Please sponsor my 5k swim coming up in April and help support Marie Curie Cancer Care, an organisation which provides home nursing care to people with terminal illnesses.

After receiving numerous threats that appear to originate from members of a single Baptist Church, a South Carolina library system has canceled its young adult summer reading program. A deluge of phone calls and emails included statements such as “We’re going to get you.” The library decided to shut the program down for the protection of patrons, comparing the situation to receiving an anonymous bomb threat. I don’t think that’s hyperbole. We know that christianists have murdered abortion doctors, so what would stop them from physically attacking those they believe to be spreading witchcraft and (horror of horrors) other religions?

In point of fact, I question whether the people making these threats honestly believed their rhetoric– or at least whether those who organized the campaign did. You see, one of the things criticized was a tie-dyeing workshop for promoting “hippie culture and drug use”. That’s a lot to put on a method of dyeing. The thing is that programs like these attract young people to libraries. Maybe they check out a few books they wouldn’t otherwise have read. Increasing your knowledge of the world increases your ability to think for yourself. Somehow, I suspect that that is what the real issue was.

Quite a mouthful, isn’t it? That’s the title of the paper I’ll be presenting on July 14 as part of The Association for Research In Popular Fiction’s Symposium, Popular Politics and Vampire Stories: the Appropriation of Vampires in the 21st Century, at Liverpool John Moores University. If you’re interested, you can read the abstract here.

I’ve been complaining about the heat (and, to my shame, using the air conditioner) for months now, but when it rains, I can stop all that.  In places where the heat is humid, rain may give you a moment of relief, but it only makes the heat worse when the storm passes; when I lived in Japan, I knew to stay inside for at least a few hours following a summer downpour.

Here, where the heat is dry, the cool air lingers for a day or two, and the dust stays down for at least as long.  The rain brings the temperatures back down into a range that this Seattle girl can understand.

On the way back from the dragon boat races yesterday, from one the bridges we crossed, we could see four couples getting their wedding photos taken on the shore or sitting with legs dangling playfully in the water. Both brides and grooms wore white. Because of the mud, each bride had an assistant to hold up her dress, while others ran around with reflectors. Setting a young couple in white clothes in a natural space creates a fantasy version of nature that helps heighten the fantasy of the perfect wedding day so that a photograph may communicate it.

It also reminded me of this review of Rebecca Mead’s One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding. What the review and (if the title is any indication) book don’t cover is that this isn’t only a US-phenomenon but a global one.  The Western wedding of mass-consumption is being exported on a major scale.  China isn’t just a place where the poor may be underpaid to sew fancy wedding gowns (as the article mentions) but also a place where the wealthy, and even the emergent middle class, plan extravagant weddings under the many pageant tents I pass whenever I go into Zhengzhou (and Zhengzhou is not prosperous compared to many other Chinese cities).

In Japan, wedding ads are unavoidable and many couples choose to replace or supplement traditional ceremonies with ones in “wedding chapels”, church-like buildings that only serve one purpose and even provide foreigners to play the role of priest.  (I knew someone who took one of these jobs, and was about as far from a priest as you can imagine.)

Now, I don’t think that the idea of showing off wealth as part of a wedding is something the West invented.  It’s the only that the particular methods of doing so have been growing in global popularity.  Some of this may be due to exoticism.  Some of it may be because of the power of the American entertainment industry. I can also see  how parts of this sort of wedding ceremony fit well with traditional Japanese and Chinese culture (the father giving the bride away to the husband, for instance), but I wonder how much of the symbolism is in fact understood.

Despite another night lost to insomnia, I woke up this morning in time to join five of my students outside the college gates. They were taking me to the larger lake that the campus lake feeds into so that we could watch the dragon boat races. This was a smaller version than those you might be familiar with: smaller boats with fewer people and only four crews racing at a time. I’m pleased to report that the boat in my favorite color, green, won all three races that we watched.

What really interested me, though, was watching my students. They’ve told me that they’re country girls, but even still, I was surprised (and delighted) to see how the stress drained from their faces as we started walking through the fields of corn behind the college. They came close to skipping along the dirt paths. When we got down to the shore, one of them rinsed off her arms by splashing cool water on them. Later, she told me that, in her village, they would wash clothes while standing barefoot in the river– at least in summer. I don’t mean to romanticize their rural origins: I know there’s a reason why their parents have sacrificed to send them to college and why they want to move to cities after they graduate. But I hope they never lose their love for open spaces. Those are precisely the feelings that can be translated into an ecological consciousness, which China– like the rest of the world– needs desperately at this point.

Something that surprised me– and might, at first, seem to conflict with their rural origins– occurred as we passed through a half-built subdivision of Western-style houses (yes, the rural is becoming suburban here). I commented that the homes seemed very big to me; my students thought they seemed small. Of course, I was thinking about nuclear families living in the buildings; they were thinking of three or four generations at once.