A smart blog for my churchy friends ('specially the 'piscopals)

I thought I'd introduce you all to and give a big blogospheric welcome to Last Protestant Dinosaur, a blog by the Rev. Jarrett Kerbel. When I finally get around to doing my "Thinking Blogger Award" post, Jarrett's blog is going on my list of award winners. He's got a bit of a John Donne for the blogging age quality to him. He only just started, so there's time to catch up on all of his thoughtful, theological posts. My favorite so far is the one on his problems with the theology of the crucifixion and atonement (though he really needs in the future to avoid using the phrase "imperial Roman church" -- good god, is this 1607 instead of 2007?!). And those of you who are specifically members of the Episcopal church, as he is, may appreciate his musing on the possibility of mainline church survival in this essay.

Anyway, I know a number of you would be interested in Jarrett's blog, and I know Jarrett needs more of an audience and a community and a conversation, so I'm spreading the word (heh). Plus, he's a friend and, despite his occasional use of Reformation-era turns of phrase, he's a truly good man.

Naked Beowulf? WTF?

This week's Entertainment Weekly features an article on the mini-trend in recent movies of men fighting for their lives in the buff. One of the upcoming instances of nekid wrasslin' they cite is the CGI version of Ray Winstone in Robert Zemeckis's adaptation of Beowulf. Winstone plays our eponymous hero and the nakedness, er, reveals itself in the fight with Grendel.

Um, why? Well, explains co-writer Roger Avary in the ET article (#956, Sept. 28, 2007, p.55):

In the original epic poem, Beowulf decides that swords and armor are just going to slow him down. So, he strips and waits for Grendel to come and then does some medieval ass-kicking in the buff. When we were first working on the script, Robert Zemeckis said, "Guys, does he have to fight him naked?" We were like, "Yes, actually he does -- it's in the poem!"

You know, I always half suspected that Avary was just riding Tarantino's coat-tails with his co-writer credit for the Pulp Fiction screenplay (and the Oscar it won) and now I'm more than certain. Where on earth does he get "naked" from without sword and shield (or armor, as he mistakenly claims)?? Does he think that because the men are sleeping when Grendel arrives that they're necessarily in the nude? All I've got at home is the Roy Liuzza translation, so if there's something in the Old English that suggests nakedness let me know (though somehow I doubt that Avary was reading Old English!). Or, more plausibly perhaps, is there a bad translation or adaptation he's getting this from? Or is it from one of the looser and interpretative parts of the Heaney translation? Here's what the Liuzza translation has in the relevant passages:

I have also heard that this evil beast
in his wildness does not care for weapons,
so I too will scorn -- so that Hygelac,
my liege-lord, may be glad of me --
to bear a sword or a broad shield,
a yellow battle-board, but with my grip
I shall grapple with the fiend and fight for life
foe against foe. (ll. 433-40)

[H]e knows no arts of war, no way to strike back,
hack at my shield-boss, though he be brave
in his wicked deeds; but tonight we two will
forgo our swords, if he dare to seek out
a war without weapons (ll. 681-5)

Hm...you know, maybe Avary thought that "so that Hygelac, my liege-lord, may be glad of me" could mean something a bit more risqué than the usual lord-thane bond.

In fact, I'd have no problem with Avary and his Beowulf in the buff if he'd said something like, "we wanted to emphasize the hyper-masculinity of this society, right down to male bodies, so that when Grendel's Mother appears and they're not ready, it's clear they didn't think a female creature was a threat" or something cool and interpretative like that. That I could buy. I could even buy a total queering of the poem if the interpretation had the courage of its convictions (and that would totally surprise me, too, coming from a mainstream Hollywood movie!). In other words, Roger, dude, don't be a boring literalist and a slave to your source material while also getting it literally wrong! Don't claim "it's in the poem!" if it's not; or, if what you mean is 'the poem suggests this' then say so. Learn the difference between text and subtext, if only so that those of us who teach the original poem won't have to deal with a generation of fan boys and fan girls who think they read that Beowulf was naked in those fights because he was in your movie version and you claimed "it's in the poem!"

But I have to say, now having gotten that rant out of the way, I'm really intrigued by Avary's misreading. Maybe it even falls into the category of Harold Bloom's "strong misreading." I mean, as I suggest above, it could work. (It only really bugs me that Avary lays the 'blame' on the poem, instead of taking credit himself -- though that's kind of interesting, too, in an arm-chair psychologist way. Roger, dude, why are you afraid to take credit?) Heck, I may end up using all of this a way to teach my students the difference between summary (whether accurate or inaccurate) and interpretation. Like many teachers, I spend a lot of time reminding them that they have to back up their arguments with the text, so that what I often get from the less strong students is an "argument" that "proves" the plot, and they end up doing something like Avary and saying "It's in the poem!" (albeit usually more accurately than he does). I could someday take the movie and say, "Look, naked Beowulf is not literally in the poem, but how might this make sense as an interpretation?" And then maybe we could talk about the hyper-masculinity of the poem, of the nakedness of Winstone's really buff body as the cinematic equivalent of the boasting, etc., etc. Who knows. As long as they know that the nakedness is not literally in the poem!

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!
  

The (lost) art of textual editing

I've recently taken on a smallish editing task -- that is, editing in the sense of producing an edition of something -- involving two short Middle English texts to be included in a future printing of an anthology of English literature. They're texts I consider myself intimately familiar with, they're short (just under 700 lines all together), and their introductions won't require any new research from me. And as a bonus, the accepted scholarly edition, which I'm using as my base text, is available electronically, so I don't even have to retype those 700 lines (so I do have to clean up formatting). So the task is relatively simple for me to do, plus I have until December to do the first one and until June for the second one. And I'm also getting paid for the job! Cool!

But that's actually not the best part. Turns out that I'm finding the task much more fascinating that I thought it would be (I thought it would be relatively rote -- easy money for a tedious task). The texts I'm editing are each unique -- no multiple manuscript versions with conflicting text, so no complicated job of deciding what's the "most true" reading -- and they've been edited many times before without controversy, as far as I know. But still, I'm finding some little differences between the scholarly edition and the next-most-scholarly classroom editions. Most of the differences are in the glosses (or glossary), but sometimes the classroom editions silently edit things suggesting that the editor thought the manuscript reading must be a mistake (although often there's no mention of it, not even in the textual notes in the back). When I find these differences, I could just go with the scholarly edition -- that's my base text, after all, and I'm editing for a student anthology, not a scholarly edition of my own -- but I find myself drawn into figuring out the choices the different editors made and their (implied) reasons for doing so. It's fascinating and sometimes puzzling to see the editing and glossing choices made by serious and impressive scholars and to realize that sometimes I have good reason to think they're wrong. And it makes me realize how opaque all of this is to our students, how they read one edition of an older text and think of it as "the" text, authoritative and complete. I try in all my classes to give them some idea of how The Riverside Chaucer and other such editions are total fictions, the work of editors trying to determine the Platonic Form of Chaucer's oeuvre based on many multiple manuscripts, but I may start bringing in more concrete details to show them. (I also may start doing translation assignments like Jeffrey Cohen does, instead of the usual ME reading comprehension quizzes I used to give.) And I'm going to do the same with select texts in the medieval survey class, too. I'm definitely going to bring this up more in my Old and Middle English classes (though I already do some of this).

There are other ways this little project has become fascinating to me. Like I said, I took this on because I'm intimately familiar with these texts. But as I go through them literally word by word, deciding what needs glossing, I come upon details and moments of interest that I'd overlooked before: plays on words, multivalent meanings, regional linguistic variations that give life to the text's moment in time and place, and so forth. I also realize that to gloss and to edit -- including providing punctuation -- I have to think about the syntax, grammar, and structure of the language in a microscopic way that I hadn't done before. And sometimes that's led me to moments of interpretative richness as well. And so hence this post's title. It's kind of a shame that the dissertation that edits and presents a previously unavailable text has gone the way of the dinosaur, because there's a lot to be learned in a task like that. The intimacy I thought I had with this text was only just familiarity. And I'm thinking that next time I do the graduate research methods class, in addition to having a session and an assignment on determining what the scholarly edition of a given text is, I'll create some kind of assignment where they have to edit a passage of something, or do a more micro-level comparison of editions.

By far the biggest challenge in all of this is meeting the requirements of the anthology publishers that I modernize and regularize spelling. I've looked very closely at the other Middle English texts in the current version, and there's a variation in how this is done -- a very telling one. Chaucer is only lightly regularized -- "hym" is changed to "him," for example, but all word final -e's seem to remain, even when they're not needed for the meter. But in anonymous poetic texts, especially ones with a variable meter (and not Chaucer's careful iambic pentameter), final -e's are mostly gone. Archaic spelling is preserved in rhymes, however, when modernizing it would disrupt the rhyme. But even that can't always be helped, since "food" and "good" are often spelled that way in Middle as well as Modern English, but doesn't tell the uninitiated reader that they rhymed in ME. Anyway, the special consideration that Chaucer gets in these editing techniques -- and that the anonymous writers don't get -- just goes to show how much we still fetishize the author on some level, despite Barthes and Foucault and the "intentional fallacy." (Wikipedia links provided for my non-academic, non-literary readers' quick reference.)

Word final -e's are just one challenge I have to face -- do I change "muste" to "must" throughout or only when it doesn't disrupt the meter? Or in this particular piece does that even matter? -- but there are others. One of the recurring one is how to "modernize" an archaic word. Often enough these words survived the Middle Ages and have early modern and modern spellings that are pretty regular. House style for the publishers is to use the OED, so if the OED has an entry for the word, I use the spelling of the entry heading, where, again, it doesn't disrupt anything like rhyme or meter.

But what about a word like "nemely"? I hit it just before beginning this post. It means "quickly" or "nimbly" and in the OED it shows up as a variant spelling for the head word "nimbly." Changing it to "nimbly" wouldn't actually disrupt the meter since "nemely" in the original must scan as two syllables, with the second -e- syncopated: nem'ly. And it won't disrupt the alliteration, either. But I feel like "nimbly" loses some of the flavor of the time and place. This is a Northern English text and "nimbly" sound too fastidiously Southern English to me, too posh and prim. (Those colorings of class and culture between the south and the north are just beginning to develop in the 15th century -- if the Towneley Second Shepherd's Play and the character Mak, who puts on a "southern tooth," claiming to be a yeoman of a lord, is any witness. And my text is a 15th century text. If it were any earlier, I might be anachronistic in wanting to avoid the hint of the posh privilege of the south. And even as it is, it says more about my own predilections than anything else!) I'll probably be a rebel and retain "nemely" but gloss it as "quickly, nimbly." In other cases I'll submit, changing "werk(e)" to "work," for example, even though in Middle English that -er- would be a distinct sound from -or-. But some sound needs to be preserved; this is a poetic text after all, and poetry lives in sound.

I need to bring details like this to my students' attention more often, let them know how much comes between them and the manuscript versions of these texts. I do this kind of thing plenty when we read texts in translation, giving them passages from the original or multiple translations to compare. Although at least once a year there's a student (sometimes even a graduate student!) who stuns me by demonstrating that they think reading a translation is the same as reading the original, I think I manage to get through to most of them that translation is always interpretation. But so is editing, especially when you're talking about medieval and early modern texts, and I need to make that clearer to them. I don't have to focus on it all the time, but I should plan at least one exercise around it in each pertinent class.

I'm so glad I took on this project -- even if I weren't getting paid for it!

OMG! A total rock star likes me!

OK, not a rock star, but close enough in the academic world. I'll explain best I can without revealing identities

So the final outside letter for my tenure finally came in -- too late for the department personnel committee, but in time for the chair to mention it in her letter, and for all the subsequent levels up the hierarchy. Anyway, it's from someone in my immediate specialty and it's someone I was a little afraid of because I thought she wouldn't like my work because she's all fancy-pants theoretical and I'm knock-off pants theoretical at best. So I actually didn't put her on my list of potential reviewers. But my senior colleague did, and she ended up being one of the people solicited, and since her letter was late in arriving I was especially worried about it.

Well...It. Totally. Rocks!!!!! (Yes, I got to see it. As you may recall, we're a public university in an open-records state. When my chair said it was "absolutely glowing" I just had to read it!) OMG, she likes me, she really likes me! And get this: lo these many years ago, I was an admitted, prospective graduate student visiting Rock Star's campus and department, back when she was still an assistant professor, I think, and in the letter she makes it clear she *remembered* me. And she mentioned that she knew my work from my articles even before the book! It's like she's been following my career or something. How awesome is that?!

I think I may faint, and this time it's not from whatever's in my head causing my dizzy spells! This is definitely something for the "love file"! Woo-hoo!

Arrrrr....woah.

OK, so I'm a little late, but today is Talk Like a Pirate Day. I did, however, point out to my students last week that one of the Old English verbs for "to be" (there are two sets) -- bēon -- is a little like talking like a pirate: Iċ bēo, þu bist, hē/hēo/hit biþ... (You had to be there.)

Anyway...the "woah" of my post title refers not to some Keanu Reeves-ified pirate, but rather, to the fact that I've been feeling a little dizzy for the past two days, especially any time my head is below my heart (e.g., bending over to pick something up, flipping my head over to wrap my wet hair in a towel, etc.), or even if I turn around too quickly. I'm not sure what's going on, but I'm starting to wonder if I have some brewing inner-ear problem like Wiley had last spring. OK, so I'm using my experience with a dog to diagnose myself. Is there a problem with that?

Yes, yes, I'm going to take myself to a doctor, but right now I'm too busy, dammit. I've got a grad committee meeting to run tomorrow and two classes to teach after that. I won't be able to get to the doctor until Friday at the earliest, which means my students will just have to deal with a dizzier than normal prof.

Argh. Er, arrrrrr....

K'zoo preview

Now that all the last-minute abstracts for K'zoo papers are in, and panel organizers are making their decisions about who's on their panels in May, I know for sure that the panel I've co-organized is a go, and also that I'm presenting on another panel. It's not the first time I've worn two (or more) hats at a conference -- at MLA one year I was presenting, presiding/organizing, *and* interviewing job candidates as part of a search committee -- but it's the first time at the Zoo. And my co-organizer is doing the same. Let's hope they don't put our panel on Sunday morning or we'll be exhausted!

Anyway, just wanted to give y'all a heads up because this means that someone else will have to take over any blogger meet-up festivities. You don't have to decide now, but just know that I'm not really the best person to do it this year.

But that's not until May, so we don't have to worry about that just now.

Happy happy joy joy -- good news

My department voted unanimously to promote me and give me tenure! And rumor has it that unanimous votes in my department are a rarity. Wow -- cool!

But now I must knock wood -- KNOCK KNOCK KNOCK -- because there are all the other levels my dossier must still go through.

Meanwhile, my fingers are crossed, I'm not counting any unhatched chickens, I'm knocking on wood, and, just for the heck of it, I'm throwing salt over my shoulder, too.

The internet is evil

OK, I know there's something ironic about titling a blog post with that blanket statement, but hear me out.

So. I was just doing an exploratory search of the job listings in the Chronicle so far -- just exporatory, mind you -- and fantasizing about jobs I can't/won't apply for or don't qualify for, and I found a job in my field at the flagship university of my home state. Now, that particular university is in a pretty damn cool town, not far from my home metropolis (which is getting cooler every day, it seems) and really close to the suburbs where the Fizzy Family live. (One drawback: also close to crazy Dad, but he doesn't drive far any more, so at least I wouldn't have to worry about unannounced visits. Yes, I worry about these things even in a fantasy.) Plus, it's a solidly good flagship with a lot of smart kids (Eldest Niece is an alum, after all). Alas and alack, however, it did not have a job in Bullock's field.

But that's not the evil part. See, I started doing this "oh how I wish I could be there instead of here" thing I sometimes do on the 'net, where I start clicking around as if I'm exploring a place I'm actually considering moving to. Sometimes this is pure fantasy, and involves taking virtual tours of the 4 million pound house for sale next door to the Dickens House in Bloomsbury. In this case, it involved clicking around on the Homestate U web site to see my future fantasy employer and colleagues.

And that's when I was blinded by the face of evil. OK, maybe not really evil. Just incredibly annoying. See, it turns out that someone I thought was a total jerkwad in college, who told someone I was interested in back then that I was a slut (I know! what a jerk!...but lucky for me at the time the guy didn't listen to Mr. Jerkwad), is now the freakin' head of an institute at Homestate U and has multiple books, which won multiple awards from This, That, and The Other Professional Society. And he's only a year older than I am! Ooh, that's so not right. Why can't life be like a moralist novel and punish the jerks?! And the worst part of it was seeing his smiley smug face on the web page, as if to say, "Ha ha -- I can call women sluts and still be called a 'scholar' and win scholarly awards from here to the end of the universe!" It's like he's an allegorical figure of Patriarchy itself.

So, see, the internet *is* evil, because I really didn't need to know this. And had I not followed the clicks, I wouldn't have known it unless the alum magazine had chosen to profile him (which I supposed is possible, I guess, but he's not *that* exciting compared to some of the more obviously famous and interesting alum). Dammit, how can I get any work done tonight with the image of Mr. Jerkwad in my head?

On the bright side, however, I no longer covet the job at Homestate U. Of course, envy and general malice have replaced the coveting. Hm. Excuse me while I go do penance of some kind.

Blogjam

Oy. I have 780 unread blog posts in my Bloglines subscriptions, so if I haven't commented on your blog in awhile, that's why. I've fallen way behind, and some of that goes all the way back to when I was in England in July.

Speaking of which, I'm "behind" on my own blogging -- there are stories and issues and ideas I wanted to post from my month in London, not to mention the vague promise I made to tell you what I was doing with my graduate research methods class (which, btw, is going OK, but I think it needs more substance next time -- there's a whole post brewing there, too). I also have a half-written post on the vast differences between various archives and libraries, and what one gains from working in them. I started that post while I was actually in one of those places!

I'm starting to wonder if I have time for blogging, but I don't want to lose touch with the friends I've made while doing it over the last two years (just missed my blogiversary a couple of weeks ago). This isn't an announcement that I'm going to quit, but just an explanation of my relative absence in the blogosphere lately. I may just settle into a once-in-awhile posting pattern, and rely on readers who've put me in their RSS feed subscriptions. It all remains to be seen. In the meantime, even if I'm not commenting, I'm trying to catch up and I'm thinking of you all -- especially those of you I know who have started new chapters in their lives or who are going through hard times, personal or professional. And if it's any consolation, I'm kind of lame at keeping in touch with friends I know IRL, too.


PS -- I really want "blogjam" to enter the idiom (if it doesn't already exist). Feel free to use it frequently and disseminate it.

Woo-hoo for me!

In graduate school, one of the senior TAs, who had this special TA position specifically designed to mentor the newer TAs (a good system, btw), told us to keep a "love file" in which we put copies of the kick ass teaching evaluations, cool professorial comments, and all other commendations that made us feel like we were doing this thing we do right. I never took that very good advice literally -- never created that file -- but now I have a blog. And here I can say "Yay for me!" to the whole wide world.

So, two little things made me feel good this week. First, one of my new graduate students, a mere two weeks into the program, wrote me an e-mail telling me how grateful he is for my mentorship as graduate adviser and as the instructor of the research methods class. I don't *live* for such notes, but they sure do make my day!

And then, in the last day, I e-mailed the organizer of a panel at K'zoo and asked if there were still open spots, because I thought I might have something for it. Not only was there an open spot, but the organizer said she was familiar with my work and looked forward to getting a submission from me. Awesome! Someone's reading my work!

I love the little things like that. They really matter and they really make my day. They let me know I'm doing things right, that what I do in my job matters at least to some people, and that therefore my existence matters beyond my circle of loved ones. (An aside: one of the cool benefits of being an academic is that people you've never met, in far flung places you don't live or have connections, have read your work, know your name, and value what you do. Even if it's only 5 of them it's still cool.) These little things *especially* make my day when there are other, crappy, unbloggable things going on around me that I can't do much about, that involve systemic problems a helluva lot bigger than me. I can play my little part in those things, too -- make up for the inadequacy of others, perhaps -- but those are the kinds of things that get me down, and have I to look to these other things I've done that somehow brought others pleasure or value of some kind. It's all I can do.

A quick life-in-Rust-Belt observation

There are only 4 movie theaters in this town (5 if you count the historic single-screen theater that shows second-run but mainstream movies) and other than that historic one, all are owned by the same company.

Until moving here I'd never lived anywhere without independent and art-house cinemas.

RBoLDW: Random Bullet Points of Labor Day Weekend

• The tenure file is done and turned in! Woo-hoo!

• To celebrate, Bullock and I did our first shopping trip to Costco last night and got some yummy wild salmon which Bullock grilled. We picked up a number of other things, but we're being pretty judicious about what we'll actually consume before it goes bad, and what we have space to store. There are only two of us, after all. But I quickly realized that if all we ever buy at Costco are Clif Bars and giant bottles of generic loratadine (the drug in Claritin), we'll save a decent amount of money over the course of a year and more than make up for the $50 membership fee.
  

• Because this Costco is the only one in Rust Belt, and therefore also the only one in this part of the state (because Rust Belt is the only city), the large crowd there produced a pretty good cross-section of the region. However, according to our local newspaper, some of the higher end shoppers of the area, the ones living in close proximity to this Costco (the reason why it chose that location) have not yet realized that Costco carries goods they'd be interested in. (Apparently they don't read all the stories in national newspapers about the Costco yuppie phenomenon.) Some of them are even vowing to boycott it because it's not high end enough for its location. Oh good god. It makes me want to hit them over the head with a lovely bottle of 2004 Turnbull Cabernet Sauvignon (about $2 cheaper at Costco than on Wine.com)!
  

• OK, enough about Costco. Btw, Turnbull Cabs are to die for. Not cheap -- usually about $45, depending on the vintage -- but wonderful if you like big, rich red wines. And they're good wines for collecting and aging.
  

• Tonight Victoria, her sister, our friend who needs a pseudonym still, and I are having a girls' night out. We're going to see Becoming Jane. I'm really excited, but not nearly as excited as the two mothers of young children in the group, who are really, REALLY excited.

• I'm managing to keep up in spinning class now and do all the standing exercises! Yay! Now I need to work on form so I'm not putting my weight on my wrists and arms, but holding myself up with my legs and core.

• Speaking of core work, Victoria has also convinced me to do PiYo -- an upbeat version of Pilates with some yoga -- on Fridays, so now we have Spinning MW at noon and PiYo on Friday at noon, plus I'll still be doing a long run on Saturdays and an easy one on Sundays. I'm going to be SO fit this semester. Here's hoping I can keep up with it all.

• Bullock and I are talking about having Thanksgiving here this year. His mom and sister are coming, which also means his sister's kids, two dogs, and, possibly, a hedgehog will be here. Virgo Sis said she may be able to make it, too. Word is Fast Fizzy and the Fizzy family are staying put this year (Fizzy, tell me if that's not true!) since they traveled last year, and my dad doesn't travel on Thanksgiving (or much at all these days), and though I'll invite Eldest Niece and Nephew, they probably can't afford it, so it won't be the *whole* family. Still, even with just the members slated to come, that means we'll be making dinner for two vegans and a celiac! It's going to be a complicated meal. Any suggestions for vegan or gluten-free (or both) recipes are welcome! (I'm looking at you, Pastry Pirate!)

• Speaking of grown-ups and families, about 2/3s of the new graduate students are roughly about my age, give or take a couple of years, and a number of them have kids, some of whom are in college already. One of the students, who is only 41, is a grandmother already. Some of the younger ones have children, as well, with or without spouses. It's a demographically interesting group. I find this all very fascinating, and dealing with grown-ups is such a pleasure, but I also worry for them, since they're entering a profession that still assumes everyone is young and single and child-free, or, if married, a man with a stay-at-home wife. These students can't simply pack up and move for a Ph.D. program or a job, or if they do, it will be that much more difficult for them. Any advice for assisting them -- resources to point them to, for example -- would be greatly appreciated.
  

All praise Costco

Costco opens tomorrow -- the first one in Rust Belt, and it's right in our neighborhood. Bullock and I stopped there after work tonight to get our memberships so we're good and ready. Turns out they were having a pre-opening party with food and drink and wander-at-will tour of the store and the place was *packed*. Parking was as hard to get as the past two weeks on campus (don't get me started on that.) Though Bullock and I are familiar with Costco from relatives who are devotees, er, members, many Rust Belters had never been in one. There were many "oohs" and "ahhs" to be heard, as well as "Wow, that's a lot of Tic Tacs." (That last one was actually from Bullock. I don't know why it cracks me up so much. Maybe because Tic Tacs, like monkeys and the word "pants," are inherently funny. Pants-wearing monkeys eating Tic Tacs would be *hilarious*.) There were also lots of smiling, cheery employees. My god, they were cheery. It was almost a little cultish.

Anyway, I think it's a sign of my having drunk their figurative Kool-Aid or else just how boring I am that I'm *really* excited about the new Costco. Woo-hoo! And it's kind of crazy that so many people turned out for the pre-opening party. You couldn't even buy anything yet -- though you could see their wares, eat lots of free food, and get a free make-over if you wanted one. That's definitely a sign that we need more to do here in Rust Belt.

OK, right now I'm imagining a new reader stumbling onto my blog and thinking, "Hm, let's see what an intellectual who has devoted herself to a life of the mind is up to...Oh, I see, pre-shopping at Costco." Well hey, I appreciate a store that offers a good bargain *and* pays its staff a living wage with good benefits. And bulk often means less packaging -- it's good for the environment, too. So see, I'm thinking. Really, I am.

Making my tenure dossier narratives matter

On some level, the narratives I have to write for my tenure narrative are merely hoops I have to jump through. But as I'm telling my graduate students in my research and methods course, there's a way to make every hoop of this profession into something that matters -- if not something that MATTERS on some grand scale, at least something that's useful for preparing for a next step or stage that matters more, or at least for thinking about what does matter.

So I'm kind of happy that I'm practicing what I'm preaching and I'm pretty pleased with what I'm doing with my narratives. They have a recurring theme (how literary of me!), which is the value of the liberal arts, the humanities, the study of literature, and the study of the past (specifically the Middle Ages in my case, obviously). I'm sure I'm not saying anything particularly original, though I am trying to avoid cant and also trying to come up with concrete examples. But I think this is important for those people on the college and university level of the tenure process who might need to be reminded -- or even taught -- that there's a value to what we do in the English department, and that there's an audience for it as well, not just in our students and other scholars, but in the general public, too. Given that our president at one point wanted to make RBU into a science and technology focused university (though he seems to have backed off of that plan lately -- maybe) and generally talks about education in instrumentalist, vocational terms (i.e., as training for a particular occupation or profession), I think the message I'm trying to send is still needed. I'm perfectly willing to make myself the poster-child for these causes.

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!

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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.

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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.