—A is for aunts, swarms of, all of whom are explaining how you could have cooked the food just a little, little bit differently for a lot more flavor, but really, what you made is just fine, not to worry. —B is for brothers, the ones watching televised blood sports throughout the family holiday. —C is for caterers, which you wish you had. —D is for Dumb and Dumber, which, along with Something About Mary, are the videos brought by younger members of the family and all they want to watch on the televisions not occupied by the blood-sports events being observed by the male members of the family unit. —E is for everything , as in “I can’t believe Iundefinedate.” —F is for obscenities, which you must not say in front of the children, even when you spill the stuffing on the floor because the cheap aluminum pan you used collapses under its own weight, never mind that the youngsters are...

All we’re talking about in Connecticut is the failure of the economy, how we have to cut our budgets, how I can no longer count on two graduate assistants to work on the journal I’ve edited for nearly twenty years (LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory). My co-editor, Margaret E. Mitchell at University of West Georgia, and I are scrambling to keep the publication alive despite these drastic withdrawals of support, and what does Connecticut’s governor do?

She sends all non-essential state personnel home today at 11 a.m. because it’s going to snow.

As if snow is a BIG DEAL.

It started to snow about an hour ago. Let me emphasize this point: It’s only snowing. It’s not doing anything worse. Or anything weird. We live in New England. Snow is what happens in this part of the country in the winter. There are — as of right now, anyway — no flaming swords shrieking from the sky, no...

I have a couple of friends who are from wildly different backgrounds, live in wholly different circumstances, and who nevertheless have a great deal in common.

What they have in common sometimes comes close to breaking my heart.

At other times it comes close to making me laugh out loud.

And if we’re really being honest here (and why not?) sometimes what they have in common makes me envious while at other times it brings me despair.

What they have in common is the belief that, if they buy the right book, find the right past life, discover the right weight-loss program, employ the right combination of aromas, dress in the right colors, eat the right fruit, sleep the right number of hours — in addition to lighting the correct candles, watching the best movies, feinging the right shui, chanting the best mantra, consuming the highest fiber, eating the most fat, eating the...

With everything up for grabs these days — from Illinois senate seats to advertisements on in-class hand-outs — I thought it might be interesting to see what we, as a bunch of teachers, scholars, administrators, writers, and students, would put on the auction block.

To quote the governor of Illinois: “I’ve got this thing…and it’s [expletive] golden. And I’m just not giving it up for [expletive] nothing. I’m not going to do it. And I can always use it.”

What’s your [expletive] golden thing? What do you have in your possession that you — under the right circumstances, for the right payoff — would be willing to trade for real [expletive] power? Be specific and don’t be shy.

Extra points will be given for originality and hubris.

Just like in life.

Nobody LIKES guilt, but many of us have it.

Sort of like an iPod.

Knowing in advance that I needed to write this column, I kept track during the week of my numerous occasions of guilt. Disappointingly, perhaps, they are different from occasions of sin. My list of what makes me feel guilty includes the following: —eating —drinking —sleeping —talking on the telephone —purchasing a copy of a tabloid because I started reading it on line at the supermarket check-out counter —preferring People over The New Yorker (I refer here to the magazines, not to groups or individuals) —actually despising The New Yorker, especially the coy little insider-pieces. —reading my horoscope before I read the news —not reading all of the news —not flossing —not wearing sunscreen —not writing enough —not exercising —not meditating —not gardening —not having an organized closet —not liking a movie recommended...

Okay, my pretties, these are my offerings for the funniest videos I’ve watched in the last couple of weeks. It’s the end of the term and we deserve a shot at the frivolous, the absurd, the ridiculous, and the cunningly crude. I feel a need to pass these tastes of humor around, like cheese straws at a party. Nothing substantial here, but fun at the end of a long day.

I’ve been forcing my friends to watch them and then I’ve been watching my friends react — which is probably illegal in Connecticut — and I’ve been amazed by who enjoys what. These are people I know pretty well, too. When I sit somebody down and look at them as they respond to Alec Baldwin in _SNL’_s holiday classic “NPRs Delicious Dish Schweddy Balls” sketch, I’m pretty sure I know what to expect; I’ve never asked a stranger to watch it with me before (you’re the first).

And I have been shocked. Some wild friends have...

I was 21 and my brother was 28. I was living in England at the time, and I would continue to live there — on and off — for the next four years. In 1978 my father was moving out of the house where, several years earlier, my mother had died.

The winds of chaos were whistling right outside the windows of both of our lives and night was right outside the door but we didn’t know it. Not entirely. We wrote to each other often and I now know for a fact what I only suspected back then: His letters are better than mine.

Here’s one of them.

June 1978 Dear Gina,

It is Sunday afternoon and I’m sitting in the living room, in our living room, where the white pictureless walls stand listening and watching. They’ve seen me here before, in this yellow sofa that used to be downstairs which we just brought up here again, years ago where I sat and read mystery stories and did my science homework....

When I showed this video to a few friends, including one from my Cambridge days (a Norwegian scholar of 18th-century British literature who is over here doing research at the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington — and she’s a wickedly brilliant woman with a particularly astute eye for satire), they thought I was showing them a parody.

They did not believe the video of Sarah Palin’s interview at the turkey farm in Alaska was real.

They shook their collective skeptical heads and said “Gina, you’ve been deceived. Tsk, tsk. You should know better. Surely this is a hoax?”

It isn’t.

I’ll warn you: it’s a messy video in several respects. Live turkeys are rendered, well, unlive in the background as Palin, interviewed by a local television station, describes her delight at being back in Alaska.

Yes, watching the turkeys suffer is rather gruesome, but watching Palin blithely cheep a...

Nice people will sometimes ask me if I have a hobby. I feel a little awkward answering their kind inquiry because the short honest reply — ”no” — doesn’t do much to move conversation along.

I’m at a loss to answer the hobby question because while I genuinely respect and applaud the fun stuff my friends do to relax and entertain themselves, I have no similar habits.

Usually I end up sputtering out some lame fib, such as “I like to shop” or “cooking can be fun.”

I mean, my aunts used to spend hours making ravioli which were not then referred to as “home-made” because everything you ate in a house such as ours was “home-made” because nobody had any “money.” Nowadays pasta-making can actually count as a hobby, I suppose, because there are machines to replace the aunts and hours of preparation can go into the creation of these unique delicacies.

(Yet somehow I imagine it’s tough...

Flannery O’Connor: “Success means being heard and don’t stand there and tell me that you are indifferent to being heard.”

Ask a woman if she’s ambitious and she’ll look at you as if you just asked whether she sticks pins in puppies for fun. Ask a woman if she’s competitive and she’ll look at you as if you suggested that she’s a hooker.

“Me? Ambitious? Well, I want to succeed in my vocation, of course, but I wouldn’t use the word ‘ambitious.’ I just want to get what I deserve, if that’s okay. As for competitive, no way. I hate being measured against somebody else.”

Women rarely admit our ambitions out loud not only because we fear failure — a fear we share with our male counterparts — but because wanting to succeed might make us seem less feminine.

That’s the tricky part.

Wanting an audience, wanting success, wanting to win — isn’t that what scary women want? We don’t like ...