bibliophibian

Thu, 15 Jul 2010 01:53:35 GMT

I have several library-and-career-related things I want to write about, but right now I'm going to write about something fashion-related instead. This may become a trend.

Start by reading this post, if you haven't already, because it's excellent:

The Hierarchical Structure of Fashion

I identify with a lot of what's being said here. Not all of it--the biggest size I've ever worn is a 12 US, which means that shopping is sometimes annoying (really, Old Navy, I can comb through your stock on multiple occasions and not find a single pair of size 12 denim capri pants? Really?)--but it hasn't ever been what Silvana describes going through.

(...Also, tights really aren't pants. I mean, if you want to wear tights instead of pants, that's your business, but there's still a difference.)

But this:

But fashion is fun. Color, style, pattern, playing around with era, with anachronism, being creative, re-purposing items, layering, doing things for shock value, using your attire as a costume, psyching yourself up using clothes, and the power of surprise. I struggle with the enterprise of fashion. What is it? Is it art? Or is the purpose of fashion to make you look good? And by what standards do we determine whether or not you have, in fact, succeeded in looking good?

And this:

Fashion is, at its core, about Rules. A complex, random, dynamic, unpredictable set of rules that are always established by someone other than you. Whether its fashion magazines, fashion designers, newspapers, movies, music videos, the popular girls at school, or your boss. There are rules. Part of the fun is trying to figure out how to do what you want and still abide by the rules. Or decide when to break them. But they’re almost always arbitrary and the strong social prescription to follow them is about falling in line, and about warning you that you better not stand out too much. There’s a reason that dress code violations are considered disrespectful: Modern Fashion is based on respect. You are supposed to respect all those powerful people, living and dead, who have made these fashion rules about the propriety of open-toed shoes or how tight is too tight.

And so when I hear, tights are not pants, or you should wear pantyhose to court, or I wouldn’t wear X cut of a shirt because it doesn’t look good on me, I think, who made these rules? Why are we following them? Why do we passively subscribe to an aesthetic system that requires us to daily fulfill the twin obligations of being “respectful” by not doing anything out of the ordinary and looking as thin and “feminine” as we can muster? I want fashion to be less about making other people comfortable, and more about personal expression and art. There is too much hierarchy. It is too top-down, from a murky top with too many leaders with too many conflicting messages.

...Yeah, pretty much.

Here's my deal: I love fashion, except that there are parts of it I hate (the parts, specifically, that involve either exploiting women or stigmatizing them)--but even the parts I hate, I'm fascinated by. There are Rules that I agree with, and Rules that I disagree with--but whether I agree or disagree, the more I get involved with fashion the more I find myself thinking that, in the words of Captain Barbossa, they should be more like guidelines than actual rules (yes, I am going to quote ridiculous Disney pirate movies while talking about fashion, and you can't stop me). And that's how I try to use them. If I'm not sure about something, I'll refer to what the guidelines have to say about it, but if I have strong feelings about something that run counter to them, I try to trust and obey my own feelings over arbitrary rules handed down by the fashion world. But using the Rules as guidelines isn't always easy when the world is full of people insisting that they should, in fact, be Rules.

And it's always seemed strange to me that the fashion world is so full of people who insist you follow the rules when so many important and memorable people in fashion are the ones who didn't. Though I suppose if the rules weren't there, the innovators and rule breakers wouldn't have anything to break free from. So maybe they'll always be there, and maybe they're a necessary evil. But maybe that's all the more reason to break them now and then.

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Adventures in Librarianship, Parts Two and Three, or: Well, Fuck

Tue, 25 May 2010 18:28:20 GMT

So I've been meaning for a long time to write more about my career/grad school situation, and today I got some news that inspired me to do so.

( Unfortunately, it's not good news. )

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Thu, 15 Apr 2010 19:29:38 GMT

I seem to be currently performing a sort of musical experiment on myself, and it is to see if it's possible for me* to listen to too much Kate Bush.

*I was going to say "Is it possible for a person to listen to too much Kate Bush?", but then I remembered that it's possible and perhaps even likely that for some people, any amount of Kate Bush is too much. So.

Right now I'm listening to Hounds of Love (the whole album, which I just recently acquired, as opposed to the title song which I've had and loved for years), and so far the answer is "no", but I have both discs of Aerial and a couple of other songs I can listen to after this, so we'll see.

Anyway, listening to all this Kate Bush is making me want to blog about her! So I'm going to tell you a little bit about Kate and I.

I discovered her music for the first time in my freshman year of high school. By which I mean that when I were reading Wuthering Heights (the novel by Emily Bronte) in English, one day my teacher came into class and was like "OKAY YOU GUYS ARE PROBABLY GOING TO THINK THIS IS REALLY WEIRD AND NOT LIKE IT BUT GO WITH IT, OKAY?" and played us "Wuthering Heights" (the song by Kate Bush).

I'd never heard anything quite like that before. I was already a fan of Tori Amos, who is musically similar to Kate, but I'd never heard anyone sing like that before. I didn't quite know what to make of it, but I loved the song anyway, and I don't think I was the only one--I remember the general reaction in class being "WOW, WHAT THE FUCK WAS THAT?...can we listen to it again?", and it became kind of a thing that whenever she wanted to give a lecture on the book, we'd bug her to play the song first--although that might have been more a "teenagers would rather listen to music, even music by strange helium-voiced women, than discuss Victorian literature" thing.

Somehow, during that semester of high school, I ended up with a copy of The Whole Story. I think it happened because I told my mom about "Wuthering Heights" and she wanted to hear it herself, and this was pre-YouTube and pre-iTunes (OH GOD I JUST MADE MYSELF FEEL SO OLD), and was not pre-Napster but my mother has always been very anti-downloading music, apparently to the point where she was willing to buy a whole CD by an artist she'd never heard of. When we got it, I mostly listened to "Wuthering Heights" over and over, but eventually I branched out and listened to the whole thing.

My reaction to the whole album was similar to my reaction to that first song--I liked it overall, but I didn't quite know what to do with it. Kate Bush was, quite frankly, too weird and out there for Teenage Me. There were elements to her music that 14-year-old-me honestly didn't like that much, and elements that Teenage Me wanted to like but was afraid people would judge me/think I was weird for liking.

So for the rest of high school, I treated listening to her as sort of a ~secret shame~ thing. I never investigated her other work or told anyone I liked her, but still, certain songs got under my skin and stayed there. Not the whole album--I'm looking at her discography now and I can't even remember what "Experiment IV" sounds like, and all I can remember about "The Man With The Child In His Eyes" is that I used to skip over it so I could get to "Hounds of Love" faster. But "Hounds of Love" and "Breathing" and "Army Dreamers" and "Cloudbusting" and "The Dreaming"--those songs wrapped around me and wouldn't let go, and eventually I decided I didn't want them to. I didn't start shouting from the rooftops that I liked Kate Bush, or anything, and in some ways I was still pretty hung up on what other people might think about my musical choices, but I stopped giving myself such a hard time about it when I was listening to her alone in my room and there was no one AROUND to possibly judge me for it, at least.

Then college happened! College was kind of faily in a lot of ways (like when I decided bedtimes and regular class attendance were for losers), but it was good for me in that I started to learn how much bigger the world was, in so many ways, than I had known when I was in high school (and then when I graduated I started learning how much bigger the world was than I knew when I was in college, and so it goes). Music was no exception. I started figuring out that there was SO MUCH MORE MUSIC and SO MANY DIFFERENT TYPES OF MUSIC than I'd known! And some of it was kind of weird and out there! And some people liked it and some people didn't and both those responses were totally valid! And, yes, there were people out there who liked Kate Bush and didn't care what anyone else thought about that. AMAZING.

And, to cut to the chase before I get even more rambly (if that's possible), Teenage Me turned into Adult Me, and Adult Me is still way too hung up on What People Might Think in a lot of ways, but she's noticeably less hung up on what people might think of her musical choices.

So: Kate Bush! She's a little weird and not for everyone, and there are still times when I ask myself if I feel like listening to her and the answer is no, but other times the answer is YES OH MY GOD LET'S LISTEN TO SOME MOTHERFUCKING KATE BUSH RIGHT NOW FUCK YEAH, and I am currently in one of those times.

Recommended reading on how Kate Bush is weird but awesome if you like that sort of thing can be found here, but should be viewed (and, depending on your internet connection, loaded) with caution because it is FULL OF GIFS. Of which I will show restraint and repost only one:

YOU'RE WELCOME.

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Mon, 12 Apr 2010 23:59:24 GMT

Lately I am full of Thoughts about self-image, self-esteem, and other such self- things. I've been trying to get these Thoughts to congeal into something I could write down and post, but they've been eluding me. But something happened today that brought it back to the forefront of my mind, so I'm going to try and lay at least some of it down in a way that makes some kind of sense.

( I'll start with what happened today. )

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Tue, 06 Apr 2010 19:19:13 GMT

Adventures in Librarianship, Part Two is still pending, but part of the reason I haven't written it yet is that I've been in more of a mood to talk about fashion, so I'm going to do that.

I recently filled a pretty big gap in my wardrobe with these boots from Charlotte Russe, which I'm in love with. I'd been having a hard time finding cute, affordable, comfortable boots, and these fill all those criteria nicely.

And now that I have boots covered, I know what the next thing on my Shoe List is going to be, because on Easter morning I got up, put on a cute white-and-teal sundress, and then discovered I have absolutely no white shoes, at all, anywhere. Which I'm pretty sure I also discovered last spring and then forgot about. And possibly the spring before that.

I don't really like white shoes much, is the thing, and I don't wear white too often, either. But since it's spring, and since I'm trying to broaden my fashion horizons, and since I'm sure there'll be another time when I put together an outfit that white shoes would go well with and then remember I still don't have any, I think at least one pair is a worthwhile investment.

As far as criteria go, aside from color: I'm just going to look at sandals, for now, and preferably something a little nicer than a flip-flop, but either a flat or a wedge heel, so that I can walk on grass in them. A preliminary search gives me these, these, and these, and I think I like the ones with the cork soles best but they are also the most expensive, sigh. But that's also the first place I've looked, so.

In other spring fashion news, I'm hauling out all my sundresses, which is something I had an irrational aversion to for a long time (I used to stubbornly stick to jeans or long skirts in the summer and then complain about the heat even more, oh, younger self) but last summer I bought a bunch and now I'm excited to wear them again. I predict that by June at the latest I will be sick of Louisiana summer and dreaming of sweaters, but right now I'm still enjoying the fact that I can walk outside at night without a jacket.

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Adventures in Librarianship, Part One

Sun, 21 Mar 2010 21:31:33 GMT

Since one of the things I want to use this blog for is my Adventures in Librarianship, I thought it would be good to lay out some background on where I am now, how I ended up there, and where I want to be in the future.

( In which I navel-gaze some, and relate the history of a few unsuccessful jobs and one (so far) very successful one. )

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Mon, 15 Mar 2010 21:14:20 GMT

So, almost a year after registering this journal, I'm finally going to start using it. At least, that's the plan right now--I might end up making one or two entries here and then abandoning it again. But I've been meaning to set up a space to talk about things like work and fashion and maybe other stuff, so that's what I'm planning to use this for.

I'm still setting things up, so in lieu of any actual content, please accept the comic my username comes from.

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