Source: 15 Great Quotes about the Novel
Some great thoughts from pour friends The Insightful Panda, where I go for all my pop culture updates!
Source: 15 Great Quotes about the Novel
Some great thoughts from pour friends The Insightful Panda, where I go for all my pop culture updates!
((For those of you who, like me, were not Math Majors in college, I apologize. But this particular blog post seems to need a ridiculous number of parentheses and a rather surprising number of braces {curly} and brackets [square]. Be warned.))
There is a fairly famous rhyming couplet by the 1920s Algonquin Round Table wit, Dorothy Parker, that has been widely anthologized (and it suddenly occurs to me that a whole slew [this is a technical literary term] of the editors anthologizing this were {white} men], which says, “Men don’t make passes/At girls who wear glasses.”
I have been thinking about this since Mike Allegra (heylookawriterfellow) asked me to add to my BWCG series some BWCGs who wear glasses. I thought of this most recently after viewing a teaser for this coming Tuesday’s Agent Carter, in which Agent Sousa (the delightful Enver Gokaj) says to (an injured and therefore unavailable-for-the-mission) Agent Peggy Carter (the even more delightful Hayley Atwell) that what they need for the coming mission is someone who can “blend in with the glamour and throw down in the gutter.” Damn, Spanky, I LOVE the writers on this show!
Any Gentle Reader who has spent any time at all reading this blog will recognize that this is not only the dual nature of what I look for in my Female Leads of TV, Film, and Life, but also a micro-blueprint of who I would like to eventually be. I have to admit that the second part sounds much less painful to me than the first part, because as Agent Dana Scully admits in the most recent New X-Files episode, running/fighting in three-inch heels is no country for really anyone, but absolutely not Women, Older Men or Sane People of any Gender. Okay, she didn’t say that.
But as Jane Austen might have said, “It was nowhere said, but everywhere implied.” Come on. Amy Acker has said that at one point her only “stunt ability was running in heels” (Citation, as Wikipedia would point out, desperately needed. My guess? A ComiCon. San Diego? Maybe. Who knows?).
My point here is simply that Dorothy Parker was wrong and Mike Allegra is right. (Full disclosure: I wear glasses. So sue me. {Twenty-odd years at MIT’s Writing Center (some of them more odd than others) has made me as blind as my cat Musashi, if not as a bat or a possum. [If M. were a little boy, he’d be wearing Coke bottle glasses and a bowtie]}.
So in honor of a Sunday-facing Valentine’s Day (black Tuesday meets the Lord’s day), I offer you some of my favorite female actors (Nope, don’t call me a teacheress, professoress, editoress or martial artistess; I avoid calling them actresses for the same reason) in glasses.
I tried very hard to chase down the pics I have seen online of Lucy Lawless as herself, rather than Xena, wearing glasses, to no avail. Similarly, her soul-grandmother, Linda Carter (the always-and-everywhere Wonder Woman, despite DC’s brilliant work with Gal Gadot).
And because I believe it is important to look back and forward at the same time, I also give you Ingrid Bergman and Scarlet Johansson.
Also, the classic, brilliant, unimitatable Katherine Hepburn on a skateboard, because duh.
To my pal, Mike Allegra, men and women who love women in glasses or, you know, on skateboards: YOU’RE WELCOME. HAPPY VALENTINE’S DAY. NOW WE WILL LET THE WEATHER BECOME WARM AGAIN.
So last month when I put our Eliza Dushku as our BWCG #8, our buddy Heylookawriterfellow commented, “Is it wrong for me to request a badass woman who wears glasses? Ahem. Perhaps I am revealing too much about myself.”
At the time, I thought, well, in both the DC and Marvel comic-verses, mainly the heroes wear glasses when they are undercover. Diana Prince and Clark Kent take off their spectacles to be come Wonderwoman and Superman.
Agents of SHIELD and Agent Peggy Carter also put on their glasses when they don’t want to be recognized, and we all know how effective that is. And the Dushku also wore glasses in the pilot for Dollhouse as a part of her new persona.
So I thought and thought until I came up with an actual badass woman in combat gear superhero who actually wears her glasses as a superhero. Heylookawriterfellow, I have found one at last: Tina Fey. You’re welcome.
I was just nominated for the Lovely Blog Award by the lovely Writer Chick! Thank you for that, Annie.
The instructions are simple:
So here goes:
Seven facts about me:
+8. BONUS: This picture is what I did on Saturday: Boston ComicCon 2015!
Here are the blogs I will nominate:
I am honored to have been nominated for the blogging Liebster Award by Nicole from How to Fangirl for Adults. Go check out her blog! The Liebster Award is an award by bloggers for bloggers that is passed forward, and it has some other cool bells and whistles too!
The Rules:
Nicole’s Questions
11 Facts about Myself
My Questions
My Nominations
Here at San Diego Comic Con, the creator of Buffy, Firefly, Dr. Horrible and Dollhouse, and the director of two Avengers movies, just told us the nature and purpose of existence. He also revealed one of his next projects: a “Victorian female Batman” called Twist.
So during Joss Whedon’s big one-man show panel here at Comic Con, a fan dressed in a Jayne hat and a Sunnydale T-shirt asked what was the meaning of life, what was the nature of reality, and how we could be sane and happy in the world. And Whedon responded:
“You think I’m not going to, but I’m going to answer that. The world is a random and meaningless terrifying place and then we all—spoiler alert—die. Most critters are designed not to know that. We are designed, uniquely, to transcend that, and to understand that—I can quote myself—a thing isn’t beautiful because it lasts.”
Whedon added that “the main function of the human brain, the primary instinct, is storytelling. Memory is storytelling. If we all remembered everything, we would be Rain Man, and would not be socially active at all. We learn to forget and to distort, but we [also] learn to tell a story about ourselves.”
And Whedon said, “I keep hoping to be the hero of my story, [but] I’m the annoying sidekick. I’m kind of like Rosie O’Donnell in that Tarzan movie.” He keeps hoping to be Tarzan, but finding that he’s that weird monkey that nobody can tell if it’s a girl or a boy.
“My idea is that stories that we then hear and see and internalize—and wear hats from and come to conventions about… We all come here to celebrate only exactly that: storytelling, and the shared experience of what that gives us.” The shared experience of storytelling gives us strength and peace, Whedon added. You understand your story and everyone else’s story, and that “it can be controlled by us.” This is something we can survive, “because unlike me, you all are the hero of your story.”
Anders, Charlie Jane. “Joss Whedon Just Explained the Meaning of LIfe to Us.” io9.com. 11 July 2015. Web. 12 July 2015.
Dear heavens. I can barely remember a summer like this one, when we have gotten so much good news, not just in general but more so for those on the margins. So let’s make a list of the Outrageously Cool things that have been happening lately in the news and the world.
In Ester Forbes’ classic young adult novel, Johnny Tremain, the protagonist, Johnny overhears a meeting of the Sons of Liberty in 1773, where James Otis says, “We give all we have, lives, property, safety, skills . . . we fight, we die, for a simple thing. Only that a man can stand up.” Though I read that book for the first time maybe 35 years ago, that line has stayed in my head ever since. I thought about it recently, when I read the two blogs I reposted about Agent Peggy Carter.
I have been lucky not to have to deal with much overt sexism throughout my life. I recognize that as an overeducated middle class white woman doing a relatively “female” job (teaching English), I may have an advantage that other women don’t have. As we have seen with the recent tale of the Nobel Prize-winning sexist idiot who called women in the lab “distractions,” sexism hasn’t gone away and probably won’t any time soon. But it is another reason why we need shows like Agent Carter, to remind us of the time when women had to put up with that kind of bullshit all the time. We remember what our mothers, grandmothers, great-grandmothers, etc. fought for and we sign on for the fight too.
Because it isn’t only sexism. It’s racism, classism, homophobia, me-first politics and religion, and all the other intersecting forms of institutional oppression. And the people most hurt by each of these problems, and that may well include us too, need us to stand up and fight so that others may stand up. But how do we do that? Well, when I went to seminary the first class we took was on anti-oppression, and it required us to face our own isms and untangle them, admit to them, and start habits that would help us stop doing some of the things, having some of the thoughts, that lead us into participating in the oppressions. It’s hard work. You will disappoint yourself more often than not.
So how do we find the strength to fight this battle? Well people like King and Gandhi found religion/God helpful. That can be good for some, although for others sometimes religion has only taught them to be ashamed of themselves, not to respect themselves. So I also like how popular culture heroes, and the writers behind them, offer us a line here or there that is just jam-packed with wisdom. In the last episode of the first season of Agent Carter, we see Peggy jump all the hurdles with her many skills: hand-to-hand fighting, code-breaking, shooting, parachute jumping, and most of all a crack brain and a big heart.
At the end, when one of her so-called “superiors” at work takes all the credit for Peggy’s efforts, another colleague asks her, “How can you just sit here and take that?”
She says, “I don’t need a congressional honor. I don’t need Jack Thompson’s approval or the president’s. I know my value. Anyone else’s opinion doesn’t matter.”
And that could just be a single line in a single episode in a single season of a single show. But it is going beyond that. Because when Hayley Atwell goes to ComiCon and other nerd-fest conventions and people ask her for advice on being strong, facing sexism and other oppressions, she tells them, “Know your own value.” And I just bought a T-shirt with her image on it and the phrase, I know my value, because although I do often know my value (thank you, many years of therapy), I also often forget and need a reminder. And this is what characters like Xena, Buffy, and Agent Carter fight for, inside the stories that transfer from TV to our heads: that a woman also can stand up.