(no subject)

Amber Benson and her co-author Christopher Golden are very, very funny people. They seemed like people I'd hang out with, perhaps in large part because they treated the whole reading and signing thing last night as though they were in fact just hanging out with all of us, chatting and laughing. The book seems like it will be good, victorian horror with apparently quite naughty bits to be found here and there. That Amber Benson is one raunchy woman, I can tell you! She doesn't look much like Tara in real life somehow, perhaps because she doesn't have to look sad all the time in real life and because her hair is darker, but every now and then there'd be a flash of "that's Tara I'm looking at!" During the Q&A a woman stood up and said (I paraphrase) "This will sound crazy but I can't let the chance to ask you this in real life pass by--will you marry me?" Amber Benson let her down kindly by saying she has a boyfriend with whom she is very happy, but if she didn't have a boyfriend and she liked girls she would be able to give her a quasi-positive answer but they'd have to get to know each other better first. When I got my book signed I told the two authors that I grew up reading Susan Cooper and Evangaline Walton and so loved the Ghosts of Albion website as soon as I saw it, and their eyes lit up at Cooper's and Walton's names--so I was not at all mistaken in sensing a certain awareness of genre tradition there :)

Also, in further proof that everyone cool listens to Arvo Part, that's what Amber Benson listens to while she writes.

I can't seem to get warm today. I know objectively that it's not that cold in my office, but still. I am rather regretting that I remembered to make a salad for lunch today, because I'd rather have something hot. Oh well.

On further listening to the Qntal remix album, I like the songs better than I did the first time around. I was having a kneejerk reaction, I guess. I certainly would dance to it in a club, where it would probably sound better anyway. But I still like the less oontz stuff more. The last few tracks on the cd are the kind of thing I was expecting.

I'm reading a great book, Belly Dance: Orientalism, Transnationalism and Harem Fantasy. It's a collection of essays by academics working in middle eastern and/or dance studies. The introduction alone should be required reading for anyone remotely interested in the history of belly dance; it presents an excellent overview of Middle Eastern dance from pre-Islamic times through to its worldwide popularity today. Much of it is written in postmodernese, but I find I'm still pretty fluent in that. In fact, reading it is making me slightly sad that I didn't find belly dance while I was still in grad school, because if I'd had a subject I could be passionate about, I might well have stayed. To some extent, I was passionate about Mohawk culture and history, but it was always uneasily, aware of my perhaps unbridgeable outsider status among other factors. A part of me toys with the thought of seriously going back to school, learning Arabic and going into Middle Eastern studies. But a big part of me doesn't want to start all over again and face years of financial insecurity, though at least there would probably be a healthier job market at the end than there was/is for anthropologists who study native north america. And I don't know that I have the discipline for it anyway, if I ever even did. Anyway, personal bellyaching (ha!) aside, the book is just revelatory and I highly recommend it to any dancers wanting to know more about how it all came to happen.

rojagato, did I see you this morning cycling on Mass Ave? I thought I did but I wasn't sure as I was standing still and the cyclist in question was not.