Shame on me.

After years in which I made fun of grad students for claiming to be so very busy, I have become one, and karmically, am more busy than I can believe. Of course, a good half of that busyness can be chalked up to settling into a new city and a new lifestyle and trying to get over the feeling that you are still tethered to the old one. Which, well, so far I haven’t been that successful at the getting over part.

I have, however, been writing a lot, just not here, which is more than a little unfair to my fellow Harpies. It’s just turned out to be really hard to develop a writing schedule that incorporates some blogging here when my routine has basically been tossed in the air like so much salad. I’m working on it, I swear.

Still, some things you could read, if you were interested, follow.

I am blogging at Bitch about television for the next couple of months. I’ve already got a few posts up. Most recently, I’ve been on a haters’ streak, first with True Blood:

But this is a show which features dialogue that is George-Lucas levels of terrible, horrible, no-good and very bad, delivered by actors whose amusement with the campy material they are being offered appears to have been exhausted by the time they’ve appeared in more than three episodes. (See, e.g., “Tonight Lorena and I have fucked as only two vampires can,” intoned by Stephen Moyer with the air of a man undergoing a root canal. Without anesthesia.). It is also a show that has a plot line which honest-to-God involves the main character being a fairy whose “light” is being allegedly stolen by vampires. Talk about your re-inscriptions of purity myths.

And then on Tyra Banks:

Nonetheless, I very much understand why women want to be models. The dominant cultural explanation at the moment, often laced, in feminist circles, with grumpy middle-aged disdain for how young women are supposedly eschewing the glorious feminist legacy, attributes it to an aversion to hard work and a hope to get rich quick and lead a fabulous lifestyle. I think there might be something to that, but much more than it, I think, is the desire women seem to have, across even race or class lines, to be seen. I know full well that being culturally considered “ugly” can get you just as noticed as being culturally considered “pretty.” But the particular kind of notice that is attached to someone calling you “beautiful,” when you’re female in this culture…well, for all my time spent being an angry card-carrying feminist, I haven’t quite been able to eradicate my own desire for it. So I can’t easily cast aspersions on people who actively run after that. They may just have had a better shot at catching it than I ever did.

And then, I did a little thing at The Awl about what I saw at TIFF this year:

6. At the end of Tabloid, Errol Morris comes up front for a Q&A. The documentary itself is wonderful, a crowd-pleaser about a woman named Joyce McKinney. McKinney once made a name for herself in the tabloids by allegedly kidnapping her Mormon ex-boyfriend while he was traveling in the UK and chaining him to a bed, as the tabloids delightfully described, “spread-eagled.” This was all, in her view, a well-intentioned effort to rescue him from the church. The movie allows her to describe this for herself, and she does a bang-up job, I have to say. (There’s also a twist at the end I’ll resist spoiling.)

“This movie,” Morris says in his prefatory remarks, “has probably convinced me, once and for all, that love only requires the participation of one person.”

Enjoy, and feel free to discuss here.