T & P at RBU (that's tenure and promotion at Rust Belt U)

I'm so sick of writing the narratives for my tenure dossier that I thought I'd write *about* my tenure dossier instead. Sure, I could do research work or get a head start on next week's classes, or work on service-related things, but that would mean not obsessing about tenure, and I can't have that, now can I? :)

Here at RBU, a public university with a unionized faculty (through the AAUP), we have processes for renewal, tenure and promotion, professional assessment, and merit evaluation that involve a lot of paper work, some of it every year, but which also provide a solid and undeniable paper trail when it comes to tenure and promotion. As Martha Stewart would say, "It's a good thing."

Here's how it works: every year prior to going up for tenure and promotion, assistant professors must turn in a big fat renewal dossier that includes narratives in which the candidate for renewal discusses his or her "teaching practice and philosophy," "service to the institution and profession," and, of course, "professional activity" (i.e., publications and presentations, grants, or creative work etc.) -- or, as I like to call these narratives, "Why I Am So Wise," "Why I Am So Clever," and "Why I Write Such Good Books" (apologies to Friedrich Nietzsche). The dossier also includes supporting documents proving the validity of these narratives, as well as a CV summarizing them all. And every year before tenure, this dossier goes up through the following Great Chain of Approval: the department personnel committee, the chair of the department, the college personnel committee, the dean of the college, the university personnel committee, and the provost (plus our new president likes to sign off on it, too). That's essentially the same chain as the Great Chain of Tenure, except that the trustees also get a piece of that action. And as the renewal dossier goes up, the candidate gets a letter saying whether they've voted for or against renewal. Votes against can be appealed at every stage before it goes to the next level, and there's a set calendar of the deadlines for every step of the way (the process takes all year). And if any of these bodies approve but have worries about a candidate's performance in any area, they'll say so in the letter they send the candidate. When it's all said and done, the renewed candidate will have renewal letters from every step of the process, all of which will eventually be added to the tenure dossier (more on its differences in a moment).

There's also a short document used for merit evaluations (and the sad little salary increases that come with that), which goes only to the department personnel committee, the chair, and the dean. But copies of past merit evaluations also go in the dossiers for both renewal and tenure/promotion.

And prior to all of that, when an assistant prof is hired, s/he is given not only a letter of offer that sketches the expectations of the job, but also a separate letter of expectations, which is crafted by the chair in consultation with the new hire. The evulations of the renewal dossier each year are based on comparison with the candidate's letter of expectations (also included in the dossier).

So what this means, ultimately, is that the various bodies who have the power to grant or deny tenure and promotion also have chances each year prior to that to warn someone that they're not doing enough to merit tenure and promotion, or even to fire them outright. So a person who has had nothing but good evaluation letters can go into the tenure process with a certain amount of confidence (aside from the usual paranoia characteristic of the culture of tenure).

It's an incredibly sane system, unlike the way renewal and tenure can operate in many other institutions. All such processes should be so sane.

For tenure, there are some additional requirements. The narratives one writes aren't merely about one year's worth of work, but about one's whole career at an institution, and they need to give a sense of the future, too -- a research agenda, the willingness and ability to take on greater service commitments after tenure and promotion, and a continued engagement with teaching.

And then there are the "outside letters." Here, too, RBU's practices are sane and healthy -- although one of my letter writers was taken aback by one element of our practice. At many places, the letters of recommendation solicited from scholars outside the candidate's institution are the Big Unknown and therefore a locus of a candidate's anxiety since it's the one thing s/he has no control over. This is because at some institutions, the candidate has no say over them at all, or at best, little say. But at my university, the list of people contacted for letters came out of names suggested by me and by a member of the personnel committee most familiar with my field. My chair then selection names from each of those lists and consulted with me to make sure they were agreeable -- e.g., no one whose work I had vociferously disagreed with in my work. And in the end, I was told who the letters would be coming from; I can even, if I choose, ask to see the letters because of the open records laws of our state. (That's what gave one writer pause; actually, the very fact that I was cc'd on the e-mail asking if she'd be willing gave her pause.) Seeing them might give me opportunity to counteract, in my narratives, any criticism in the letters, though I wouldn't be able to suppress them, since once solicited, they must be used. My chair told me they're all positive, so I'm not going to worry.

See, totally sane. What's also fair about this process is that the chair must include in her letterto the recommenders that the letter-writers must NOT decide whether the candidate would get tenure at their institution. That language is required by our contract because it's a frequent tendency of letter-writers to make just such observations, and I'm glad to see them discouraged from doing this. Since tenure is decided on the three categories of teaching, research, and service, and the letter writers are only getting my research materials and my CV, they're not in a position to judge my whole case. And besides, different institutions have different requirements for tenure, and some of my writers are at flagship research universities, so even if I didn't meet their requirements, I might still meet RBU's. The point of these letters is to put my research in context and to judge its contribution to my specific field. Since I'm the only medievalist in English at RBU, their contribution to my file is really important in this respect.

The outside letter issue is an area where the tenure process can get really scary and stressful. Even in a sane process like ours, it is a little nerve-wracking to entrust the judgment of your work to people you know only through their work or meeting them at conferences! But I have one friend whose process is even saner -- no outside letters at all! Their university feels that the peer reviewers for published work have already done that job. Wow. Imagine that! Still, our process is better than at some places. We need only 3-5 letters, whereas some places are asking for crazy numbers -- 10, 15, even 20! Some places also require all letter-writers to be full professors at top tier research institutions. That last bit is especially snobby and anachronistic, since today important and influential scholars are spread out across all sorts of different kinds of institutions. Anyway, ours need only be tenured and promoted to the level the candidate is seeking promotion to (in other words, Associate Professor) and need only be employed by a four-year college or university. Mine are from a range of colleges and universities -- SLACs, public branch campuses of state universities, R1s, and metropolitan universities.

There's a lot I like about working at RBU (even though I call the town and the university "Rust Belt," I always mean that affectionately, and it is accurate in terms of its economic history), and one of them is the no-surprises system of renewal, tenure, and promotion. (Not to mention the fact that even tenured profs must do a similar professional assessment every five years, in addition to annual merit evaluations, which I think is healthy for the institution and its faculty.) The relative fairness of it all is something I'm grateful for.

However, because I have a slight superstitious streak, I've typed this entire entry with my fingers crossed! (For luck, that is -- not because it's all a lie.)

Dr. Virago, wuss

The semester started today, but I don't teach until tomorrow. Instead, my first class of the year was an hour-long lunchtime spinning* class at the rec center. It also happened to be my first spinning class ever.

Oh. My. God.

It kicked my ass, utterly and completely. I was especially wussy on the standing-up parts after about two or three sets: my knees went all wobbly and my legs said, "Are you KIDDING us?!" and gave up. I was too afraid I'd topple over and smack my face into the handle bars or something, so for the rest of class, everything time we were supposed to do a standing routine, I just upped the resistance, but remained seated.

But I'm totally jazzed now to have a new challenge. This is going to be good cross-training for running and it's a lot more intense than any of the running jogging I'm doing now anyway. And I've got Victoria doing it with me, so it's more social than my running, too. Maybe this will reinvigorate running for me; I hope so, because I'm starting to get bored (hence the lazy jogging).

So I'm psyched. By semester's end, I want to kick ass back.


*For the uninitiated, "spinning" is a group exercise class using stationary bikes. We do interval training -- various speeds, resistance levels, and positions -- to upbeat music with the guidance of an instructor.

T & P stands for tenure and *paranoia*

So I'm putting together my tenure file -- writing my narratives, gathering stuff for the supporting documents, polishing my CV -- and I keep sweating the details, the petty stuff. And each time I do, I keep imagining some faceless person I don't know on the college or university level saying, "But she hasn't done enough of X," where X is something that should be inconsequential at my stage of the game by my U's standards (for instance, serving on university-level committees) and isn't something anyone should be judging my case by. In fact, at my university, we have a pretty transparent and fair process that involves annual reviews that go all the way up through most of the levels that the tenure and promotion file will go up. (This is something I want to write about in more detail later, because it's how I think all tenure and renewal processes should go.) In all of those I've gotten good reviews. I have every reason to be confident. Not cocky, but confident.

So what gives? Why am I so paranoid and anxious? Is it just me or is it a larger cultural thing? Does the anxiety cloud that forms around tenure in academia in general cause me to pick up on that even though I don't have any reason to be so anxious here at Rust Belt U?

I got the power! I got the power!

The power of computing, that is.

My computer is mostly back now, thanks to the heroically patient work of Bullock. (I love my handy man. I think the only thing I haven't seen him fix is a car and he can probably do that, too.) To make a long story short, restoring the back-up set of the entire hard drive, backed up on my external hard drive, failed because of a single frakking corrupt file. Grr. So we had to rebuild the computer from scratch. There was one moment of hair-tearing irony when the computer didn't want to recognize the wireless modem and then told us to go online to search for the drivers. Uhhhhh...Lucky for me Bullock was able to use *his* computer to find it and download it to my memory key. But rebuilding also meant re-downloading updates to a lot of things, especially for Windows XP, my version of which pre-dated the big Service Pack 2 download. Pretty much all of my Wednesday and Thursday were taken up by this, and most of Bullock's too.

Luckily I had also made a duplicate of the Documents and Settings folder and all of its contents on my external drive, too, not quite trusting the mysterious back-up system which saves everything in some proprietary, compressed form. That turned out to be handy for accessing all my saved files not only while I used Bullock's spare laptop, but also after rebuilding and reinstalling everything. Then it was just a matter of copying all my files back over.

And now, I have a cleaner hard drive that's 3x as big as my old one and partitioned into two drives, C and D, with the first, smaller one, for programs, and the larger one for data. And I've set up My Documents (including Pictures and Music), my mailbox and e-mail profile files, and my PDA calendar and contact files, all to save to the D drive. And I plan on exporting a copy of my Firefox bookmark file there before every weekly back-up, too. So now I can save the actual stuff I need without a lot of extra junk. I might try the complete hard disk back-up again, too, but I'm still suspicious of it. Having the data itself in duplicate is a good thing, I think.

I recommend external drives, by the way. Mine's 80 gigabytes and when I bought it, I think it was only about $1 per gigabyte. They're much cheaper now. Meanwhile I'm also thinking about getting a 4 gigabyte memory key for backing up all of my documents and pictures and taking them to the office for additional safety. After all, an external drive doesn't do me any good if the house burns down.

RIP hard drive

Hard drive installed: none.
I am the Blue Screen of Death.
No one hears your screams.

(Credit Peter Rothman, with first line altered by me)

Yes, my hard drive died last night. Luckily I backed up the entire drive to my external drive just last week, and also saved all my document, picture, music, and e-mail files at the same time. (Fingers crossed that the fact that I can't turn off the damn external drive right now is just because it has been disconnected abruptly from the dead computer and so is 'thinking' it's still 'in use' -- and NOT because something's screwy with it! Please, please, please!) And I ordered a new hard drive on Amazon last night, which will get here on Monday or Tuesday. This was after Bullock helped me go through all the steps to diagnose the problem and make sure it wasn't just that the hard drive had gotten jostled and disconnected from a proper sitting in the computer. It is a well-traveled notebook, after all. And then he helped me find the right new hard drive at a decent price online. Thanks Bullock!

In the meantime, I can use Bullock's old laptop for accessing those saved files and doing work at home. Right now I'm on his desktop, the only computer with access to the internet in our house at the moment. So it may be a few days before I blog or comment (here or at your blog) or respond to e-mails other than work ones. (I have Eudora on my work computer set up to download only my .edu mail, to keep me honest. And I don't blog from there on principle.)

So the only things I lost aren't a big deal -- annoying, to be sure, but not a big deal: all the damn dates I entered in my calendar for the semester, including the tenure file deadline I finally remembered (but I printed all of that out); a week's worth of e-mail messages (though those sent to the .edu address are still on the server); the updated CV I worked on yesterday for my tenure file (but also printed out); and the 1000-word response I wrote for that article mentioned below (but that's been sent to the volume editors and also printed out for my files).

So I am maintaining a Zen-like calm. And now, I'm going for a run.

The T word

I'm going up for tenure and promotion this year, a year early.

What's that, you say? Why haven't I mentioned this before? Because I think I'm in denial. The file is due in 3 weeks, and other than asking my chair to arrange outside letters many months ago, I haven't done a thing.

The other sign of my denial: I just finished making to-do lists for the semester and putting deadlines on my calendar, and the one deadline I forgot was the tenure file deadline. And it's sooner than any others.

D'oh!

(I'm sure there will be future posts on this topic, btw.)

A short post on (my) religious identity

Over at Unlocked Wordhoard, I made the comment that I'm "culturally Catholic, but not actively religious." You don't really need to read the whole comment, but I link to it as a reference and courtesy. To give you some context: it's a small part of a long-winded comment in which I try to explain where I was coming from in a previous post because Dr. Nokes misunderstood it. That misunderstanding I attribute to bad writing on my part -- assuming all of my audience has deep knowledge about where I'm coming from.

But that's not the point here. Rather, right after writing that comment, I turned to Bullock (or rather, called from my study to his) and asked, "Can a person be 'culturally Catholic'?" And his response was an immediate: "Yes. You are."

But what do you think? Is there such a thing as "culturally Catholic"?

*********************

Btw, this post may be confusing to readers who remember the two or three times I've called myself an "atheist." I really shouldn't toss that word around since it implies an active disbelief in a god or gods (not to mention the connotations it has for some people of being actively anti-religion) and I'm just not that adamant. Conflicted, maybe, but not adamant. "Agnostic" is probably more accurate, but I have a hard time with the wishy-washy connotations that term has developed alongside its more precise meaning. It's not like I'm flaky and can't make up my mind or something. While it's true that I'm "without knowledge," I choose not to practice any kind of devotion, and I do so rather continuously, day after day, with a lot of thought and sometimes even angst involved. And yup, there goes my chance at ever running for higher office in the U.S. (Or can I claim plausible deniability with an anonymous blog? Te-hee!) Not that I was planning on it anyway.

Give me a P! Give me an R! Give me an O!....

...And a C-R-A-S-T-I-N-A-T-I-O-N!

Today I sat down and forced myself to write something that I've been dreading to do, and should have done last week, but have been putting off because of said dread. And yet the draft of it only took me half a day. D'oh!

What's my problem? Seriously, I'm usually not a procrastinator, so why did I put this smallish task off?

Well, part of why I was dreading it was because it was a response to a critique of an article I'd written, and that's never fun. It's moments like these that I sympathize with my students when they get my comments on drafts and have to respond to them and take them into account. No wonder some of them just go with denial and don't change anything except maybe the typos! And for that very reason -- that sympathy with students -- I think the whole process of peer-review, of revising-and-resubmitting, or responding to critics, etc., is valuable to us not only as scholars/researchers, but as teachers as well. It's valuable to keep us humble, to remind us of what it's like to get a marked-up piece of work back, but it's also valuable so that we can say to students, "Hey, I have to go through this, too" and to convince them that they are indeed part of a writing community.

Anyway, back to my procrastination issues...This was also just a weird piece I had to write. It wasn't revise-and-resubmit or a response to an editor to convince him/her that a peer reviewer's criticisms were misplaced -- those I've done. But in this case, my article is being considered for a edited collection and the editors assigned various people in the field to write introductions to groups of articles. And in my case, the introducer took my article to task for a few things he thought were wrong with it. And so I was supposed to write a response which will be published along with his intro and my article. I guess it's suppose to be imitating the kinds of conversations/debates that can happen over longer periods of time in a series of journal articles, which in theory is cool, but it still made for a weird kind of writing performance for me since I've never taken on criticisms of my work in (potential) print before. So the strangeness -- not to mention dealing with criticism -- made it all something I did not look forward to in the least. Hence the procrastination.

On the bright side, however, while procrastinating, I got my syllabuses for fall done! Woo-hoo!

I'm buying these and putting them next to my Python Holy Grail figures

The Pastry Pirate just sent me the link a BBC News story with the headline "Faith-based toys to hit US stores." Here's a taste of what you'll find in the article:

David Socha, founder of One2believe, the company which makes the dolls, is confident the demand is there for "God-honouring" toys which reflect Christian teachings and morality.

"We get a lot of people, even people who are not of faith, don't go to church, saying 'I've got a four and a six-year-old and I don't know what to get them any more'," he said.

"If you go in a toy aisle in any major retailer, you will see toys and dolls that promote and glorify evil, destruction, lying, cheating.

"In the girls' aisle where the dolls would be, you see dolls that are promoting promiscuity to very young girls. Dolls will have very revealing clothes on, G-string underwear."

What his company offers instead is "something faith-based that is not only fun to play with but also is solidifying a person's spiritual wherewithal and their spiritual journey", he said.

Hm. Yes. And they're also so much more manly than those sluts in the "girls' aisle." Oh so much more manly. OK, seriously, there does seem to be an emphasis on male figures, and even Moses, complete with gray beard, seems rather buff and virile (go see for yourself). What's more, I find it disturbing that Socha segues to the dolls in the "girls' aisle" after talking about toys glorifying "evil, destruction, lying, cheating," and then talks about their underwear. And just why does he know what the dolls' underwear looks like anyway?

But the main reason why I wanted to post about this -- and perhaps more germane to a medievalist blog (although I'm also a feminist medievalist) -- is that I find it curious and interesting that there does seem to be a growing market (or at least growing visibility to an existing market) for materials that re-tell Biblical stories and that most of the consumers in this market are, presumably, Protestants. It all seems so "papist" and "Romish" and, dare I say it, medieval. (Well, OK, there's Milton. But he's kind of in a class by himself, isn't he?) It's also kind of odd coming from a culture where there are a lot of people who say things like "the only book I need is the Good Book" -- well, and, apparently, multiple re-interpretations of it. It's the same kind of oddity I found in the Protestant evangelicals flocking to The Passion of the Christ, which, you'll note, is cited in this article as showing that there's a market for Christian-themed entertainment.

The article also cites a "boom in Christian fantasy fiction" as an alternative to the Potter books. Hm again. To all you folks out there looking for Christian fantasy fiction who may end up here now via Google, I have two words for you: medieval literature.*

There, now maybe there will also be a boom in our course enrollments (although, not to brag or anything, mine are usually full, thank you very much).

*Though to be honest, not all of it would qualify. But you might especially like the romance and hagiography genres.

Help me fill a class day

Having caught up on my sleep last night, and with the semester a mere three weeks away here, I spent today updating my syllabuses for my two fall courses. One of them, I'm happy to say, needed no changes other than dates. Lest you think that I've already become one of those moribund stereotypes of a lazy prof even before being tenured, I feel I have to say that the reason why I'm not changing this class a bit is because it worked and I don't want to mess with it. Huzzah, a class that worked! Sure, I'll retool individual lesson plans, but the big picture part doesn't need messing with.

On the other hand, my research and methods class needed complete re-doing. Last time I had my colleagues come in to give state-of-the-field talks in their various fields, but I'm not sure that was useful for the students and I'm pretty sure it was a burden to my colleagues. My students and I might have debated which were the most useful/informative talks, but I think we'd all agree that the series was hit-and-miss, and when you're a beginning grad student, it's hard to take it all in anyway.

So this time I'm taking the class back -- more work for me, alas -- and spending much more time on the nitty gritty issues of research. I'll do a blog post with more detail about what I'm doing -- which I've been promising to do anyway -- but first I need your help. I have one slot in my class schedule that needs filling and since it comes near the end of the course, and after we finish reading Gerald Graff's Professing Literature, I'd like to do a day devoted to "The Future of Literary Studies." I might turn to blogs like The Valve (just to give one example) for the content, but I'm wondering if you wise people of tha interwebs have other ideas, particularly articles (in print or online; conventional media or blogs) about the profession (including those of both the hand-wringing ilk and the optimistic kind) and its future. I'd prefer they be specific to English/American literary studies, but related humanities fields, or the humanities in general might also be useful.

Any ideas?

I'm baaaaaaack

Bullock and I got back this afternoon. We were *supposed* to get back this morning, but our red-eye flight from Portland yesterday didn't leave until nearly 2am. And of course I hardly slept on the plane or in the airport while waiting. Why, btw, does airport furniture make it impossible to recline and snooze? It's not like today's airports, with their "ticketed passengers only" rules, are in danger of collecting homeless bench sleepers. Given the frequency with which passengers get stranded, you'd think they'd at least give us reclining seats.

So anyway, we're very tired here, but the trip was fantastic. The wedding was beautiful -- it was at a resort in the Columbia River Gorge -- and all the associated events were fun and full of good food and company. And even though Bullock and I knew no one but the bride, all of her friends were interesting, good people, and we had a fine time talking to them all. Plus, in addition to wedding festivities, I got to see my friend Tommy, eat some yummy food he prepared for us, meet his sweet doggie, and also see his co-op chicken coop and chickens. Being the suburban/city girl that I am, I'd never held eggs fresh from the chicken and it was kind of cool. Plus the chickens were pretty -- not your generic white ones.

We also spent some time in downtown Portland, buying books at Powells (of course), eating sushi in an automat, drinking coffee, shopping, and generally walking around, watching people.

And finally, on our last day, before that red-eye flight, Bullock and I spent the day doing the auto tour of the "Historic Highway" along the Gorge, stopping at all the waterfalls and hiking up the trails around -- and sometimes under -- them. (I'll post pictures when we've uploaded them.) By the end of the tour, I was kind of fascinated by the fact that we were doing what the road had been built for -- auto-tourism -- but we were also reading markers and seeing interpretative exhibits about those historical tourists. So were tourists *of* tourism. It was kind of a tourism mise en abyme.

Away for the weekend

Bullock and I are leaving early tomorrow morning for a long weekend in the Portland, OR, area. We're going to a wedding there. Bullock will look dashingly handsome in a charcoal gray, light-weight wool suit in a snazzy, modern, narrow cut, which he'll wear with a bright blue shirt and a polka-dot tie in shades of green, blue (same as the shirt), and silver. I tried to take a picture of the lovely combination, but the camera wasn't doing justice to the tie's colors.

I will be wearing colors that don't match Bullock at all -- browns and pinks -- but which suit my green-eyed, brunette coloring. His colors are better for his blue-eyed, red-headedness. Anyway, I mentioned a while ago, when I danced for joy over the arrival of H&M to Rust Belt, that I had a helluva time getting just the right top for the skirt I wanted to wear to make it seem like a formal enough outfit. I think it was Medieval Woman who asked to see a picture, so below is the complete outfit, complete with wrap and necklace also purchased at H&M, and the perfect little clutch purse bought with my last 5 quid at Heathrow airport on my way home from London. (The shoes I had. They're not perfect, but they'll do.) Voila:


And while we're in Portland, we'll also be visiting my friend Tommy of The Angry Liberal and the food blog, Macerating Shallots. Tommy has known me since "the summer I was a governess"* when I was 15, but we've only seen each other once since then, when he came through Rust Belt a few years ago on his way to visit family and friends in Neighboring Blue State. But we've kept in touch -- at times more regular than others -- over the years by letter, e-mail, and now the blogosphere.


*I wasn't technically a governess. I was a live-in baby-sitter at the far-away summer residence of a family I baby-sat for during the school year. But I *was* grossly underpaid, exploited, and treated like a second-class citizen by everyone except for Tommy.

Confession

I have not read a single Harry Potter book.

Return to Rust Belt

I'm back in Rust Belt, where the sky's a "windjammer blue" (well, it would be if it were a paint color), there's a lovely breeze rustling the trees, the birds are a-twitter, and the temperature is a perfect 72.5 degrees. Bullock's mowing the lawn and I'm catching up on mail. It's good to be home.

But despite the change in location, look for retrospective London posts to come.

FYI, if you called or texted me on my UK number after 9 a.m. GMT, I didn't get it.

I can't read!!!!

You have to imagine the post's title in the voice of a distraught dog (if dogs could talk). It's a reference to a dog treat commercial from about 5 years ago where the dog gets all excited when his human comes home from the store with bacon-flavored treats. He runs around the house, trailing her, while a voice-over cries in excitement, "Is that bacon?! Do you have bacon?! Is there bacon in there?! It sure smells like bacon!!" And then when the bag comes down to his eye-level, he cries in utter despair, "But I can't read!!" Totally hilarious. At least to me.

Anywho, I chose this lament as the post's title because today I spent my first day having to deal with 15th century documents in Latin. Oy. So far I've been ridiculously lucky in that everything that I've encountered up to this point was in English. But starting today, my luck ran out. Now, you're probably thinking, "Hey, you're a medievalist. *And* you went to Catholic schools. Don't you know Latin?" Yes, I do. But not fluently. I need a grammar and a dictionary by my side. And that's when I'm reading it in modern, printed texts. These texts, you see, are manuscripts, written in a 15th century version of the "Secretary" hand, which, if you ask me, is the Worst. Hand. Ever. (Though I'll take the 15th century version over the crazy mad loops of the 16th century version.) Here's an image for those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, but let me tell you, it looks all nice and neat and easy here and that's *not* what happens when it's in a civic record! And when 15th century (or any medieval century) people write in Latin, they don't write everything out. They abbreviate every damn word, leaving off endings and sometime middles. And to top everything off, my paleography skills are rusty. Though they've gotten better over this trip, it still sometimes takes me a long time to decode what a particular scribble is supposed to say. When it's in English, it's a bit like playing Hangman -- get enough letters and the rest falls in place. When it's in Latin, and abbreviated, and your Latin is hella rusty, well, you suddenly feel pretty damn illiterate. Hence the title of this post. (Hm, maybe I should go buy this. Cute.)

Oh, and I'm reading from microfilms, which also makes it a little difficult, though these are pretty damn good ones, at least. And on the upside, I can make copies of and print out the relevant pages and work out the words I'm missing now when I get home to my dictionaries and grammars. Plus, what I'm looking for are records about a particular person -- who once owed a manuscript I'm writing about -- and so it makes it an easier task to go through the records looking for his name. I don't actually have to read the pages I'm looking at unless they're about him. But, oh, god, it's incredibly boring. Imagine paging through hundreds of pages of strings of digits looking for repetitions of a particular string and you'll get the idea.

I think, by the way, this is one reason why I like good police procedurals. I empathize with the characters when they have to pour through some civic records office looking for some suspect's adoption records or whatever because all they have is part of a name and a general time span, or something like that. I feel their pain.

So why am I doing this? I'm not entirely sure! Seriously, I don't know what I'll find and if I can use it, but I figure the more information I have about the owner of this manuscript, the more I can say about how the fifteenth century additions to it in the margins and flyleaves reorient the book as whole toward this owner's social world. But man, getting back to the literary texts in the manuscript itself is going to be such a treat!

Celebrity sightings in London

JJC not only saw, but sat next to Jude Law while dining at the cafe at Salisbury Cathedral. (The proof is in this post, ninth picture down -- though don't be in too much of a rush to see Jude or you'll miss the best cute kid pictures ever. Jude is behind the man with the unnerving stare.) OK, that's not London, I know, but the Cohen clan was based in London. But read on...

I, on the other hand, jogged past and locked eyes with Viggo Mortensen. But alas, I don't have proof. It happened somewhere between the Tower of London and Paul's Walk on my way back on this route on Saturday (between miles 5 and 6, going west -- he was going east).

At least I *think* it was Viggo. The guy was the right height (i.e., not at all tall), and it really looked like his face. That bone structure and cleft chin are pretty remarkable. But if it was him, he's dyed his hair dark and is bulking up for some role (or for himself) -- hey, if Brad Pitt can do it, Viggo can, too.

Then again, I get a little loopy when I run.

ETA: Says Bullock: "It might not have been him though, there must be lots of Danes running around London and their gene pool really isn't all that large so they probably all look alike." Te-hee! Maybe what I saw was a Viking who'd just sailed up the Thames. Anyway, Bullock's a Swede (well, Swedish-American), so his comment is even funnier in a intra-Scandinavian grudge-match context.

Update: It wasn't Viggo, just his evil twin (because the evil twin is always the one with the dark hair). I have it on the good word of Viggo's personal secretary biggest fan (see comments here and here) that he's on holiday in Denmark and his usual blond dreaminess.

One of these days, btw, I do mean to get back to serious blogging, including finally doing that Thinking Blog meme that Bardiac tagged me for (thanks Bardiac!).

Random Bullet Points of London

• I ran an 8-miler today from 'home' to the Thames north bank and along it to Waping. I'd never been to Waping and it's really cool, at least along the river. There are all sorts of re-purposed and refurbished (and not so refurbished) warehouses and cool little pubs hidden in them -- like the Captain Kidd.
• Note to self: don't do a run through a major tourist attraction at midday on a Saturday. Running by the Tower of London and Tower Bridge would be much cooler early in the morning before opening. And it doesn't even have to be *that* early to beat the tourists. Cobblestones are bad enough without having to play "dodge the tourist."
• Mad dogs and Englishmen...and runners go out in the midday sun. I wasn't the only one out today, and not even the only one trying to dodge the tourists at the Tower. This made me feel like less of an idiot.
  
• To the asshole Italian tourist who thought it would be funny to run up right behind me, into my personal space, and pant like he was doing Lamaze: yeah, I'd like to see you even try and keep up with me. Loser.
  
• Not all of my day was spent running. I also taught Hassan the bartender in the college bar how to make a "black and tan" (half lager, half Guinness). He pronounced the color "really nice" and said he'd have to try it later.
• And Hassan taught me exactly why you have to let a Guinness set before serving it (and why a black and tan probably should have the Guinness poured first). It's not just that it has a big head (though it does), but the color and clarity improve with a little waiting, too. I watched it as it went from smoky brown to its usual clear blackish amber.
• And I read some more Ed McBain in the courtyard of the college, sitting in the sun on a bench.
• I'm also doing laundry so I'll have some socks for a planned roller-blading outing tomorrow (if the weather holds), and though I've done laundry now three times in the college laundry, I only just now figured out where the drawer for the detergent cube thingies is, and only because someone else was there with his open. D'oh! I've been putting them in the barrel itself (which the directions say will do if you don't have a drawer). Well, how should I know they were hidden behind the key for all the little pictures?
• Yes, I *am* having a mellow, do-nothing day, why do you ask?
• In other news, the other day I found and bought an apple green t-shirt at Benetton on sale for 6.95 that goes perfectly with my awesome new skirt. Excellent!
  

Pretty!

I've been taking tons of photos of gorgeous English flowers, but these are NOT from England. No, these fantastic, multi-hued hydrangeas grow in our yard in Rust Belt. Bullock sent me the picture since they hadn't bloomed yet when I left. I love the fact that we never know what we're going to get. I don't remember so many blooms or blue ones in the last couple of years.

This job is painful

I nearly cried out "Fuck! Ow!" in Private Archives #2* today when I smashed my pinky finger. I smashed it good and hard, because it *still* hurts a little to type with it, and it was awhile before I could calm down and get back to skimming archival material for the couple of names I'm there to try and find. (*No, I haven't mentioned Private Archives #1, but I will in another post.)

And how exactly did I smash the said finger? (FYI, I love saying "the said x" -- it's all over these documents.) I'm not sure. I think I just smacked it against the box that the big fat, heavy manuscript came in. Or perhaps I caught it between the big fat heavy manuscript and the box, since I was lifting the manuscript at the time. Whatever I did, it hurt like hell.

Yeah, they really shouldn't let klutzes into archives. This is the first time I hurt myself, but the other day, at Fancy University Manuscript Room, while looking at one of their "select" manuscripts, I decided I needed to smell it. I have no idea why. I'm weird. But when I bent down to do so, I nearly got lipstick on it!

******
In unrelated news, in my first week here I discovered a bookstore near me that sells really cheap, but not used, paperbacks. I keep buying Ed McBain police procedurals for £1.99. And can I just tell you: I *love* Ed McBain. Love, love, LOVE him. I don't know why I hadn't read him before, given my affection for more contemporary hard boiled detective fiction and police procedurals, but I hadn't. And it somehow seems weirdly wonderful to discover such an American hard boiled writer in England, birthplace of the "golden age" of the 'softer' variety of mysteries (Agatha Christie, et al.).

Eight things

The Combat Philosopher tagged me for the 8 Things meme (or "game" as he prefers to call it). Since I seem to be the last person to do it, I doubt you really need an explanation, but for the few readers I have who are not bloggers, I will explain. The tagged blogger is supposed to list 8 random and preferably surprising or interesting things about him/herself and then tag 8 more people to do it. After reading the Combat Philosopher's 8 Things, I'm afraid mine won't be all that interesting! And since I did that 100 Things meme (over many posts last summer) I'm also worried about repeating myself. But here goes:

1. I have petted a lion cub and an orangutan (not at the same time) and look on both moments as ones of sheer pleasure and wonder, never to be forgotten. The lion cub encounter was at the Vienna Zoo when I was 9 years old (I did not, btw, set free the bears). The orangutan was at the LA Zoo and I was 32.

2. My siblings entered me in a kiddie beauty contest when I was young enough that I have absolutely no memory of this -- I have only their word.

3. I once stole, er, "borrowed" a fake, 6-foot totem pole from a fraternity (as a prank). I simply walked out with it while they were holding a party. I thought about holding it for ransom, but then just returned it mysteriously in the middle of the night, leaving it outside their house, ringing the doorbell repeatedly, and running away.

4. Sometimes, when I'm talking (in conversation, in class, wherever) I have the sense that there are two simultaneous versions of me: one talking, the other listening and, usually, thinking, "Omigod, did you really just say that?"

5. I once shocked an audience of about 1000 at the Cambridge Union by starting a floor speech with the phrase "I've had sex." The thing is, the TV personality who spoke right before me said much the same thing but said it more euphemistically, and no one was shocked. Funny what words can do.

6. I used to be incapable of telling a joke or funny story. I was that person who started trying to tell it and then interrupted herself to say, "Wait, that's not how it goes..." Oy. (As a friend in college said, "Virago, you're funny just being you.") So I worked on memorizing a few jokes. Except, for some reason, the only jokes I now know are dirty ones. Then when I had to go to traffic school and picked "comedy traffic school" (don't ask -- it's an LA thing, I think), and the comedian needed a break and asked us to tell jokes, I was the only one in the room who knew any. But they were all dirty. So we asked if anyone would be offended, and everyone said no, and the comedian gave me the go ahead. So I went from being the person who couldn't tell a joke to save her life to the one who told dirty jokes in front of an audience. Apparently, I'm incapable of moderation when I take on a new project (cf. my marathon running).

7. At least three of my ex-boyfriends have names that sound fake, or like comic book characters, and two of them were (and still are) named Guy. So a friend of mine used to tell people, "She's dated only two guys." (That's not really a fact about me, I guess, but I find it amusing.)

8. In my college application essay, I compared myself to a Magritte painting, a Woody Allen movie, and a John Irving novel. That's just plain bizarre. Ceci n'est pas un pipe!

I'm supposed to tag people, but given how I feel kind of pressured by memes, even as I appreciate being tagged, I'll do the cop-out thing and say, if you want to do it, be my guest!

Now that's just sad

I am a lame blogger. Witness this:

Mingle² - Free Online Dating

It's kind of ironic given that I swear like a sailor in real life, even around babies and children.

Accidental warblogging

[The title of this post is a play on the term "warchalking."]

I'm in the BL. I enabled my wireless because I wanted to use the catalog from my seat. I'm not supposed to be able to access the real internet without paying for access (the BL site and its catalogs are free to access), but somehow I did. I feel naughty. And this is bad, because I don't need distractions from work. In fact, enough said -- I'm getting off the bloody internet.

********
In other happy accident news, I ran into JJCohen and his lovely family while we were each on our respective way to our day's destinations, just walking down the street. How funny to run into someone you know (and mostly virtually) in a city of some 7 million people and about as many tourists and visitors. Granted, I was only steps from my home here, but it was still a pretty surprising coincidence. Although I didn't get a chance to talk to them for long, I pronounce them all delightful. Kid #1 especially cracked me up, in part because he's about the same age I was the first time I came to London. I'm glad I got a brief chance to meet them all in real life.

I can has medieval house?

It's medieval, it's in a town called Battle for pete's sake, and it's only £375,000. (Well hey, it's a lot cheaper than the Victorian town house next to the Dickens House in Bloomsbury that's selling for 4 million!) Please, please, can I have it? It's really cool -- look at its listing and check out the pictures.

Update: I can has church? Well, it's not medieval, but it's a church! With a spire with rooms in it! OK, in the fantasy world where I can actually afford these things, and where I have a job in freakin' Battle, England, should I live in a medieval town house or a early 20th century converted Methodist church. Hm. And don't forget the needs of Bullock (the church has more space for the workshop, I think) and our imaginary children. What a quandary!

PS -- In case you were wondering, yes, I was at Battle Abbey today, and walked the grounds of the Battle of Hastings. I saw the house above and snapped that picture, then ended up on the real estate agent's webpage. I wasn't actually *looking* for real estate in Battle, despite the fact that I have a last name with Norman origins.

Oh sunny day!

*Finally* London had a sunny summer day. So Morgan and I spent it walking to the Camden Lock Market and along the canal from Camden High Street through Regent's Park, past the zoo. (I still have to upload my pictures.) While in the market, we discovered the *fabulous* skirts of Nicola Quilter buried among the stalls of knock-offs and cheap imports. (If you want to find her stall, it's in in the middle of this jumble. Or you could just go to her website.) I bought this skirt:


[ETA: That's not me. The picture's from the website.] The photo doesn't do the green leaves justice -- they're a really *bright* green. Isn't it cool? Morgan got a mini, too, but in a totally different color-scheme and pattern. I'll let her post about her own. But aside from the cool design, I really liked Nicola herself -- funny and nice and knowledgeable about what size was right for each of us and what would look good on us -- and I especially liked her sizing system. Instead of numbers, she has names: tiny, trim, normal, healthy, extra-healthy, and voluptuous. Awesome!

I also bought a hideous beaded bag for 5 pounds. I don't know why. I think I was considering it and just about to realize it was hideously garish, when the shop keeper went to a whole lot of trouble to take it down from the display for me, and so I felt guilty and bought it. It's really quite garish.

Then after the market -- which also included a lunch of West African goat curry; yummy! -- Morgan and I wound our way on foot through London to the Leicester square area to meet up with Owlfish and Pittenweem at a pub.

Then, after drinks, after leaving the pub and walking quite some ways, upon entering the Bloomsbury area, in the middle of a conversation with Morgan about our mutual love of mystery novels, I said, "Oh f@*k! I forgot to pay my tab and get my Visa!" So I split off from Morgan and walked *back* to the pub, and then walked home again.

So for those of you playing at home today, I walked just over 10 miles today. That's on top of my 4 mile run this morning. Well, it was a beautiful day, so what they heck.

And then I met Dance at the college bar. And now that I know someone else in the dining hall, maybe I won't be afraid to go in. The subsidized prices (even for non-members) are really cheap and now I won't necessarily have to stare at my plate. Woo-hoo!

There have been other blogger meet-ups before these two, as well. Early on in my stay here I had lunch with the fabulous Flavia, and on Thursday a bunch of bloggers got together for American BBQ (yes, BBQ -- not bad, actually, but not as good as Bullock's) for a belated 4th of July celebration that Owlfish and Pittenweem organized. Morgan was there, as was Eulistes, the latter of whom I met up with earlier in the week, as well. (Eulistes, btw, claims I have "the best quizzical look [she's] ever encountered" and she wants "to bottle it in concentrate for future use." Really? I think I just frown a lot when I'm concentrating or trying to hear over the din).

Which is all just to say that in addition to working, walking a lot, running, and visiting museums, I've been being very, very social. So with all of that, I haven't been able to blog all the longer posts I want to do on seeing The Merchant of Venice at The Globe as a 'groundling,' or comparing the three libraries I've worked in so far, or, for that matter, doing the two memes I've been tagged for, or catching up on all those posts I promised about my graduate research class or the mortality of my former professors. Ack! Too little time, too much to blog!

But now I'm very tired. Must sleep.

Pictures of pork

Because I haven't posted in awhile I thought I'd throw *something* out there for you so you know I'm still alive. I took these pictures above for Bullock because he's rather obsessed with pork in all its culinary varieties. (Yes, I know there are other meats in the display window. He likes those, too.) They're from a Yorkshire town called Otley.

Anyway, he responded that the place looked like where the English branch of the Sopranos would hang out. Te-hee.

Happy Independence Day!

A day of diversions (in many senses of the word)

Oh, so much has happened today, and every little bit of it deserves its own post, but alas, it's late and I have to be up early tomorrow, and I'm completely knackered. In short: I traveled just under 12 miles on foot today -- 6 running, 6 walking to and from the Tate Modern -- but about 3 of those miles were due to diversions in the sense of detours. One was caused by a 10K race taking place on my running route (an appropriate reason for a diversion, but requiring a change of route, none the less) and another was caused by who-knows-what craziness that the police had to take seriously, given the recent bombings, thus causing them to close off the Thames walk on the south bank of the river between me and my way home. I was just east of the Globe Theatre and wanted to go west to the Millennium Bridge, but about 12 cops stood in my path and told me "it'll be hours" before the mysterious event was dealt with. For a moment I thought, "I'm stranded in Southwark!" but then I collected myself and headed to the next bridge eastwards and took a more roundabout way home. And while on that bridge I could see that the trouble was already cleared up and the pedestrians moving freely along the walk. Sigh.

And, of course, the Tate Modern was very diverting. The current free exhibition in the Turbine Hall on cities was really fascinating and I love how the permanent collection is laid out thematically. This wasn't my first trip there, but it was more leisurely visit this time.

And the other diversion -- in both the entertainment sense and the detour sense -- really, really deserves its own post. Here's a highlight: during my run, while I was contemplating the reason why Middle Temple Lane was locked off at Fleet Street and reading a sign on the gateway, a man asked me, "Why are you running through the middle of London? Are you a werewolf?" (Note: I was not in Soho and did not have a Chinese takeout menu in my hand.) There's a lot more where that freaky pick-up line (because I think that's what it was) came from, but I'll have to save it for a "Freak Magnet: London edition" post.

And I still haven't blogged about the lovely time I had in Specialized Library #1 this week, which I keep meaning to do! Ack!

Tomorrow and Tuesday (and perhaps Wednesday also) I'll be up at Oxford and may have even less time to blog. We'll see.

Wait, what?

OK, how is it I didn't know the Tour de France was going to be here next weekend? Should I brave the crowds and watch some of it? Or given recent events, stay away from big crowds? [Update: Given the car bomb at the Glasgow Airport now and the fact that Saturday is the two-year anniversary of the Tube bombings, I think I'll stay away from the race and all large crowds.] And I guess if I'm going to Canterbury next weekend, I better go on Saturday because the race will be getting there on Sunday. Though will this mean Canterbury might be kind of crowded, even on Saturday. Hm, maybe I should go to Hastings and Battle instead and Canterbury the following weekend. I skipped any day trips today because it's raining all over southern England (I'm going to head out to the British Museum, instead, and spend the day indoors).

So guess how I found out about the Tour -- by reading the "How to Find Us" part of the Shakespeare's Globe web site. I find that particular conjunction of past and present kind of hilarious. And it's perhaps a bit like having to plan around a royal entry or something, this time with flash-enabled interactive maps!

And by the way, why is the Tour de France starting in England? And with the opening ceremonies in Trafalgar Square, no less? C'est ironique, non?

Clueless me

[Update below]

So today I played hooky from the archives (more on them later - there's lots to tell) and met up around 11am with a former professor of mine who's staying on the edge of Chinatown on Shaftesbury Ave. (which street always makes me think of the address of a radio show I used to listen to as a teenager: Rock Over London, with Graham Dene). We walked down to the National Portrait Gallery (passing through Leicester Square, where I saw the TKTS booth -- but I still haven't gotten tickets for anything yet), and walked through about half of the collection, including the exhibitors and winners of the BP Portrait Award. After, we had lunch in a lovely little bistro, where I accidently spilled my white wine all over my senior colleague, but she still paid for lunch (thanks!) and the kind proprietors brought me another glass of wine.

And I did all of this completely clueless that this morning at 2am, not far from where we were, at Haymarket and Coventry St., right off Picadilly Circus, police were defusing and disassembling a car bomb, and that streets around the area were closed off for some time. It wasn't until my colleague said something about sleeping well this morning because (as she would find out later) the street was so quiet from being closed off due to the scare. What scare, I asked? I suppose I should read the news online *before* I go out.

Then again, I had a perfectly enjoyable, albeit clueless, walk from my room to Shaftesbury on a sunny and pleasantly warm late morning, so maybe ignorance is bliss. After all, what good is fear going to do me? Deputy Asst. Commissioner Peter Clarke, head of Scotland Yard's counter-terrorism unit, says "we must all stay alert." Alert to what? What if, while we're all staying alert for the last thing that happened, something *different* happens? (This is what drives me nuts about the no liquids rule on airplanes and still having to take my damn shoes off.)

So I'll just go about my business and figure that the concealed-carry law in the state where I make my home is statistically more a danger to me than potential terrorism in London.

Update:
A quote from a New York Times article today (2 am EST edition):

“It’s only when I got to work that I realized what was happening,” said Renee Anderson, 32, a New Zealander from her country’s nearby diplomatic mission. “I feel surprisingly all right about it. We all kind of thought, ‘Well, you could be hit by a bus anyway.’ ”

Kiwis and me: san souci.

Random bullet points of Britain

• On my friend's A to Z map of Leeds and its environs, "built up" areas are shaded in pink, and any collection of three or more residences not belonging to the same farm counts as "built up," even if everything around it is countryside. I find this charming.
• While visiting said friend, I went for a couple of runs in her semi-suburban, semi-rural town. These runs included a loop around a "tarn" (which I find cool to say, even though it's just a pond) and a pass by the end of the Leeds/Bradford airport's runway. Just as I was going by, a plane came in for a landing. Don't worry though -- Yorkshire is a hilly place, and the runway was actually up above me. I thought it was kind of sublime watching that plane fly so close overhead. The sheep across the road were unimpressed, however.
• We went for a visit to Harewood House, and I wondered, 'How did they manicure all that lawn in the 18th and 19th centuries? Would sheep alone do the trick?'
• There are three libraries in Harewood and I want them all -- especially the one with the secret doors.
• Something I learned: the Leeds to London/London to Leeds train is always crowded.
• Something I learned about myself: I don't get the point of Big Brother. But I *really* don't get the point of Big Brother's Little Brother. A commentary show on a reality show? WTF?
  
• I cannot find my way around the maze of where I'm staying and it's just one big building built around a courtyard. I have to figure it out tomorrow or it will drive me nuts.
  
• There is an angry, or at least irritated, French woman in the room next to me. She's on the phone chattering away in irritation.
• I heard 8 different languages being spoken in the Tesco across from the Russell Square Tube station, and then I stopped counting. For the record: English, Spanish, French, German, something Middle Eastern which I'm unable to specify, Cantonese, Italian, and something I couldn't place at all.
• Weirdly, I could understand the woman speaking Spanish in Tesco better than I can understand my French neighbor, and I've had many more years of French. Hmm.
• There's an old man in a flat across from where I'm staying who seems to spend all of his time watching the world go by on the street below. I don't have a view of this from my room -- I look onto a lovely interior garden -- but I saw him when I was roaming the halls trying to figure out which toilets and showers were closest to me. If I see him again, I'll try to snap a picture.
• I have not changed the time on my computer. It's still in Rust Belt time. I think perhaps I should change it, eh?

That's it for now. Must unpack!

Required reading re: graduate school

Horace at To Delight and To Instruct has posted his collection of links about graduate school in a series of posts helpfully organized in stages from 'deciding to go' to 'the job market'. But you can find them all by following this link: Grad Compendium.

When I get a chance, I'm going to make that a permanent link in my sidebar.

Teaching the research paper in my upper division literature course

As many of you know, this past spring semester I assigned students a research paper as their final project in my medieval literature course. This is more or less a medieval survey course -- from the beginnings of English literature through the 15th century -- but I tend to think of it more as a medieval "highlights" course. Relative to the body of literature written in the British Isles in what we call the Middle Ages -- Old English, Middle English, Anglo-Norman, Latin, and the Celtic languages -- I teach only a small selection. I prefer whole texts where possible, though that means selected plays from cycles and collections, selected Lais from Marie de France, selected books of the Morte Darthur (though in their entirety), and generous parts, but the not the whole, of The Book of Margery Kempe. And then if you think of manuscript collections like "The Exeter Book" as a whole, obviously I'm only doing parts of that, as well. This is an "excluding Chaucer" class as well, which I'm fine with, as Geoffrey gets a class all to himself. But even with Chaucer excluded, there's still so much I leave out. But I rather teach a text thoroughly and give students the opportunity to know it well, than to skim lightly over it in the name of "coverage." I see my class as teaching them how to read medieval literature with a selection of texts that work best for me and that speak to each other well.

So this year, I decided to teach them how to read and write about medieval literature on a more complex level and in conversation with more advanced readers: professional scholars. But before I did that, I wanted them to learn how to read the literature on its own terms and with their own wits, before the voices and ideas of others drowned out their own nascent thoughts. So over the course of the semester, they had three stages of writing assignments (no tests -- it was all about the writing this term), one of which was a series of short writing all semester long, the second of which was a short, formal essay, and the last of which was the research paper, in two stages (proposal/bibliography and paper).

Stage one was an idea I totally ripped off from Rob Barrett (with his permission), who rocks for giving me access to his syllabuses and his great pedagogical ideas. It's a short writing assignment called a Crux Buster (his name for it, which I love), in which students must take two non-consecutive passages from a text and write a two-page, informal response that addresses how those passages shed light on each other or the text as a whole, and/or how they are meaningful (locally or globally). I had students write six of these over the course of the semester, and they always had to address the part of the text we were discussing that day, so that they'd do this writing *before* hearing class discussion. (Theoretically this was supposed to improve discussion, too, but I'm not sure if it did or not. That's a post for another day.) And they were expressly forbidden to write about plot or character development. It took some students to catch on, but since I had a grading scale that ended up being very generous, it gave them some room to fail miserably on the first couple of Busters and still come out with a good grade in the end -- thus giving them the space to learn from mistakes.

OK, so what does this have to do with the research paper? Well, for one thing, I was trying to teach them how to come up with interesting questions and to find discrete parts of a text worth investigating closely -- the basis for good research papers. I was also trying to get them to hone their close reading skills, which I wanted them to apply to the more formal assignments as well. Next time I need to be more explicit about this, because I don't think all of the students got that, and slipped into the usual broad generalization in their research papers. Most of them did get it, however. I think a lot of them realized that a good paper -- whether a research paper or not -- is an extended and more shaped Crux Buster, that close attention to one's subject (in this case, the literary text) is what an essay is supposed to convey, too. And I think they were more primed to see the critics doing this, as well.

In the second stage of preparing them for the research papers, I asked students to write a more formal essay. Often I give topics, but frankly, I'm pretty crappy at writing specific topics -- they all end up being "write what I'm thinking" topics. Ugh. So I left this one rather open-ended. However, it had one requirement: they had to take some element of text that a casual reader might overlook in a first reading and argue for its significance to the text as a whole. Again, this was designed to teach them how to ask the good questions and find the good topics to write about. It also forced them to think of themselves as something *other* than a casual reader, and to think of themselves as teaching an imagined audience about the text under discussion -- something a good research paper should do, too. I modelled this approach throughout the semester, as well. For instance, we talked about the word "aeglaca" in Beowulf and how it's applied to "monsters" and "heroes" in the text, as well as the various ways it's translated even in single translations. We talked about how the very multivalence of that word might hold meaning for the poem as a whole.

Then, soon after that paper, in the second half of the semester, I began teaching the research paper. From advice I got here on this blog, I learned that it's important to really *teach* them how to do this -- not simply expect them to be able to do it. So I took three days out of my syllabus to talk about how to do research. Because I already expect not to be able to "cover" all of medieval literature in my class -- and don't see that as the point of the class -- doing this is perhaps less painful than it might seem. Here's what I did on those three days:

Day 1:
Why we do research (student perspective / scholar's perspective)
How we do research – Part I: Asking the right questions
How we do research – Part II: Judging the sources; using good sources

Day 2:
How we do research – Part III: Finding secondary sources (met in library - orientation to MLA Bibliography, etc., by library staff member)

Day 3:
How we do research – Part IV: Writing the research paper

Readings to be completed: They Say / I Say (entire book); Jane Chance article on Beowulf
Review of research tools, skills in using them
Discussion of Chance’s article as model research paper, in light of the “moves that matter” outlined in They Say / I Say

The only thing I'd change is that last day. I think I'd use a different article. The one I used is Chance's classic argument for the centrality of the fight with Grendel's Mother to the structure and meaning of the poem as a whole, and while it's a clear and accessible article, and though students were intrigued that the Grendel's Mother episode was once seen as a mere footnote to Grendel, it didn't work so well with They Say / I Say. That book teaches you how to make an argument in context of the critical discussion already going on (no matter what your topic), in response to other writers, so it's a great introduction to how to *write* the research paper. But Chance's article frontloads the critical history of Grendel's Mother, and the rest of the article consists of her original argument. As I told students, that's a fine way to structure a paper, but it gave us fewer opportunities to see the rhetorical "moves that matter" in action.

I think I'd give more attention to audience on that last day, as well. I might even have students imagine that they're writing for a journal to be distributed among their classmates, so that they'll assume a wider audience.

Once students got down to doing the research, they had two assignnments to turn in: 1) a short proposal and an annotated bibliography of at least 5 secondary sources of scholarly value, turned in about a month before the final paper was due; 2) the final paper itself, which had to be 8-12 pages and have a bibliography with at least 10 secondary sources. The proposal wasn't graded, but I gave them detailed feedback, helped them find more sources, and warned them if some of their sources weren't appropriate. (Even with this warning, two students did poorly on the final projects because they lost serious points for non peer-reviewed, non-scholarly sources.) Next time I do this, I might more emphatically warn students how much time ahead they have to start the research, and I will also spend more time talking about how srouces that are generally about their subject might be of help, too. Some students doing cool topics such as "homosocial desire in Guigemar" claimed they couldn't find secondary sources, but that's because they were only looking for sources specifically about "homosocial desire in Guigemar." D'oh!

As you may recall, I was really excited by the proposals students turned in. And for the most part, I was not disappointed by the final products. Again, I need to emphasize more that the close reading they did in the Busters is still necessary in the research paper. Students still have a problem with being specific, using evidence, and getting close to the text, even when they're reading models of such criticism. I think I need to point out more how they might model their own essays on the scholarly essays they read! But what I was really pleased with is the fact that almost every single paper actually had an argument. With only a couple of exceptions, gone were the merely descriptive papers and the plot summaries. Students said something about the texts they were addressing. And as far as I'm concerned, that is no minor triumph. So I'm going to do this again, and not just in my medieval survey class, but also in Chaucer (where the online Studies in the Age of Chaucer bibliography makes things oh-so-easy).

And here's another cool outcome: one of the students who wrote one of the best papers is going to turn into her senior honors thesis with me. So at least one student was inspired enough to learn more, and *that's* what it's all about.

Civilization comes to Rust Belt!

Holy cow! While I wasn't paying attention, Rust Belt got an H&M store and it's been there since about September! How did I only just discover this? Well, thank god it was there, because it *finally* provided me with the perfect top for a kick ass skirt I got some time ago at Anthropologie in another town. (Alas, we still don't have one of those.) The skirt is a really cool assymetrical flippy number in chocolate brown lace over a dusty pink satin, and I'm planning on wearing it to a semi-formal wedding, but I needed something dressier to go on top than the dusty pink knit top I'd previously worn with it for a slightly more casual wedding. You wouldn't believe how hard it was to find a top in the right shade of brown -- even though brown is big right now -- and the right shape and right level of dressiness (without being too busy for the lace skirt). Finally I found a chocolate brown tank in stretch satin. I also got a necklace, earrings, and a wrap in shades to match the dusty pink in the skirt -- all for under $40! H&M rocks!

Oh, and though I'm not a big cosmetics junkie, I'm also pleased that we now have a Sephora. Perhaps the Anthropologie, Whole Foods, and Trader Joe's (all stores we're sadly missing) aren't far behind!

****

On an unrelated note, I'll do the promised posts on undergraduate research and my plans for the graduate research methods class in the next two days. And then I'm off to England on Wednesday, and since I'll be visiting a friend for the first few days, I probably won't be blogging until I'm settled in in my London digs.

Hey, scholars like dismemberment, too!

No, this isn't another silly zombie post.

The NY Times Book Review has a review by Charles McGrath of two new and one year-old adaptations of Beowulf for children and young adults. They sound pretty cool and if I get to teach a graduate seminar on the original poem and its adaptations and translations, I may add these books.

But what inspire the post's title is the opening paragraph of the review (bold mine):

"Beowulf," a 3,000-line epic poem composed early in the eighth century, is the first significant text written in English, or in what eventually became English. What interests scholars about the story is its place in our linguistic development, and also the way it blends both Christian and pagan details. But what recommends “Beowulf” to children — and to older readers who haven’t lost a child’s delight in stories that are both scary and gory — is that it’s also a first-rate horror yarn, featuring slaughter, dismemberment and underwater sword fights.

OK, first of all, that "What interests scholars..." sentence should be in the past tense; that's what interested scholars half a century ago and more. But more important: what's with the false dichotomy between scholars on the one hand and "older readers who haven't lost a child's delight in stories that are both scar and gory" on the other? Doesn't he realize that's precisely why many of us became medieval scholars?

Sheesh.

But the books sound pretty cool. Surely they have to be better than Beowulf & Grendel or that Grendel movie on SciFi that Dr. Nokes so hilariously skewered.

PSA: The Sister Study

As many of you know, my sister Ms. V. died of cancer in 2002, four years after being diagnosed with breast cancer. So Virgo Sis and I are enrolled in The Sister Study, a massive, long-term epidemiological study of the genetic and environmental risk factors for breast cancer, sponsored by the National Institute of Environmental Health Science, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Health and Human Services.

The study has one more year to reach their goal of 50,000 participants. They currently have just over 35,000 enrolled. You can become a part of The Sister Study if you meet the following qualifcations:

• Your sister, related to you by blood, had breast cancer.
• You are between the ages of 35 and 74.
• You have never had breast cancer yourself.
• You are a woman living in the U.S. or Puerto Rico.

If you don't meet these qualifications and can't join the study, you can still help by spreading the word across the blogosphere. The Sister Study investigators would especially like to encourage under-represented women to join the study: women over 65, African-American women, Latinas, and Asian-American women. Let your readers know! Don't forget to link to The Sister Study home page. Interested women can also get information by calling 1-877-4SISTER or e-mailing info@sisterstudy.org.

Even the Rust Belt zombies are down on themselves

It's a good thing I live with a man who makes the Boy Scouts look disorganized and unprepared, because so far the Rust Belt zombies have been easy to deal with. We've got ourselves holed up on the second floor of our house, and Bullock has done a mighty fine job of barricading the top of the stairs with the oak and walnut he was going to use for our dining room table. We also brought up all the saws, blades, knives, and other sharp objects from the woodshop and kitchen (man we have a lot of knives), all of the first aid kits (yes, plural -- Bullock is big on safety around all those sharp objects), and all of the astronaut food and water jugs from the disaster preparedness kit. It's too bad I no longer own a bow.

Meanwhile, the Rust Belt zombies are a little lackluster. I think we're over-prepared. The first ones were from the 19th century graveyard around the corner. They were quickly mowed down by the cars on the main drag that runs through Leafy Lea. But even the more recent undead aren't exactly high energy. In between the groans of "Brains!" I keep hearing things like, "Uh...nothing happens here" and "Arrrr...why bother?" I keep wanting to remind them of the fabulous art museum, the world class zoo, the wonderful symphony and opera, and the great park system, but then I remember that they're zombies and I shouldn't be nice to them.

Oops, sounds like some of the more ambitious one have realized we're up here. Gotta go!

[This silly post -- which has a certain grain of truth to it (minus the zombies) -- is brought to you by My Elves are Different's Blog Like It's the End of the World Day: Zombie Attack. Hat tip to Morgan.]

On feeling like a n00b

In just over a week I'll be leaving for London and I'm still not sure what the hell I'm doing in terms of the archives I'll be working in there.

It doesn't help that one archivist still hasn't written me back to give me permission and set up an appointment for me, nor that another one, at a similar privately held archive, pretty much told me I probably won't find anything and I'm wasting my time. OK, fine, but at least I'm doing the scholarly version of due diligence. Of course, he was right, in part because I didn't discover an edited version of just about all of their medieval documents until long after I'd made non-refundable housing and air travel arrangements. D'oh! In my defense, it's really recent and didn't show up in the bibliographies of even more recent secondary works related to the subject. I found it in a rather serendipitous way while looking for something else.

So I may go bust in both of the above archives, but there's still a lot of stuff I can work on at various libraries and public archives. And that work might lead me to archival resources or microfilms or out of print edited versions of documents and information I'd have a harder time getting here in the US. I keep reading the information leaflets of some of these places and thinking, "Hm, yes, that might be useful. I'll see where that leads me." And doing that will be a lot easier and more efficient if I can just walk over to their shelves or call up one of their microfilms instead of using interlibrary loan, etc. So the trip won't be a total bust. Of course, I'll be spending about $5000 dollars for this "efficient" use of my time, so I feel a little bit like I've done some bad planning.

But still, I do have to go to Oxford for 3-4 days to see the manuscript that this whole project revolves around, so I would have had to fly to the UK regardless. And *that* I have arranged with the manuscripts librarian. *That* I know how to do, since it involves a literary manuscript, where I'm not a total n00b, and where, apparently, I have mad skilz enough to get people to respond to my e-mails. It's even an extra-special, heavily guarded, you-can't-see-this-unless-you-prove-you're-worthy kind of manuscript, and I didn't even have to flirt with anyone* to get permission to see it, so ha! I can do some scholarly things right! (*That's a joke. That's not my usual MO.)

So, meantime, why not blow a bunch more money being all scholarly in central London and meeting up with bloggers, getting a little urban fix for a month, seeing some theater -- some of which I can justify as work related (I teach Shakespeare!) -- and taking some side trips which I can also justify as work related (pictures of Canterbury and the site of the Battle of Hastings for the classroom!)? Why not?

And on top of all this I'll get to see my friend E's new baby (not work related, obviously).

But still, I feel a bit like a scholarly flibberty-gibbet. Granted, a lot of this is new stuff to me -- manuscript scholarship, working with civic and archival documents (oh god, please let it mostly be English -- I can do French and Latin, but the script is so much easier for me to read when it's English) -- and I'm largely teaching it all to myself (or re-teaching, in the case of my paleography skills), so maybe I shouldn't be so hard on myself. But I so hate looking like an ass, *especially* in front of English people, and *especially-especially* in front of Londoners. (Don't ask me why -- I really don't know.)

BUT, the good news is I'm feeling more confident about my latent paleography skills. I'm reviewing that Oxford manuscript now, looking for where the interesting (to me) marginalia is (using the PDF I made of the microfilm) and I'm working in tandem with a printed edition of part of the MS that reproduces the marginalia, as well. Anyway, I was just now looking at a MS page and then looking at the printed edition when I said to the long-dead editor, out loud, "Are you a retard? That's clearly an 'l' -- not an 'i.' Duh." Te-hee!

Oy, but in general, I have to say that being a medievalist seems always to make me feel like I need to go back and do graduate school all over again, as if I'm just now ready for it. And as a side note, there need to be grants and awards for young profs just to get the skills they need to do the research that grants usually cover. For instance, I have only two languages -- French and Latin -- but I'd like to do German and Italian. And I sometimes fantasize about making myself into an Anglo-Saxonist, but where would I get the Scandinavian language training? And my paleography skills are limited to late medieval and early modern books and documents, and mostly to English (damn those Latin abbreviations!). But that's a post for another day.

The point of *this* post is I hope all the librarians and archivists who encounter me while I'm working in London are kind and patient. My mantra is going to be "this is a new area for me," and hopefully they'll understand!

Dog breed(s) of the week

Don't worry, I'm not starting a new feature of this blog. Rather, my post title refers self-deprecatingly to the fact that I keep getting obsessed with yet another dog breed or two every week. Bullock and I are thinking of getting our own dog when I get back from England, so I've been researching different breeds, trying to find the one that's right for us.

As many of you may know, I was previously obsessed with the Portuguese Water Dog. But I've learned that they're a pretty high maintenance breed ("willful" is a commonly used word -- along with more positive terms) and some informational sites even warn that they're not really good for first time owners. Plus they're not that common, so the chances of finding a rescued young adult one nearby are slim, and if I'm going to get a specific breed, I'd rather adopt one without a home rather than get a newly bred puppy. Puppies are hard work and I'm not sure either Bullock and I are up for it. Plus, PWD puppies are expensive! Good god, they're expensive! I don't really want a luxury dog. I'm interested in specific breeds because you have a better chance of knowing what you're in for, but I don't necessarily want to support the demand for designer puppies, if that makes sense. (I'm trying hard here not to insult either those who have pure bred dogs with papers, or those who've adopted mixed breeds from shelters. I get it. Seriously, I do. It's all about what works for you.)

Anyway, I want an active dog who might be willing and able to go for runs with me. S/he doesn't have to be able to do the really long distance ones with me, but a dog who can be trained to run 3 miles at an easy pace would be nice. And I'm totally willing to get a dog that needs a good daily workout as long as it generally has an eager to please personality. Bullock would like a dog that's not willful and demanding, or that needs to be trained and worked constantly to know who's boss. (So no Border Collies -- sorry Tommy! -- or any kind of terrier, for example.) And after the ear infection/vertigo incident with Wiley, I decided I wanted a dog small enough that I could lift him/her on my own. But Bullock wants a dog that still seems "doggy." Too small and it's not "doggy" enough for him. Oh, and a low maintenance coat would be nice. (That's the other thing with PWDs -- they need to be trimmed all the time because they have hair that grows like ours. It's super soft and virtually non-shedding, but I barely have enough time to get my own hair cut!) And we'd both like an affectionate, friendly dog who gets along with people and other animals of all kinds.

So it seems, from what I've found browsing around web sites and talking to other dog owners, that a lot of the gun dog breeds, especially pointers and "versatile" gun dogs, satisfy all these requirements. In particular, I'm looking at Brittany Spaniels and Pointers. They both need a lot of exercise, but I think between my running, our backyard, and the park around the corner with plenty of safe, encloed space for throwing a ball or a frisbee, we can give a dog that. (Btw, I walk or run by that park all the time and *no one* is ever in it with dogs. Why not??) Plus, Bullock and I are often home. In fact, we usually have alternating schedules that makes one of us home every other day for at least half the day. And since there are lots of hunters around Rust Belt, there are also a lot of recue organizations for these breeds, full of perfectly nice dogs who simply didn't show adequate skills or interest in hunting.

So, that's where I am now. If you know any Brittanies or Pointers and want to either encourage or discourage my latest obsession, let me know! And hey, feel free to suggest other breeds and get me obsessively reading about them!

How to look like a 1970s NASA scientist

In response to Medieval Woman's desire in the "Readers' choice" post below, here's how Bullock gets his 1970s NASA Scientist Dude look (well, as we imagine it -- I can't find a photo of an actual 1970s NASA scientist looking quite like this):

1) Wear these glasses:

(Made by Shuron Ltd.)





2) Cut your hair this short:


















3) Grow out this facial hair combination (yes, that's Seth Bullock from Deadwood, from whom my Bullock gets his pseudonym):











4) And add longish but not extreme sideburns, a bit like "Greg" on CSI (though Bullock's are fuzzier):














And voila! You have a guy with 1950s hair and glasses who's trying to be cool with 1970s facial hair -- in other words, a 1970s NASA scientist. (Pocket protector and short-sleeved shirt + tie combo not necessary. Please.) And in 2007, it's a perfect pomo pastiche of a look.

Readers' choice!

Bullock and I are going away for the weekend for a wedding-related shindig (not actually the wedding itself, since that's in New Zealand), and when I get back I intend to blog something substantive. The question is -- what?

Which would you rather read about: whether or not my students' research papers from the spring were a success and how/why I taught the research process in an undergrad class? What I'm planning on doing in my graduate research methods class this fall?
A post-conference meditation on what it means to finally feel "grown up" in the profession? A post-conference meditation on the mortality of my mentors? Or my fears about looking like a fool and not knowing what I'm doing on my upcoming research trip to the UK?

Or would you rather read something breezy and summer-light -- for instance, my newest dog breed obsession? Or how Bullock has transformed his look into a NASA scientist ca. 1975 and why I dig it? Or why I like "The Starter Wife" and have given up on "Hex"? Or how I may break down and get an all-regions DVD player to watch the second seaons of "Life on Mars," now that it's out on DVD in the UK? (Uh, I guess that's it for that last category!)

Oh that's so wrong

There's a billboard on the main commercial drag in our neighborhood, Leafy Lea, that is perhaps a perfect example of why the close study of language matters (especially to folks who go into advertising, in this case). The sign is advertising a hair salon and one of its "d'oh!" moments is in the fine print, where it says, "We specialize in all hair types." Um. Someone needs to look up the word "specialize." But that's really not the worst of it. Oh no, there's more.

First of all, the name of the salon is Master's Touch. Ew. Creepy! Seriously, when you read that name, doesn't it give you the heeby-jeebies? Doesn't it sound like the name of an S&M web site or something? And hair care is certainly not the first thing I think of here. Shouldn't a name of an establishment convey what it does? OK, so clearly the name is not the advertising firm's fault. But wait, there's more...

So what's the image used to convey what Master's Touch does, to make that vaguely creepy sounding name more clear? It's the head of an African-American woman with straightened hair that covers half of her downturned face and one her averted eyes.

No really, I'm not making this up.

I'm sure they were trying to invoke the skilled touch of a master artisan with that name, but when it's paired with an image of an African-American woman in a submissive pose (and hair imitating the dominant culture) a whole 'nuther set of associations with the word "master" springs to mind.

Yikes. Not what they were going for, I'm sure. At least I hope the hell not!

Why I became a professor

Over at Reassigned Time, in discussing the "good stuff" about graduate school and being an academic in general, Dr. Crazy writes:

I like that some of the hardest work I do can be accomplished in pajamas.

What she said.

(That said, I'm in my running clothes right now and really should sign off and get out there! More substantial blogging soon, I promise!)

Surviving grad school

Horace at To Delight and Instruct is collecting all your favorite posts of yore having to do with how to survive graduate school. He's thinking of it as a kind of permanent carnival. I think once he's put all the posts together, I'll put a permanent link to it in my sidebar.

His Call for Posts is here. Go give him your links.

Thank you, Horace, for doing this.