thirteen ways of looking at a geek
You asked, I answer. There are still seven spots left; ask!
I've sorted these more or less by subject area. If you were going to ask "Do you consider yourself a control freak?" you can just table that one, 'kay?
1. What food item are you looking forward to discovering at the next Farmer's Market you go to?
ramps (which will only be in season for another week or two) and morel mushrooms. This Saturday will be my first trip to the outdoor market this year!
2. What should one do with little purple eggplants? They've been at the farmers market lately and I am mystified.
If they're long and slender, they're asian eggplants, which are *wonderful*. You can use them any way you would use big globe eggplants, but these are a little more delicate in both texture and flavor, and they're not at all bitter (which means they don't need salting). Paler ones are generally milder in flavor than darker ones. Buy ones that feel heavy for their size. These are perfect for eggplant fans. They are excellent in Thai-style curries and stir-fries, especially with tofu or pork. Fast improvisatory recipe: halve two asian eggplants lengthwise, cut in chunks, stir-fry with a bit of red curry paste, add coconut milk and tofu, simmer until eggplant is tender (10-15 minutes), add basil and lime juice. You can throw in almost anything else you like -- onions, red peppers, green beans, whatever.
3. What should I plant in my garden this summer?
Heirloom tomatoes, first and foremost; plant seedlings, if you can, rather than seeds. Herbs, especially basil; try growing them in pots so you can bring them in for the winter. Green beans are always good. Zucchini's easy, so be careful not to plant too much or you will be sooooo sick of zucchini bread.
4. What's your favorite food?
Food like single ingredient, or complete dish? Right now, my favorite food is asparagus because it's in season. Yum. My favorite dish changes with the season, too, but probably the single thing I make most often and never tire of is this Thai-style squash-leek curry that is just unbelievably good.
5. In what way is "demon mutant fennel" not redundant?
Fennel is an angelic vegetable that is, under normal circumstances, everything it should be. It is excellent in pasta or on pizza, and its lovely fluffy tops are the perfect garnish for potato-leek soup or mushroom-barley soup. Every now and then, however, one of them will lurk menacingly outside renenet's second-story window. They really can look quite alarming in the dark. Or so I'm told.
6. Do you have a favorite Muppet? And if so, which one? And why?
As a child, probably Big Bird. Now? The Swedish Chef, natch.
7. What poet who died more than 500 years ago most rocks your world?
None of them. I haven't read enough literature that old (and don't know enough other languages) to have a reaction beyond "Chaucer doesn't suck." If poets who died more than 500 years ago rocked my world, I wouldn't be studying the history of the novel.
8. Rhymed, blank, or free?
Sestinas.
9. What's a book that significantly changed your life, and why?
So many! I wrote about some of them a while back. I'll add another one: James Phelan's Narrative As Rhetoric, which I mentioned when I first read it. This is the book that really got me hooked on narrative theory, which has turned out to be my thing. Because of reading that book, my dissertation is the way it is. And because of that book, I went to a Big Important Conference about narrative theory this spring and had an amazing time and realized I had found My People, academically speaking.
10. What's the best single teaching experience you've ever had?
This is a tough one, partly because I have so *many* but also because there are two kinds of great teaching experiences. One is where we *feel* good as teachers because our students just did something AMAZING. And the other is where *we* do something amazing, something spontaneous maybe, that works in a way we didn't expect. Sometimes these overlap, but not always.
One where I was happy about what *I* did was the final day of a women's studies course I taught several years ago; we had been talking off and on all semester about the value of women's studies, about whether it's just academic wankery or can really create change in the world. We spent the last day of class brainstorming about problems and issues we'd studied that semester, talking about how and where we see them made manifest in the world, and I wrote down everything they said on the board, and then had them talk about how feminist concepts and ideas we'd talked about could be used in concrete ways to combat the problems they'd identified, and we linked up the problems and solutions with arrows and covered all eight of the chalkboards. They shared information with each other about organizations they knew of or wanted to start. Two groups for local middle-school girls came out of that brainstorming session, and three students (including one of the men) started volunteering at the rape crisis center.
Of course, the end of last semester's class also ranks right up there.
11. What's your favorite BtVS episode?
Probably "Fool For Love" and "Once More With Feeling." And "The Gift." And... let's just say a lot of others.
12. Any chance Buffy and Faith could really end up together? If so, how do you think it would happen? :D
Absolutely. The "how" depends on what one means by "together." Hooking up for a night of hot girlsex is pretty easy to imagine - cranky frustrated curious Buffy, snotty unsympathetic seductive Faith. I can also imagine much more platonic versions of togetherness; their whole good slayer/bad slayer thing could easily turn into a good cop/bad cop routine for training slayers (though I think that, as in S7, Buffy would actually be the bad cop in that scenario), and I can totally imagine them directing some sort of slayer training camp with exactly that vibe, learning to rely on and trust each other. Long-term sweeties feels less likely to me, but I wouldn't rule it out. Buffy's, what, 22 when the series ends? Plenty of people come out in their twenties (::raises hand::). And I can imagine Faith dumping a current girlfriend (or boyfriend) like a hot potato for a shot with a newly bi-curious B.
13. Have you been watching Battlestar Galactica?
Yes. And, in fact, heard a song today that might want to be a BSG vid. But it might also want to be a Firefly movie vid. We'll see.
I've sorted these more or less by subject area. If you were going to ask "Do you consider yourself a control freak?" you can just table that one, 'kay?
1. What food item are you looking forward to discovering at the next Farmer's Market you go to?
ramps (which will only be in season for another week or two) and morel mushrooms. This Saturday will be my first trip to the outdoor market this year!
2. What should one do with little purple eggplants? They've been at the farmers market lately and I am mystified.
If they're long and slender, they're asian eggplants, which are *wonderful*. You can use them any way you would use big globe eggplants, but these are a little more delicate in both texture and flavor, and they're not at all bitter (which means they don't need salting). Paler ones are generally milder in flavor than darker ones. Buy ones that feel heavy for their size. These are perfect for eggplant fans. They are excellent in Thai-style curries and stir-fries, especially with tofu or pork. Fast improvisatory recipe: halve two asian eggplants lengthwise, cut in chunks, stir-fry with a bit of red curry paste, add coconut milk and tofu, simmer until eggplant is tender (10-15 minutes), add basil and lime juice. You can throw in almost anything else you like -- onions, red peppers, green beans, whatever.
3. What should I plant in my garden this summer?
Heirloom tomatoes, first and foremost; plant seedlings, if you can, rather than seeds. Herbs, especially basil; try growing them in pots so you can bring them in for the winter. Green beans are always good. Zucchini's easy, so be careful not to plant too much or you will be sooooo sick of zucchini bread.
4. What's your favorite food?
Food like single ingredient, or complete dish? Right now, my favorite food is asparagus because it's in season. Yum. My favorite dish changes with the season, too, but probably the single thing I make most often and never tire of is this Thai-style squash-leek curry that is just unbelievably good.
5. In what way is "demon mutant fennel" not redundant?
Fennel is an angelic vegetable that is, under normal circumstances, everything it should be. It is excellent in pasta or on pizza, and its lovely fluffy tops are the perfect garnish for potato-leek soup or mushroom-barley soup. Every now and then, however, one of them will lurk menacingly outside renenet's second-story window. They really can look quite alarming in the dark. Or so I'm told.
6. Do you have a favorite Muppet? And if so, which one? And why?
As a child, probably Big Bird. Now? The Swedish Chef, natch.
7. What poet who died more than 500 years ago most rocks your world?
None of them. I haven't read enough literature that old (and don't know enough other languages) to have a reaction beyond "Chaucer doesn't suck." If poets who died more than 500 years ago rocked my world, I wouldn't be studying the history of the novel.
8. Rhymed, blank, or free?
Sestinas.
9. What's a book that significantly changed your life, and why?
So many! I wrote about some of them a while back. I'll add another one: James Phelan's Narrative As Rhetoric, which I mentioned when I first read it. This is the book that really got me hooked on narrative theory, which has turned out to be my thing. Because of reading that book, my dissertation is the way it is. And because of that book, I went to a Big Important Conference about narrative theory this spring and had an amazing time and realized I had found My People, academically speaking.
10. What's the best single teaching experience you've ever had?
This is a tough one, partly because I have so *many* but also because there are two kinds of great teaching experiences. One is where we *feel* good as teachers because our students just did something AMAZING. And the other is where *we* do something amazing, something spontaneous maybe, that works in a way we didn't expect. Sometimes these overlap, but not always.
One where I was happy about what *I* did was the final day of a women's studies course I taught several years ago; we had been talking off and on all semester about the value of women's studies, about whether it's just academic wankery or can really create change in the world. We spent the last day of class brainstorming about problems and issues we'd studied that semester, talking about how and where we see them made manifest in the world, and I wrote down everything they said on the board, and then had them talk about how feminist concepts and ideas we'd talked about could be used in concrete ways to combat the problems they'd identified, and we linked up the problems and solutions with arrows and covered all eight of the chalkboards. They shared information with each other about organizations they knew of or wanted to start. Two groups for local middle-school girls came out of that brainstorming session, and three students (including one of the men) started volunteering at the rape crisis center.
Of course, the end of last semester's class also ranks right up there.
11. What's your favorite BtVS episode?
Probably "Fool For Love" and "Once More With Feeling." And "The Gift." And... let's just say a lot of others.
12. Any chance Buffy and Faith could really end up together? If so, how do you think it would happen? :D
Absolutely. The "how" depends on what one means by "together." Hooking up for a night of hot girlsex is pretty easy to imagine - cranky frustrated curious Buffy, snotty unsympathetic seductive Faith. I can also imagine much more platonic versions of togetherness; their whole good slayer/bad slayer thing could easily turn into a good cop/bad cop routine for training slayers (though I think that, as in S7, Buffy would actually be the bad cop in that scenario), and I can totally imagine them directing some sort of slayer training camp with exactly that vibe, learning to rely on and trust each other. Long-term sweeties feels less likely to me, but I wouldn't rule it out. Buffy's, what, 22 when the series ends? Plenty of people come out in their twenties (::raises hand::). And I can imagine Faith dumping a current girlfriend (or boyfriend) like a hot potato for a shot with a newly bi-curious B.
13. Have you been watching Battlestar Galactica?
Yes. And, in fact, heard a song today that might want to be a BSG vid. But it might also want to be a Firefly movie vid. We'll see.