Speaking of delivering bad news to students...

...here's the pre-law version.



Bullock is our college's pre-law adviser and I used to be a paralegal once upon a time, and we couldn't stop laughing (especially during the part about Constitutional law). But New Kid, you may want to advert your eyes.

H/T Lawyers, Guns, and Money

In which "I" get thanked in a book acknowledgments

Apparently, Gregory Colón Semenza thinks I had something to do with the success of Graduate Study for the 21st Century (I think I have mentioned it more than once on the blog). And by "I," I mean Dr. Virago. Go look at the Amazon page for the newly revised second edition and click on "Look Inside This Book." Then look at the acknowledgments to the second edition. Yup, there it is: Dr. Virago.

Too funny! Even funnier to me is the fact that my colleague Victoria will be taking over our 'intro to graduate studies' class this semester with my syllabus -- which includes Semenza's book -- and so the new crop of our MA students might read that acknowledgments section with no idea that "Dr. Virago" is me. Hilarious!

You know, it's things like this that sometimes make me want to 'claim' Dr. Virago here on the blog -- I'm already out elsewhere (including in print) -- but I still think I'd prefer for my own web identity and Dr. Virago's to be distinct.

Anyway, I still highly recommend Semenza's book for anyone in a humanities graduate program or thinking about applying to one, and I'm psyched there's an updated second edition. And most of my students have found it very, very helpful, and they're M.A. students, not the Ph.D. students it's really aimed at. (By which I mean to say, it's useful for M.A .students *as well as* Ph.D. students.)

And thanks for reading, Prof. Semenza!

I got bupkis

I haven't been blogging because, well, I'm boring. I got nothing. Help me out here and give me a topic. What do you want to know about?

Or how about I give you some choices.

• Would you like me to write about the experience of collaborating on a class design, which is one of the things I'm doing this summer (though the class won't be taught until Spring 2010)?
• Or how about the agony of coming up with new research projects now that the book is done?
• Or should I write a confessional entry about my frustrations with teaching last semester (note: *not* with my student, but with *my* teaching) and the difficulty of speaking to multiple audiences/levels (English-Ed students, English majors interested in grad school, MA students, etc.).
• Or maybe I should write about my frustrations with our prereq-light system that means students who haven't taken the Intro to Lit Studies class take classes like my senior level Chaucer class before they've even learned how to think about literary texts at the college level (which I suppose is related to point three, above).
• Or, on a cheerier note, I could write about how Bullock and I have spent last summer and this one rewatching all of Buffy and Angel (half way through the latter) -- though I'm not sure I've entirely processed my thoughts on that yet.
• Or, I could write about how I'm not only planning a class for Spring, but have done my syllabuses for the Fall and am trying to plan ahead not to have a maddening year this coming year in terms of prep and grading.

Or, again, you can suggest a topic, though I retain the right to demure if it's too personal or revealing or I don't have much to say on the topic.

In which I am teh lame

I'm back from Kzoo and I had a really lovely time. But I also completely crashed by the end of it and couldn't bring myself to make it to the dance. My headache was just too raging and my energy way too low. So I played Trivial Pursuit on my phone with The General in our hotel room.

That's reason #1 why I am teh lame.

Reason #2: I completely forgot about the party for Bonnie Wheeler. Forgot to RSVP. Forgot to go. Forgot it even existed, until I read about it on blogs today. The invitation is still sitting on my desk here in Rust Belt, under a pile of other stuff I've neglected this semester. D'oh!

My excuse for my lameness is in the post two below this one. It's hard to be on top of social things when you're barely on top of all the rest.

But I have to say, I'm in a much better mood post-Kzoo than I was pre-Kzoo, thanks to all of you whose company I shared this weekend, however briefly!

The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated

Or in other words...."I'm not dead!...I feel fine!"

Blogging will resume. I promise.

Realization of the day

If you "friend" your colleagues on Facebook and you take a wee little break to play WordTwist (or enter your FB time-wasting activity of choice) it's really easy to feel really guilty about not working when they send you a chat message!

OK, now I'm *really* going to get back to work!

Helping Neko Case help Best Friends help companion animals

Neko Case has a new album coming out, and she's making a song from it available for free download. And for every blog that posts the download, she and her label, ANTI-, will donate $5 to Best Friends Animal Society. And since I like *both* Neko Case and Best Friends, I'm happy to help out.

Click here to download "People Got a Lotta Nerve." To find out how you can post it to your blog and help out, too, go here (where you can also preview the song first, if you want, before you download). (And if you can figure out how to get the code for the imeem player to work, let me know.)

About Best Friends (from the ANTI- page on how to blog it): Founded in 1984, Best Friends advances nationwide animal welfare initiatives by working with shelter and rescue groups around the country. On any given day Best Friends Animal Sanctuary, the nation’s largest facility for abused, abandoned and special needs companion animals located in southwestern Utah, is home to approximately 2,000 dogs, cats, horses, rabbits, birds, and other animals. The society also publishes Best Friends magazine, the nation’s largest general interest, pet-related magazine with approximately 300,000 subscribers.

I personally learned about Best Friends from the Pastry Pirate, who has visited them in Utah and was very impressed with the work they do.

Thanks!

Thanks to everyone for all the suggestions and encouragement in the posts below about my Chaucer class and my medieval lit. survey course. You've definitely convinced me that doing adaptations of Chaucer in a Chaucer course isn't crazy, and you've given me lots of ideas for the medieval lit. class. After this year, I won't be teaching either again for three years, since next year I have the Old and Middle English linguistics classes, the research methods class for the grad students, and a special topics honors seminar on the subject of my book, and then the year after that I hope to be on sabbatical for the whole year. But that just gives me plenty of time to plan for big changes.

Anyway, I suspect things are going to be a little quiet around here for awhile because of various end of the semester madness. But I'll see y'all at your blogs. And hey, who's going to be at MLA? Medieval Woman is organizing a get-together.

RIP George Carlin, 1937-2008

When I was in junior high, my best friend Maria and I used to sneak off to a corner of the playground to listen to a cassette tape (on an office tape recorder) of George Carlin's then current HBO special, which her older brother had made with the same the recorder, microphone held up to the TV.

We would listen to that show over and over and over again. We loved it. It was the one where he expanded the 7 dirty words into a list of 100. We were fascinated by that list, partly because we weren't even sure what some of those words meant, at least not in their dirty versions (I think "jellyroll" was on there). But mostly we just liked the sheer rhythmic, poetic quality of it, and its taboo qualities. We would chant parts of it on our Catholic school playground as if it were a jump-rope song, and our teachers never seemed to notice.

And that wasn't the only bit we liked. We loved his screed against the word "nice" or his "football vs. baseball" bit ("Baseball is played on a diamond; football is played on a gridiron"). We loved his fascination with language, its oddities, and our odd attitudes about it. In many ways, I think George Carlin is responsible for my having becoming an English professor. I'm pretty sure he's responsible for why I love the medieval play Mankind so much. And he definitely gets credit for my willingness to say "ShitPissFuckCuntCocksuckerMotherfuckerandTits" -- onetwothreefourfive...just like that Jesus* -- in class when I want to talk about issues of register. (Truthfully, I haven't done the whole string in awhile...I usually stick to the first three, especially "fuck." It's enough.)

*OK, that bit between the dashes is from e e cummings, "Buffalo Bill's defunct." He's also someone responsible for helping me, at an impressionable age, to hear poetry in ordinary speech and expletives.

In Carlin's honor, I'm including a clip from about the same time as my introduction to him. It's about the 7 dirty words, but they don't make an appearance until the end. But it's definitely about language and language taboos. And because of the end it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

RIP, George Carlin. I hope no one is asking you to "Have a nice day" and no one is telling your mourning family that you've "gone to a better place."

Wuthering - wha?

Via The Cranky Professor, here's an interpretation of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" that is so very wrong it's *hilarious*. (If you don't know the original, you might want to watch it first -- it's below.)



This is another video posted in part for the Pastry Pirate. Back in college, she and I and another one of our friends had a love-hate relationship with this song. It gave us all the creeps. The Pirate could send shivers down my spine just by chanting in a high-pitched voice, "It's meeeee, Catheeeee, let me in" (especially effective if she was knocking on my dorm room door) or saying she was "soooo cooooold" in chilly weather. Brrrrrr. Creepy.

Now, I'll admit, the Puppini Sisters here are borrowing all their silly gestures straight from Kate Bush, but in the context of Andrews Sisters style close harmony (and those hair nets!) it seems all so much more cheery and full of imitation American can-do spirit (especially on "let me grab your soul"), much less spectral and melodramatic. For your further viewing pleasure, here's Kate's video for the song, with its own quality of camp creepiness and melodrama (not unlike the novel itself, actually):



And now for something completely different, the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights, by Monty Python:



Hmm...There seems to be a similarity of gestures here.

Sometimes it's hard to think

I have a headache. I think it may be due to the sudden change in the weather. It's much warmer and much more humid today that it has been yet this year. Those sorts of barometric and other meteorological changes always seem to give me headaches.

Anyway, it's making it awfully hard to think about things like miscellaneity and mercantile masculinity -- the kinds of things I'm thinking about these days. It's especially hard to read articles and other texts with lots of manuscript descriptions and list of contents and lists of colorless and unmemorable manuscript numbers and other rather dry information. (You know, if I pursue the giant miscellaneous manuscript project that I'm thinking of pursuing -- one that will take me across two centuries of miscellanies and commonplace books and god knows how many archives and libraries -- I think I may start giving the manuscripts my own names. You know, like Fred. Or Rita. Or Gertrude.)

So I'm going to take some ibuprofen for the headache, and forge through some more note-taking for a another hour. And then I'm taking off early and joining "the girls" for a ridiculously frivolous girls'-night-out of pedicures, cocktails, and the Sex and the City Movie. I'm not even a big fan of Sex and the City, but I'm strangely looking forward to this -- I've even got a good outfit to wear, though the pedicurist is going to be horrified by my marathoning feet. They always are. I definitely do not have Manolo-worthy feet.

OK, back to the scholarly stuff for now. And then, frippery and finery!




Yes, I have been more open about what I do in this post than usual. That's the confidence of tenure talking there. That's about as "out" as I ultimately decided to get on this blog.

A silent epidemic

It's time we started a internet-wide conversation* about a silent epidemic that is killing productivity across the country -- certainly at my university, and I presume at yours, too.

What is that silent killer of time? Reply-All [cue melodramatic music]

Seriously, when an administrator sends out to the entire university-wide faculty mailing list an invitation for a casual, drop-in coffee hour, do I really need to know if so-and-so from the business college is coming? Or even when the chair of a large committee sends out a message saying we need to meet, and asks which of the three following times works for the members, do I need to read everyone's reply in order to make up my own mind? Does the chair need for every member to know every other member's choice?

Ack! People! Stop hitting reply-all! I have enough e-mail and junk-mail to wade through as it is!



*The conversation isn't really necessary. I feel better now that I've ranted. Feel free to rant in the comments.

RBOS: Random Bullets of Summer

• Hm. Random Bullets of Summer sounds like a gansta rap album title.

• Thanks to everyone who offered congratulations and huzzahs and woo-hoos in the last post. And Karl, that David Wallace as anonymous blogger joke never gets old with you, does it?

• I have made my summer UK travel plans. I will be at the NCS in Swansea -- I have trains and planes arranged -- then visiting a friend in Yorkshire for a few days, and perhaps catching up with a former student who will be completing her MA in Medieval Studies at York. And then I'll be in London from the evening of July 27 just through the 30th (I leave the morning of the 31st) to look at a couple of manuscripts at the BL, and maybe out at St. George's Chapel, Windsor, too.
  

• Get this: in order to get in to the library at St. George's Chapel, I have to pay for admission to Windsor Castle. Hm. I haven't been there since I was a kid -- maybe I'll do the touristy stuff, too, when I'm done with my manuscript.
  

• For those who want to know, you can book train tickets through TheTrainline.com only if you have a UK mailing address to post them to. They'll tell you you can't use a non-UK credit card, but I did. (They also claim you can't even register with a US address any more, and I seem to have done so. But then I remembered I already had an account from back in 2004, and logged in and purchased my tickets with that account.) The AmEx has been charged and my Yorkshire friend should be getting the tickets any day now.

• I decided to stay at The Euro Hotel in London, partly on Mike Drout's approval of it for what it is, and partly because it seemed to be the only cheap place available of the places really close to St. Pancras and the BL. I like the fact that it's on a little crescent street and it's relatively cheap for London -- 55 GBP for a single with shared shower and toilet (the online reviews say the showers are very close, clean, and never busy). I'll let you know what I think after I've stayed there -- or even *while* I'm there, as they have free wireless (another attraction).

• FYI, other hotels/B&Bs recommended by friends (but which either weren't available or didn't quite suit my desire to be able to drag my luggage myself from St. Pancras):
• The Ridgemount Hotel
• The Penn Club
• The Jesmond Hotel
• The Arran House Hotel
• The Goodenough Club (which is where I would stay if Bullock were coming with me and we were splitting the cost, since it's twice as much as the others).
  

• So I think I may fiddle with the blog design. It's summer -- I have time. JJC finds it too soothing after my old template's screaming orange. (Though was it really that screaming? I always thought of it as an autumnal '70s rust, and so went with a complementary color with the new design.) He also tsk-tsk'd the flowers at the bottom. OK, so it's a little genteel and froofy, but I love English gardens (the picture was taken in Cumbria). But he has a point. It's not very Virago-like. Any ideas?

• Pippi is also getting ready for summer. I took her to the groomer today. It's the first time since we've had her that I've handed her over to strangers and walked away. It was very traumatic for *me*. But for her? Nah. Her attitude was all "ooh! new people to love me! new scents! other doggies! let's go!" Sigh.

• So you know what I just realized now sucks about being tenured -- aside from more service work? Now I only do a dossier every five years, so I have to be super-organized and save all the proof of what I've been up to in research, teaching, and service for five long years. D'oh.

O Fortuna!

This one's for the Pastry Pirate. Hat tip to Another Damned Medievalist.



Btw, here are the actual words to "O Fortuna," in case you want them.

Puzzle addiction

Morgan is an enabler. She's gotten me totally addicted to an online word puzzle game called Funny Farm. It's a word association game in which you try to guess all the words in a section of the puzzle, and when you get words that overlap the boundary of that section and another, the new section opens up. But not all the associations are literal or direct -- that's the maddening part.

For example, when you start, they give you the center section, which has the theme "on the farm." So when I started, I entered things like "cow," "pig," and "chicken," and they all appeared, along with blank boxes related to them. For chicken, three of those boxes were obvious: "rooster," "hen," and "egg." But what the frak was the fourth, three-letter word. Turns out it wasn't a word at all but an acronym: KFC. Ugh. And "pig" overlapped with the neighboring section on "religions," so of course "pig" connected, ironically in a way, to "Judaism" and "Islam." That was pretty obvious, but a couple of the other farm-religion connections were more groaners.

I pretty quickly hit a wall, but then I joined up my puzzle with other people's puzzles, and got some answers and was able to proceed in the new sections and open up even more. But now I'm stymied again. Even Google and Google Sets aren't helping now.

I dare you to play and not get addicted yourself. If you want to try it on your own, click the Funny Farm link above and give it a go. If you want to help out with my game in progress or join it up with yours later, use this link to get to my game. If you click on "Save Game" on your game, you get the unique URL for a game in progress. Past mine into yours or vice versa and you'll have a combined game. As long as you have cookies operating on your browser, your computer will save your game after every guess and you'll always come back to where you left off.

Anyone want to help me with my game in progress?

Update: If you get totally frustrated and just want all the answers, just google around and you'll find discussion boards with hints and even total keys. (I found the latter at lazylaces.com.)

Or if you just want a few hints to get you going again, follow the link to Morgan's blog and combine your game with some of the links there -- they're not too far along at that point. I'd post another link to my game in progress, but I'm nearing the end and it might spoil some of the fun.

Update 2: I have now finished the game. Yeah, I cheated a lot, but I also did a bunch myself. So if anyone just wants to get on with their work and stop obsessing -- as I did -- let me know and I'll send you the link for the completed game. The meta-puzzle answer is a single word, btw, and if you type it in, the text at the top says you've completed the game. Not very exciting.

Not safe for the squeamish...

Bullock, don't go any further.

On the other hand, Karl Steel, this post is for you. (H/T Bardiac)










Created by OnePlusYou - Free Online Dating

For no particular reason...

...I'd like to declare that "to wing" is now a strong verb. Thus: I am winging it in class today, yesterday I wang it, and by tomorrow I will have wung it.

Just because.

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In case you're wondering, yes I have gone mad. It may have something to do with the fact that my college is being ordered by the university administration to reallocate 10% of its budget to STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) fields and other initiatives in the cockamamie newly designed strategic plan, which is all about, you guessed it, STEM fields.

This is how professors who have ceased to care are born.

They're coming to take me away, ha ha, ho ho, hee hee...

Illuminating York Minister with voices

This is so cool. Back in October and November, a group called Illuminating York did a series of art installations and performances all around the city of York, England. The first link takes you to pictures and video of Evoke, an interactive project that lit up the Minster's western facade with moving rainbow lights set to operate in response to people's voices. The pictures are great but the video is even cooler. In it, singers, screaming kids, clapping crowds, and the sound of children's feet on the steps to the entrance all send undulating light projections crawling up the face of the Minster. I love the fact that it makes tangible the idea of voices being sent into heaven through the magisterial, soaring heights of the Minster. And be sure to watch the video through to the end, where the lights change into something more eery and uncanny.

I have to say though, I don't get where the writer of the post is coming from in describing York Minster as "usually dark and gloomy." Maybe they just mean at night, because York has always struck me as the airiest and lightest of medieval cathedrals, owing in part to its light stone (is it limestone? I can't remember) and its late medieval architectural techniques allowing for greater height and more windows. It's so powerfully beautiful that my mother gasped when she first entered it back on our first trip there in 1986. Though never a fan of religious art -- though she always visited every cathedral in every European cathedral city we traveled to! -- even my atheist mother understood viscerally the potential effect of the place for someone who does believe. For her its beauty was powerful enough.

I imagine living in York it would be easy enough to take the Minster for granted, but a display like this reanimates but also repurposes its beauty and meaning. Illuminating York is illuminating in all senses of the word. Well done!

Get ready for National Trivia Day!

For those of you who, like me, have self-diagnosed as having Trivia Tourette's, have I got a holiday for you! Tomorrow is is National Trivia Day! As the writers of the Bizarre American Holidays blog say:

National Trivia Day is a day to annoy your friends and enemies with all manner of trivia. One good piece of trivia to know is the fact that [Jan. 4] is National Trivia Day!

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And on an unrelated, and totally trivial, note, how does the Bizarre American Holidays blog's advertising widgit know to advertise Wilco CDs and the Garmin Forerunner 305 to me? That's really creepy.

Random bullets of Bullock's out of town and I'm home alone so I'm blogging twice in one day

• For those who want an update on the dizziness: it has subsided, but I got a doctor's appointment for Monday anyway. I think it's related to how congested my ears and sinuses have been lately, even with allergy medicine, and I think I may need something stronger. I'm also always tired, even though I'm sleeping 8 hours during the week and 10 on weekends. So clearly, dizziness or not, I need to see someone about all of this.

• My dad has always been a malaprop, and one of the words he can't get right is "tenure." Even now that I'm going through the process and repeat it frequently when talking to him, he still calls it "tensure." I always thought of his word as a combination of "tenure" and "tonsure," and since I'm a medievalist, and the university has medieval origins, and monks have played a big role in the survival of many of the texts I teach, I always thought it was weirdly appropriate. But then, while looking up stuff for the text I'm editing, I discovered that "tensure" is a word, too, though an obsolete one. It means stretching, strain, tension. Yup, that'll do, too. :)

• So what am I going to do while Bullock's away? Well, first I have about 40 more lines of text to modernize the spelling of, then I'm going to go for an evening run (which is something I don't often get to do, but love), and then I'm going to watch Pedro Almodovar's Talk to Her and maybe have a glass of wine or two. And tomorrow morning I'm going to catch up on personal e-mails and phone calls to friends and family. Yeah, I know, I really know how to play while the cat's away, don't I?

• So what do I love about evening runs and while don't I get to do it often? My biorhythms just work better with afternoon and evening exercise. I am *so* not a morning person. But evening runs are hard if you have any kind of plans or commitments. If Bullock were here, we might have social plans, but even if we didn't, if I went out running right now, I wouldn't be able to help make dinner, or else he'd have to wait for me to finish the run and take a shower before I could, which is too late for *his* biorhythms to eat. So I'm treating myself tonight. See, I *do* play when the cat's away!

• And by the way, all the Spinning and PiYo has made running seem so *easy*. It's awesome! OK, gotta run!