The proper study of mankind is books.

Sometimes I think grad school broke my brain, because I'm not reading as much as I used to. In any case...
Now reading:

laughin', spinnin', swingin' madly across the sun

1. WHYY/NPR did a piece on my old neighborhood in Camden. I miss that place. It could be isolating and frustrating, but oh-so-full of hope and goodness. Every time I go back, I'm reminded of why I should have faith in humanity.
Thanks to Andrea for the link.

2. Because this crap about the "Ground Zero Mosque" (which is not on Ground Zero, nor is it a mosque) is driving me crazy, here are some voices of reason: Fred Clark, the Slacktivist, and Gus Bridi.

3. The poverty level in the US is the highest it's been in 15 years. The poverty line for a single adult is $10,830 and $22,050 for a family of four. This past year was the first year that I was over the poverty line, though I'm not sure how they count grad students (in 08-09, when I was in school, I was making $400/month. Student loans saved my life).

4. The Cupcake Lady! She is parked a block away from my office right now. And the cupcakes are good, man.

5. My parents are coming down this weekend, and they've promised to take over our kitchen and make dinner for me and my housemates. Yay.

And that's all for now.

a people without history is not redeemed from time

Well, hey, September 12th.

I think I meant to write something yesterday, something about mourning and loss and how remembering shouldn't equal revenge, so on and so forth, but I didn't.

Anyway. Here's what I always think about on September 11.

I have squandered my resistance for a pocket full of mumbles

I saw this story on The New York Times today.

To make it brief, a Republican in Arizona (oh, Arizona, again) has been recruiting homeless people to run on the Green Party ticket in order to split the Democratic vote. A lot of Democrats have been denouncing this as "deceitful" and "not right" and as a corruption of the democratic (small d) process. They're right, of course.

But what makes me really angry is this: that people in power are using the least powerful to do their dirty work.

I think I need to go back a few steps and explain why I'm so angry about this.

On cabins and campfires

This short piece on Feministe inspired me to write a bit about camp.

When I was about 7 or 8, a woman came to my Pioneer Girls (think Girl Scouts in church) meeting to give a presentation about camp. By the time the promotional video got to the part where girls were swinging from belay ropes and shooting rifles, I was transfixed. I wanted to go, really, really badly wanted to go.

My parents said no. I was too young to go by myself. I also suspect at this point that we didn't have the money. I was persistent, though, for three summers, and finally (FINALLY!), when I was in fifth grade, my parents said yes. My mom came with me, mainly because we got half off the price, and I got a small scholarship as well.

My parents had no idea what kind of monster they were unleashing.

I'm far too excited about this.

But here's my room, almost finished except that I haven't hung the curtains yet.

And, of course, the most important thing:

An Interlude, with Pictures

Because I feel as if I've gotten mad too much over the last few weeks, here's some happiness in the form of pictures and things.

and there ain't no place in this world for our children to go

Camden's libraries are closing. This may seem like just a drop in the bucket, just another indignity in an ongoing list. After all, when you're the poorest, most dangerous city in the country, why should the libraries closing matter? I think they do. You see, when you're a kid, and you're a kid who likes to read but can't afford books, where are you going to go? The library, of course. And where do you go when your city decides that literacy isn't important, where do you go? The bookstore? Got none of those in Camden, at least as far as I know.

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22."

A couple of years ago, Reba Place Fellowship, which is a longstanding Mennonite community out in Chicago, held a conference called "Cynicism and Hope." I wasn't able to go (I was taking the Lit GRE during that weekend, yuck), though some of my community-mates did. The interesting thing about this conference was that it wasn't focused on overcoming cynicism, but rather balancing the two, and realizing that you can't have one without the other. Unmitigated cynicism leads to destruction; unmitigated hope leads to a dangerous idealism. So on, so forth.

This is what I do when I'm bored.

My cousin's wife, Donna, is an instructor in the CompSci department at Penn. I was in her office one day and got bored while she was grading exams, so I decided to re-make her board into an English lecture. Because, you know, I'm a nerd. Really. If it's not quite clear, it's got the Elizabethans, Neoclassicism, Romanticism, and the Victorians on there, along with a lovely stick figure and the note, "This work of splendor is how I ended up working at an art school."
(You can click on it to enlarge it.)

Reader, I smile.

And laugh at and am grateful for these things.

Reading List!

This is the list that I posted on Facebook in March. I've been a bit delinquent about keeping up with it. I'm going to blame that on moving and having most of my books packed up in boxes and milk crates.

this land is your land

Happy 4th of July.
I have this tendency to get grumpy about national holidays. Not that I think that we shouldn't have them (it's natural, after all, to have communal celebrations), but because they often come with a heavy load of blind patriotism and waxing on American exceptionalism and waving flags and such. So let me say this first: I don't like any of those things. I think any citizens of any country should view their country with a critical eye, and we Americans tend to gloss over our bad parts. I think that does have to do with our sense of exceptionalism, which (wake up and smell the coffee, fellow countrypeople) is a load of crap: we have done great things, and we have done awful things. Yes, we have freedom, and so do a lot of other countries.

Anyway, with that out of the way, in lieu of my normal complete-grumpiness, and in the spirit of peace and grace and love, I'm going to tell you what I do love about this big damn country.

I am not a kitten, stuck up a tree somewhere

All right. Let me set the scene for a moment.
Baseball practice on Sunday. It's so hot that my best adjectives can't describe it. A lot of the team can't make it, so there are only five of us (and it's only my second practice). So, you know, we do our thing. We jog around the field and warm up with throwing.

Words words words: my life through books

I learned to read fairly young--from what my parents tell me, I was just about three years old when I started to put together letters and create words. I used to follow my mom around and ask her how to spell different words. In fact, let's give much of the credit to my parents: my dad started reading The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe to me when I was two. To this day, I have the urge to look in closets for my own Narnia (and yes, I realize that Lewis had problems, and he could be an asshole, but let me have my Narnia, okay?).

The obligatory "This is me!" post (in words and pictures)

Hi, my name is Sarah. "Raven" comes from my bird name from when I was a camp counselor, and I'm a girl--ergo, "A Girl Called Raven." I decided to create a blog because I end up processing way too much in my head and then forgetting most of it because I'm more of a writer than a speaker. Anyway, here's an introduction to my world.

Well, hello, world.

I'm just trying this out.