Housekeeping and hypotheticals

Get excited!  The long-promised Penelope Clearwater Revival has arrived.  You can expect two new things from my blog:

1. More frequent posts.  Now that I have more followers, and not all of you are people who know me and are willing to put up with my slacking, I feel I owe it to you to post on a more regular basis, perhaps weekly.  I can’t promise these will be long posts–after all, I’m supposed to be working on my dissertation as well–but that may be for the best.  (“Amen,” says the chorus.)

2. A better organizational scheme.  Yes, it’s true: I’ve had this blog since December 2011, and only just this past weekend did I start adding categories and tags.  I did this retroactively for all my posts, which was a fun exercise for me; I especially enjoyed seeing my most commonly used tags as calculated by WordPress.  (“Charles Dickens” was the winner by far, but there were some surprise runners-up.  Who knew I’d written so many posts about Moneyball?)  I’d love your feedback on this endeavor–if you notice a common theme among two or more posts that I haven’t seen, let me know so I can add a tag or possibly create a new category.

I hope these changes will enhance both your and my enjoyment of the blog.  So that this post won’t be completely boring, here are some fun “if” statements.  I’d love to hear how you’d complete the statements for yourself.

1. If I could write and illustrate a comic book series, it would be called . . . The Adventures of Sigyn, Intra-Yggdrasil Diplomat.  I’ve actually thought quite a bit about this.  Sigyn is a minor character in Norse mythology whom I discovered while reading Edith Hamilton.  She (Sigyn, not Edith) is Loki’s wife.  So I thought I could make a pretty fun comic series–and also send positive messages about world peace and women’s empowerment–out of the idea that Sigyn is going around trying to negotiate satisfying compromises between her husband’s world domination schemes and the contrary purposes of people like Odin and the Avengers.

2. If I wrote a screenplay, it would be called  . . . The Darlings.  I’ve thought even more about this one, and I might really write it someday.  The Darlings is about Wendy, John, and Michael after they’ve grown up.  To my knowledge, this particular Peter Pan variant hasn’t been done before. The basic premise: Michael doesn’t believe they really went to Neverland or that it’s even real (he was too little to form his own memories of the event); John knows it really happened but has only negative memories and doesn’t like to talk about it; Wendy has happy memories of Neverland and is still enamored with Peter Pan but has married a man who’s the opposite of Peter in pretty much every way.  Plus there’s a bunch of other stuff going on with careers, university studies, romance, and sibling rivalry.  Maybe I’ll write this when I’m finished with my PhD.

3. If I were on a roller derby team, my derby name would be . . . Tess of the Disturbervilles.  This is never going to happen, folks, so you can just use your imagination.

A year with Penelope

My dear readers–as of yesterday, this blog is one year old!  In celebration of this milestone, I invite you to revisit some of our favorite (your favorite and my favorite) posts from the past year.

  • My most viewed post of all time: A review and listening guide of Mumford and Sons’ first album, Sigh No More.  Hmm…maybe I should do one for Babel.
  • Post that elicited the most interesting comment: After I jokingly suggested that Penelope Clearwater Revival would be a great name for a Southern-inflected wizard rock band, a commenter who’d Googled the phrase wrote to say that she had started recording music under that name!
  • Several readers’ favorite post: Some of my most loyal readers told me that they enjoyed this zany stream of consciousness about pandas, punctuation, and Coldplay more than any other post.
  • Facebook fun: My blog made a social network appearance when my mom shared this post about two of the loves of my life, Samwise Gamgee and Neville Longbottom, on her Facebook page.  Next time you see something you like on my blog, I’d love it if you shared it with your friends on Facebook, Twitter, or a personal website!
  • Christmas cheer: Now that advent has begun, you might like to check out some posts from last year on Harry Connick Jr.’s When My Heart Finds Christmas, Handel’s Messiah, and Dickens’ A Christmas Carol.

I’d like to thank you all for a wonderful year.  I wouldn’t keep this blog going if I didn’t know that you were out there reading it.  Please let me know what topics you’d like to see me address in the coming year!

Penelope hasn’t died.

Weep not for me, my friends.  I’m still alive.  (Someone please tell Hermione Granger to stop using my name as a convenient alias.)  I’m just finishing up my PhD coursework.  (So, not quite alive, actually.)  I fully intend to make a big comeback in August with some really awesome posts, some of which will, I’m sure, draw on some of the themes I’ve been thinking and writing about this summer.  Think that sounds like a snooze?  Think again!!

Preview: I’m working on a paper right now about Moneyball, so get ready, Brad Pitt fans (also Jonah Hill fans).  I might even post a picture of your guy–accompanied, of course, by some amazing insights about the movie.

Penelope Clearwater Revival…

…would be a good name for a Southern-inflected wizard rock band. Feel free to use it if you are thinking of starting one (as I’m sure many of you are).

A Penelope Clearwater Revival is also what this blog needs. I feel like I need a theme, or something give people a reason to actually want to read my blog. I’ll get back to you on that. Maybe more pictures of fairies?

Read these other blogs.

I did not expect to find inspiration for my blog from a tutoring appointment I had to cover today.  The tutee, a native Korean speaker, wanted me to check her blog posts to see whether they sounded like idiomatic English.  I fell in love with her blog, banquet365.blog.com.  Despite its title, My Continual Feast, it’s not exactly a food blog, though she does occasionally include some pretty delectable-looking descriptions and pictures of her culinary creations.  In general, “feast” here should be understood in a metaphorical sense.  It’s a feast consisting of notes from friends, watercolor Christmas cards, Central Virginia foliage, good dreams, and a beloved cat.  It’s a feast, in short, of all God’s blessings.  Looking at her blog made me a bit embarrassed of my long, sometimes pretentious posts.  When I showed her my blog, I wished I had included more pictures, more recipes (told in narrative style), fewer words.  (She did say she would use my blog as “homework” to practice her English reading comprehension…not exactly what I envisioned when I started it, but at least somebody is getting some use out of it.)

This is another blog that inspires me: allisonscoles.wordpress.com.  The author of this one is a native English speaker, a very articulate one, but she manages to keep her posts simple and lovely, and people actually want to read them the whole way through.  I want my blog to be more like these two that I’ve mentioned.  Maybe that will really happen; maybe it won’t–after all, I’m me, not them.  But you can probably expect a few changes over the next few weeks.  Meanwhile, you should start following these other beautiful blogs.

Welcome to Ravenclaw Tower.

I don’t have any pretensions to wit beyond measure.  In fact, I doubt I would be able to answer the logic problem in order to gain access to the real Ravenclaw Tower (although I do take comfort in the thought that if Luna Lovegood can get in, maybe I could too.  And by this I mean no disrespect to Luna.)  But I wanted to give my blog a Ravenclaw name because I hope, humbly, to create a place where thoughtful inquiry and the magic of words can thrive.

Don’t expect a post every day.  Don’t expect brilliance every time.  Do expect book reviews (and movie and music reviews too), brief observations and exclamations, paeans to people I like, product recommendations, and sometimes, posts consisting entirely of quotations from those who approach nearer to immeasurable wit than I do.

And yes, Penelope Clearwater is that Ravenclaw prefect who dated Percy Weasley before he became a total git.  Are you aware how deeply into obscurity a potential blogger has to dig in order to find a quality blog name that someone hasn’t already chosen?