Senator Ted Kennedy and Student Financial Aid @ Northeastern University

I am sorry to hear about Senator Ted Kennedy’s ill health.  He’s the subject of a new online exhibit by the NU Libraries Archives on Student Financial Aid at Northeastern University.  The exhibit recounts Kennedy’s strong support of federal financial aid for college students, and his relationship with Northeastern.  He spoke at student rallies, heard personal student testimonies, and held a press conference and a senate committee field hearing at Northeastern whenever student financial aid programs were threatened by presidential or congressional proposals.  The exhibit comprises photographs, articles from Northeastern University’s student and faculty/staff newspapers, official statements, and background information.  I wish Senator Kennedy and his family the best. 

From Homicide to Hope

Please join us for Thursday’s FOCUS (Forming Opportunities for Collaboration, Understanding, and Service) Forum-From Homicide to Hope: A Community Approach to Reducing Youth Violence.  Jack Levin, Professor and Co-Director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict, student Alex Alvanos ’09, Co-Founder of Social Change through Peace Games, and Emmanuel Tikili, Director of Programs for the Boston TenPoint coalition, will lead the discussion.  The program’s goal is to inform the Northeastern community about issues that affect our neighboring Boston community and to provide the attendees with resources that empower them to serve the community and to act. Attendees will leave the program with more information on what exactly they can do to reduce youth violence.  This forum is sponsored by Northeastern University Libraries and the Northeastern University Center of Community Service.

Thursday, May 22 @ 4:30 pm

90 Snell Library

Gossip Girl, Take 2

So I changed my tune, after my last Gossip Girl post.  I watched another episode with my roommate, and then became a little obsessed with it, catching up on the entire season’s worth of episodes.  I also found that it’s been pretty widely (and constantly) written about, even meriting coverage by the British press. In the beginning of The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James describes Isabel Archer, writing, “She had seen very little of the evil of the world, but she had seen women who lied and who tried to hurt each other.”  In the class I was taking at the time, our professor pointed to that line, and said that Isabel would be encountering far greater evil, evil that would seem incomprehensible to her then, as the novel progressed.  And while I could see his point, I also thought that “women who lied and tried to hurt each other,” was no small sin.  It’s also a type of evil most people encounter, and while the antics on Gossip Girl are more than a little melodramatic, I’ve also come to find them quite compelling.  The show’s depiction of friendship-the ways in which friends can love each other very deeply, without there being a rational reason behind it-is, I think, its strongest virtue. I also started reading (and enjoying) these very loving recaps-the writer draws parallels to Joseph Campbell, among others, and it’s made me feel better about my new fixation.   Tonight’s the finale: 8 pm on the CW, so tune in! 🙂

Julie Andrews and Libraries

You may know Julie Andrews as the star of Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music and The Princess Diaries, but I was quite excited to learn that she’s also an enthusiastic supporter of public libraries! She wrote an editorial in yesterday’s Los Angeles Times, criticizing budget cuts. I’ve visited some California public libraries (and in fact have a Palos Verdes Peninsula library card) but am not that familiar with LA libraries. Have any of you visited any? And what do you think of her editorial?

Middlemarch by George Eliot

My sophomore year of college I was assigned Middlemarch by George Eliot as part of my Major British Authors class. Though I didn’t do this too often, for Middlemarch, I used my dad’s method of reading the beginning, middle and end, and close-reading (he could always memorize, but my brain is not as good at that) several other sections. (The professor also decided to assign this ‘big book’ over spring break, a popular move, to give students an extra week to finish it-but it’s still hard to get into when you’re vacationing on the beach!) So 4 years later, I added it to my TBR 2008 Challenge list. And this time around, I managed to read it cover to cover. Middlemarch is the provincial English town setting, and Eliot’s sprawling novel interweaves the stories of many of its denizens. Middlemarch‘s main characters include the aristocratic Brookes (particularly the religious and idealistic Dorothea), Rev. Casaubon, his young cousin Will Laidslaw, and the bourgeois Middlemarch burghers: the Featherstones, the Garths, the Farebrothers, the Bulstrodes, the Vincys (especially young siblings Fred and Rosamond), and Dr. Tertius Lydgate. Like many stories (or soap operas) with large casts-I certainly had my favorite characters in Middlemarch whose stories I was eager to get back to (and those whom I could have happily forgone). Many of the middle class villagers seemed uninteresting or extraneous to me. The descriptions of Dorothea Brooke and Rev. Casaubon’s relationship also reminded me (frighteningly) of Isabel Archer and Gilbert Osmond in one of my favorite novels, Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady . I could see the image of “the candle and the snuffer” equally applying to Dorothea and Casaubon. I found the story lines centering on Dorothea Brooke to be the most compelling. Similar to her other novels, I found Eliot’s narrator to be too moralizing and intrusive. However, akin to Son of a Witch, I was really thrilled by the novel’s climax. The climactic scene of Middlemarch deals with a confrontation between Dorothea and Rosamond that transforms into an open and compassionate dialogue. This scene to me was so powerful because it felt like the first time in the novel where the characters were speaking honestly with each other. Writing about this depiction of the interminable force of honesty in the face of gossip, appearances and reputation reminded me of Gossip Girl, suggesting parallels between the two universes. (And there will be more to come on Gossip Girl). Other Middlemarch readers, weigh in!