risks of machine interpretation.

Dr. Daniel Turner does a great job illuminating how large language models work and how we need to think about indigeneity and colonialism when choosing our transcription method.

Want to read: It’s Not That Radical: Climate Action to Transform Our World by Mikaela Loach 📚

Want to read: Disfigured: On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space by Amanda Leduc 📚

Me: I put my hair up and brushed my teeth! I’m ready to face the day! flops onto bed

I’m trying to see myself as others see me. Would you please tell me:

1. When have you seen me happiest?
2. What do you come to me for?
3. Where do I stand out against my peers?

Qs from Christina Wallace’s The Portfolio Life 📚

🔖📚 Read Roman Polanski, David Bowie, and a New Solution to the Problem of Art Made by Monstrous Men by Laura Miller (Slate).

The magnitude of an artist’s personal transgressions sometimes matters less than the nature of the attachment it disrupts.

🔖📝📚📺🍿 Read What the Universal Translator Tells Us About Exploring Other Cultures by Charlie Jane Anders (Happy Dancing newsletter).

Anders talks about the way a universal translator gives us shortcuts to understanding other cultures that don’t really show how hard it is to actually understand another culture.

She offers a lot of examples of this and asks,

How is it that Han Solo understands Chewbacca, but doesn’t speak Wookiee himself? And vice versa?

It’s been a long time since I was getting my Master of Arts in teaching and had to take a course on how Language Acquisition happens (almost 20 years), but I recall that we tend to understand much more of a language than we can speak, and I’ve certainly found that to be true recently.

For W’s Fulbright, we spent two months in the Netherlands, and had learned some very basic Dutch using Duolingo before heading over there. I often didn’t understand what people were saying, but I always understood more of what they were saying than I could ever speak myself.

Our first week there, some young people overheard my son saying his favorite Dutch word, “kat,” on the bus. They asked us about our being Americans and then one of them wanted to know if we were full of “kattenkwaad.” We didn’t know this word, and the person who asked didn’t know English well enough to explain it, but his friend tried.

I asked if it meant behaving like a cat, and he indicated not exactly. He tried to explain by example: pushing the stop button on the bus, then not getting off when the bus stopped.

“Oh, like, pranks!” I said.

“Yes, like pranks.”

“Mischievous,” my sister suggested. He wasn’t sure about that one.

Weeks later, I found this book in the shop a short walk from our house:

Google translates this title as “First Aid for Mischief: The Survival Guide for Cat Parents.”

I don’t think it captures the sense entirely, based on our bus conversation, but it’s hard to be sure.

Went by the Oscar Wilde house yesterday and the plaque saying he lived there said:

OSCAR WILDE
POET, DRAMATIST, WIT

and I liked it so well I’m changing all my bios to read “Mother, learner, wit.”

I first encountered music from The Phantom of the Opera when I was 9 years old. I had taken a lip syncing class, because the Leon County, FL gifted program in 1990-91 was awesome, and at the performance where the most effective lip syncers gave a performance, a boy lip synced “Music of the Night,” complete with tux, cape, mask, and hat. (I was not selected for this performance, because the teacher said my performance of “Material Girl” showed that I cared more about the look than about lip syncing well, and she wasn’t wrong.)

I was immediately in love - with the song, with the costume, in my imagination with the lip syncing boy (who had been in a different class from me and who I hadn’t met nor would ever meet).

My mom promptly added the original cast recording to her next Columbia House order.

And the whole show was much bigger than that one song, endearing itself to me more than “Music of the Night” ever could have to me alone.

I stayed obsessed with the Phantom of the Opera. I read Gaston Leroux’s original novel. I read Susan Kay’s Phantom (highly recommend). I read The Phantom of Manhattan (fun but I recommend it not as highly). I went to see it when it came to Raleigh on tour. (1993, I think.) I played the computer game, Return of the Phantom.

When I met W in 1998, our mutual love of Phantom of the Opera was one of the things we first bonded over. That October, I hosted a costumed sing-along of it at my house. He was the Phantom and I was Christine. We did the same thing the following year.

We saw the show together when it came on tour. We saw it when they did a movie theater cast of the show in 2011.

Our son, M, has listened to the first act with me. We looked at The Complete Phantom of the Opera book together as we listened. He was very interested.

Next month, I hope to visit the Palais Garnier and see the places and things that I have only seen in pictures and my imagination so far: the grand staircase, the chandelier, box five.

The Phantom of the Opera has its last Broadway performance today. It’s been hugely important to me, even though I’ve never seen it there. I’m so glad it ran for so long. I know we haven’t seen the last of it in the US.

🔖 Read Durham Officials Push for Affordable Housing in Southpoint Redevelopment.

Pleased with my city’s Planning Commission members.

🔖🎨 Read On growing alongside your artistic practice (The Creative Independent).

Mother-artist Bailey Elder talks about growing as an artist and being a mother. Elder is starting a blog to interview other artistic mothers!

💬📚📓📝

No dissertation is worth a lifetime of revision.

William Germano, From Dissertation to Book

It’s my defense-aversary! I’ve been a PhD for two years. For me, getting the PhD was much bigger than having the PhD has been. Perhaps I’ll write up more reflections on this later.

🔖📝 Read On Pitching and Rejection by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

pitching is not just about figuring out what editors or publications may be interested in—figuring out what you are most interested in is vital.

🔖📝 Read How Can You Write About Pain Without Retraumatizing Yourself? by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

🔖📝 Read Kids Will Still Read Banned Books by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

Chung doesn’t minimize the harm of book banning, but discusses how it’s impossible (and a bad idea) to try to control kids’ reading.

🔖📝 Read When You Aren’t Sure Whether Your Writing Is ‘Important’ by Nicole Chung (The Atlantic).

You just need to find one person who understands and appreciates what you’re trying to do and why, and then you look for the next person…

I haven’t been sharing a lot of travel adventures not because I haven’t been having them, but just because making the time to share is tricky.

But here! Have some photos!

🔖 Read Lois Before Clark: In Defense of the Superhero Girlfriend.

Dreamed I decided to get obsessed with Lois Lane, decided this meant I should actually get obsessed with her, knew this essay by Dr. Ravynn K. Stringfield was the place to start.

🔖📝 Read “I Hate the Idea of Healing” A Conversation with Maggie Smith

One thing that mothering has taught me is that I can’t be precious about where I work. When I work, I cannot demand uninterrupted space and time…If I got completely derailed every time somebody needed me, I’d never do anything.

Finished reading: Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett 📚

My first finished Discworld. Reading Piers Anthony feels like coming home (miss me with your takes on him, please, I know his flaws). Reading Terry Pratchett feels like visiting a treasured friend. A lot of fun here.

🖖🏻📺

Data: *has a personal problem* *does extensive research* Captain Picard, I have done all the research but I do not have the answer to my problem.

Picard: What do you think about the problem, though?

Data: *blinks*

Just another reason I identify with Data.