I may pull this off yet. Dear heaven.

Nope, not at all.

I did not wake during the night from a dream about visiting a desert museum on Ælfric Ave. (To believe that, you'd have to believe that I'm frantically trying to finish a chapter on Ælfric so as to go and visit the desert.) Such a museum obviously wouldn't turn out to be a weird antiquarian thing with a couple of cacti at the end. (I never write about antiquarians.) I certainly didn't wake up during the night and finish the paragraph I'd struggled with all evening.

This is just to say

...that sometimes I hate my metabolism. I am dropping with tiredness, but I can't sleep because my stomach hurts because I need to eat some more food. I have opted for yoghurt this time, figuring that a little fat and protein will not go amiss. Man, I hate it when this happens. I am going to curl up with a book and read myself to sleep if it kills me.

There's a poem that starts like this, too, isn't there?
This is just to say that I have eaten the plums, or something like that? They were delicious: so juicy, so sweet.

Something like that.
So. Tired.

Does it come of being raised in a bookstore?

When I was about four or so, the local paper photographed me beside the duckpond behind our public library*. (I think it was a very, very local paper.) Even when I am not feeding the ducks, I love ugly libraries. It may be nothing more than nostalgia for that first public library, but I love the cosy embrace of a building that clearly exists for the sole purpose of giving me books and comfy chairs in which to read them. I can read the most appallingly clunky prose and revel in the most disappointingly predictable plots, as long as I'm in an ugly public library, curled up in an aged chair that is beginning to spew its stuffing. That's not to say that I don't appreciate the lovely St. Pancras reading rooms at the British Library. (All right, the photo shows the cafe area and the King's Library in the background, but you get the idea.) The BL is one of my favourite libraries to work in - well-lit (as opposed to Duke Humfrey's, I'm sorry to say), airy and inviting, not to mention being the home of a rather important collection of manuscripts - but there's an undeniable allure about an ugly library, like an itch that must be scratched: There must be good books inside, if it's ugly.

On the other hand, we have in this day and age (O tempora o mores) libraries that do not live in buildings at all. I, for example, still swoon every time I sit at my computer and load images of my most cherished manuscript, MS 201 of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge. Thanks to the generosity of the Parker Library on the Web project and the member of my committee who suggested that I send them a grant proposal, I have access to the stunning digital images of Matthew Parker's manuscript collection. The folks at ParkerWeb have been extraordinarily kind in loading to the test site a number of MSS I requested for my project, but ParkerWeb is not by any stretch of the imagination the same as the Parker Library that lives in that peaceful, green-walled room in Cambridge.

The books themselves are different, too, which seems fitting for a collection originally amassed by someone like Parker, who couldn't seem to stop manhandling and reconfiguring his books. At Kalamazoo this year, I heard someone say that we ought to put images of charters on the internet so that people could get a sense of the scale and materiality of the documents. I will be honest with you and say that this completely bowled me over because the whole time I'm transcribing from even the amazing images on ParkerWeb, I'm nevertheless irked by my inability to touch them and to read from the pages. (I think a computer screen is harder on the eyes, no matter how small the script.) Nor does ParkerWeb allow me to collate a manuscript or to get a sense of the size of the book, except as it is represented in the form of a ruler photographed beside the manuscript.

That is a fairly obvious way in which the books I read on ParkerWeb differ from the ones I read in the Parker Library, but what does it mean when the sequence of folios changes in the imaging process? Last week, I discovered that one folio of CCCC 201 appeared twice in the digital version, replacing in one instance a folio that contained a similar rubric. When I wrote to inquire, I learned that it was not simply a question of a mistaken link on the website and that the image of the duplicated page in fact appeared twice in their underlying data set. Page 82 does not exist in the digital CCCC 201 on any level, at least it will not exist until the reshoots are over and the final set of images is sent to Stanford. A truly Parkerian alteration.

According to my argument in the chapter I am currently working (read, struggling) to revise, this must mean that I and the others involved in the project are participating in a diachronic textual community with Parker and with his Anglo-Saxon predecessors. If the books invited later engagement, Parker was not the man to shy away from that invitation. Nor, it seems, are we, and like him, we are busy using our selective power to re-form libraries and books for different ends. The difference is that we are doing it without altering the physical forms of the books as shaped by Parker.

This all sounds very fine, but even if I have embraced the rhetoric of community and fluidity, I will always be a sucker for the tangible artefact. There is nothing like a grubby book I can hold in my hands inside an ugly, ugly library. Especially if there are ducks.



*I looked up the library's website to find out if I was remembering the location aright (next to Burgess Park, along the train tracks), and I am now enchanted by the stained glass pictured there. It is called "The Jewel of Menlo Park," but I know nothing else about it, except that it reminds me a bit of "View of Oyster Bay."

In which earnestness endures

I have to be on my way out the door in ten minutes, and I don't have a good record for writing quickly. Let's see if I can do it this time!

I was thinking that my last post helped this blog to maintain an undesirable level of earnestness, but when I reread the end of the post, I discovered an even more fundamental problem: I hadn't realized that I was exhausted almost to the point of incoherence, and there are definitely a few logical connections I was making in my head that did not get written down. Sorry, guys! I hope it made some kind of sense.

And perhaps I should be more careful about describing Eynsham as a backwater, in light of the fact that it was founded by Æthelmær, who had been a powerful figure until he retired from court a year before the "palace revolution" of 1006. Beyond this, there are some indications that King Æthelred and his sons may have visited the abbey from time to time and been permitted to eat in the refectory (!), but it's true that it does not appear as one of the leading houses in charters of the day and that Ælfric never appears in charters.

All right, today's business: If the so-called White Firefighters Case didn't bring this home to us, especially as it intersected with Sonia Sotomayor's confirmation hearings, then this week's hoopla over the arrest of Skip Gates certainly made it clear that we have not put race behind us. This case is also about class: not just a black man arrested by a white man, but a prominent university professor facing off with a working-class police officer. Society is a complicated beast. The President has once again showed his political savvy in recognizing that he could help to quell a storm that he had (probably inadvertently) helped to stir up, but his original comments are telling both of the ongoing problem and of a kind of change that he has brought in even addressing the issue in such blunt terms. The whole mess of race relations makes me quite sad. Within weeks of my arrival in Chicago, I was spat on for no reason I can discern other than that I was white - in a neighbourhood inhabited by a large white population, as well as a mix of minority populations. Somehow, I couldn't feel angry about it.

That was also the year that I met an older black woman (also named Emily) who, aside from her obvious failure to take a pretty hefty dose of medication, was still labouring under a crushing sense of injury and bitterness. We could be talking about a book or a piece of music, and the conversation would almost invariably turn suddenly to old insults and painful examples of discrimination. So many people can still remember terrible, terrible things, and there was nothing I could do for the older Emily but hear her out, swearing and all. I used to chat with the girls who worked the cash registers at one of the dining halls on campus - one was jealous of my long, straight hair, while I was jealous of the skull that allowed her to shave her head and look stunning; they were proud of me for having rhythm when they played music on quiet Saturday mornings - but the fact remains that white students vastly outnumbered black students and that the only white people working the cash machines were supervisors. Back to that fossilized class divide that preserves the old outlines of slavery. And for all that I deplore the slave trade, I can't wish that I'd never met the people who are descended from slaves. I can't unwish the country's first black president, and I can't wish to rewrite history.


It's tough, this learning from the past.

EDIT: And on that terribly earnest note, I am terribly late!

On Dabbling

I'm delighted to report that this blog now features a gorgeous slideshow of gorgeous, gorgeous western-ness. If you click on the photos, you should be able to view them in larger scale through Picasa. I guess that would also tip you off on how to contact me, should you ever feel an inexplicable wish to do so.

I am also excited about tomorrow's teaching. [Okay, so I started this entry yesterday, and that is now "today's teaching," on which more later.] I am participating in another microteaching session, but this time, I get fifteen minutes. So, we will be talking about Grimm's Law and Verner's Law. The added bonus is that part of my lecture for 7 October (sound-changes and strong verbs) is now planned. The bottom line is that I enjoy teaching anything anybody will let me teach (Latin, Old English, math, palaeography, music, whatever), but I have also made another realization: if I am going to try to do this job for the rest of my life, then I want to be doing research, surrounded by other people doing research, and working with grad students as well as undergrads. In practical terms, this means that I need to be prepared for several years of hard work in jobs that might not be my ideal. More fundamentally, this has required a fresh confrontation with my identity as a dabbler.

It is because I am a dabbler (well, partly because of this) that I didn't attempt to study music as an undergraduate, although it was one of the most difficult decisions I have ever made. It is also because of this that I took a math degree - I satisfied enough requirements on entrance that it allowed me to continue taking all sorts of other courses along the way, which is no mean reward at a place like the University of Chicago. The most potentially disastrous aspect of grad school seemed to me, before I arrived, that I would someday be asked to take the time to become really good at one thing. I wasn't sure that I had it in me, and I think I have shown my true colours by setting out to write a thesis that spans a thousand years. I still can't quite believe my committee fell for it. Oddly, in the midst of it, I think I have actually found a stronger overarching argument about linguistic distance and textual community, and I find it ironic at best that someone like me, unable in the general way to see the trees (let alone the forest) for the knots and twigs, is writing something that I hope to one day turn into a book about a Big Idea.

But being a dabbler carries its share of dangers, nonetheless. While I hope that my interest in a variety of topics is helping me to think broadly about the questions I pose, I cannot deny that I have uneven mastery of the background material for my various chapters. There are many scholars who have brought to their work sufficient breadth that they have revolutionized the thinking across a range of specializations, but that means an awful lot of material to get to know. Even if you know your stuff, I'd imagine that there might still be a lot of resentment. Part of my Wulfstan chapter represents an attempt to scrabble away a bit more at the question of Wulfstanian imitators and how we can (or can't) tell whose was the authority or the voice behind what we read in the manuscripts. Just this morning, I was reading an article where Dorothy Whitelock argues that there probably weren't Wulfstan imitators because his reputation for eloquence was already established by 1002. She cites a letter written by a guy who declined to do some translation for Wulfstan, ostensibly because Wulfstan's style just couldn't be lived up to. I suddenly thought, Gosh, I don't know. Wulfstan's Latin was clearly not as good as Ælfric's Latin, and yet he was a hugely influential man who held ecclesiastical positions of far greater prominence and wrote laws for and advised both Anglo-Saxon and Danish kings of England. Ælfric and all of the other Latinists and exegetes who were stuck in little, backwater abbacies must have really resented Wulfstan. Maybe this poor guy was just tired of being one of the backs on which Wulfstan stood, and so he allowed himself an asinine moment. Bottom line: I hope that with hard work my dabbling tendencies will help me to ask interesting questions, but I know how thin the ice is in some spots. (For example, I have already started thinking about things I want to read or reread between my submission and my defense, and I'm also trying to take note of the questions that I think my examiners should be asking about various parts of my dissertation.)

I have selected a job that I can do without creating severe pain for myself, which is what I feared it would be like to be an organist in a serious way. (Having done more work for money over the last four years in Toronto, I am less certain of this now.) Playing the organ, really practicing something hard, is one of the very few things that makes me think, "Well, I must be a fish because this is obviously water." (Running is also this way, and singing, too.) Sadly, there's more to a job than feeling exhilarated by it. I don't do enough of that kind of practicing, but this makes me wonder what is meant in Gaudy Night by the idea of doing the job you're meant to be doing. I'm not certain that the things I feel I'm meant to be doing correspond exactly to jobs I'm meant to be doing, to careers I'm meant to be pursuing. And so I do not practice enough, because I have another job, and so I am not good enough to go back and be an organist - never was, truth be told.

Fortunately, that other job has so far allowed me to be inquisitive about many different things, and I value that. When I was fretting about making the undeniably selfish decision to begin graduate work in Old English, of all things, I sat down with one of my undergrad profs from UChicago and asked her opinion on the question. She said that her job was to ask tough questions of students and to get them to start asking tough questions. "The fact that you're asking this at all means that I've done my job."

The hard part, of course, is finding the tough answers. It's difficult for me to say that "proper feeling" will not stop me from doing my "proper job," when there is so much amiss in the world, but I suppose that starting with tough questions is just that: a start. I can't promise to ever feel easy in my mind, but I think this is enough to go on with for now.

Machinery

I've always been a bit of a Luddite, deep down, and I am having a severely Luddite moment. Why, when they give me a gadget to do it all automatically, is it so difficult to embed a slideshow from Flickr? I have my set all ready to go, and I have put my user name into the widget, but...those pictures are not mine. My photos feature cacti and mountains, sunsets and le jardin. If anybody spots my stray photos, give a shout!

Grumble, grumble, grumble. I have stayed up late, trying to fix this, but now I am going to bed. In high dudgeon.

In truth, using that idiom makes me slightly more cheerful because it gives me a nice bit of language history to ponder. Not that I have much energy for pondering; I only ran ten miles this morning, but I am exhausted. And so I will droop off to bed.

Page Ten is Rad

I have just started writing my fourth of five chapters (not including the introduction and conclusion), and this is the first one where I have already done a lot of the thinking. Normally, I do a lot of reading and note-taking before I sit down to outline and write, but this time I'm writing about something I've already written about before. So, I've started by writing for a while, and I'll tackle some new readings next week. It is a really fun experience to sit down and know where I want to go in much greater detail than I normally do when I begin to work on a new chapter. In this case, I wrote term papers on Wulfstan for two different committee members, and after producing seven pages of outline for my chapter, I have started revisiting those papers and reminding myself of the some of the details I don't want to forget to deal with in the chapter. So, I admit that my increase to ten pages has been greatly facilitated by that earlier work, but I always like page ten. It gives a comforting little box to tick off in the march towards a chapter, and it's a place where I can see the chapter waving back at me. I especially like it when most of the document is still outline because then I know that I've got enough material for the whole chapter under glass, and all I have to do is start filling in my outline. This approach allows me to attack the chapter piecemeal, in whatever areas I'm thinking about on a particular day, and since I've already slotted those areas into the overarching structure of the chapter (at least as I anticipate it), I can tell roughly to what I need to connect my piecemeal compositions.

Thoughts to which this leads me, hastily noted down because I'm hungry and want to start my next lunch-book, having completed my last one yesterday:

* There's a good, long history of using a track or trail as a metaphor for gaining knowledge (following in people's tracks, etc.), but I was just rereading yesterday some stuff about Alfred's specific use of the metaphor of a hunt. I suppose that I have just characterized my chapter outlining as a hunt, at the end of which I have pounced on the material and put it "under glass."

* I suddenly have a vision of what could be very satisfying about being a grown-up academic who has done this long enough to have ideas already floating around, ready to be followed up when the opportunity arises. My goodness, does this mean that there might come a time when I feel only minorly incompetent? What a thought.

* I really enjoy writing about Wulfstan, and so the challenge of this chapter is going to lie in making the connection to the rest of my dissertation, figuring out how to balance all of the other things I want to say about Wulfstan and about CCCC 201 with my larger dissertation argument about linguistic difference and manuscripts that invite later engagement.

* The other difficult thing will be to make sure that it goes from being a chapter about (Ælfric and) Wulfstan to being a chapter about Ælfric and Wulfstan.

Loose ends

After my last post, I feel that I should perhaps clarify: It's not that I have never talked about such things with professors, but there's a limit to what can be asked of people. I also feel, rightly or wrongly, as if the pressure to present a grown-up persona is on in a new way with the job search lumbering ever nearer. I am also, of course, very grateful for my good friends at the Centre, with whom I may speak more frankly. It's just that sometimes the older, wiser touch is appreciated.

The promised future posts *are* coming. (I know, you've been on tenterhooks this whole time!) But I'm not staying up late to try to deal adequately with any of those topics right now. I have had the sleeping sickness for quite some time now, and I am trying to lay that to rest. (Ahem.)

I had an interesting conversation with a friend about how I have not found my voice for this blog. I also have not found the font for this blog, and it doesn't help that the same font looks so different in different operating systems. Same browser, different OS. Eventually, all of this will settle into place.

Sweet dreams, kids.

Speaking of patriotrism

This is the kind of topic that I normally leave very carefully offline and indeed only discuss in person when I believe that I know exactly what the feelings in the room will be. Whether that is cowardice, fastidiousness, or peacemaking, I have never known.

Even in the months before September 11th, but particularly in the years following, I was deeply uncomfortable with what seemed to be the prevailing rhetoric in the States. It seemed that the only way to be patriotic was to declare, "America is the best! America is infallible! Stand aside!" I don't understand how I can be more patriotic than to say that we have the potential to be so much better and to always improve, but this appears very threatening to many people, and as I said, I don't discuss it much, although I think I am very patriotic.

This post is not actually about patriotism as such, but this quandary of not quite feeling like I can speak freely about something that demands real thought and earnest discussion is also how I feel about academia. I don't want this post to get too long, but let me briefly say that I don't see how I can do better justice to academia and to a possible career in it than to thoroughly question my motives and what, if any, justifications there are for acting on those motives. But even in this blog, I do not feel comfortable laying bare the tangles that are awaiting my attention. Speaking to my professors is always tricky because it requires quite a lot of trust, particularly if it's someone who might be about to write me a letter for job applications. *I* think it's important for me to interrogate myself, to struggle and be aware that I have an escape pod, but some of my mentors have given me reason to believe that I should not be too frank in sharing my feelings about academia. Some of them have not, of course, but that doesn't mean that it's always fair to commandeer office hours for such things, and sometimes, they have their own needs that do not allow them to devote 24 hours of every day to their jobs, let alone to the parts of their jobs that involve their students. And that is right, because the whole point of my struggle is that the job cannot be allowed to consume other joys, other struggles, places of rest, and (crucially) other people in our own private lives or in the world.

That is not how I want that paragraph to end, but I feel like I have lost the thread of it somewhere. Sometimes, it's good to lose the thread of your expectations and discover what the paragraph is really about, but I am certain that I've lost track of the important part. I will hope to find it in my future post on dabbling, practicing Bach fugues on the organ, and falling back into Gaudy Night at what is either the exactly right or the exactly wrong time.

Oh, dear, am I going to be able to steel myself to leave this post up? Well, I will see how long I last.

C'est la fin des haricots!

Just for Bastille Day. Funnily enough, when I went online to celebrate my completion of the index for a 420-page book (oof!), everyone was playing that "Pick up the nearest book, go to page 56, and write down the fifth sentence" game. Out of curiosity, I did the same, and the result is not as irrelevant to Bastille Day as I might have expected:

"On pense particulier à son article 'Mourir pour la patrie (Pro Patria Mori) dans la pensée politique médiévale', dans lequel l'historien analyse un aspect essential de cette référence: être l'absolu au nom duquel un pouvoir peut exiger la mort de ses sujets."

This is from Béatrice Fraenkel, La signature: genèse d'un signe, which I picked up after one of my committee members referred me there so that I could prove that the early moderns (fabulous as they undoubtedly were) did not pioneer the collapse/confusion/canny rhetorical juxtaposition of "monument" with "muniment." The interesting thing is that I'm not sure this is the connection that is at stake in what I'm writing about. I think - I think - that what I'm most immediately concerned with is the association of books or documents with monuments, that first link to a physical object and one, moreover, that is about maintaining some kind of collective memory. It is probably a sign of an unsound scholar to be so hung up on this, but I can't escape Matthew Parker's statement that his Anglo-Saxon types would "renew for you the memory of that ancient and once familiar language."

There is a tension between Parker's statements like this or all of the times when someone refers to books or texts as monuments and the way that Parker treated the manuscripts he got his hands on. The physical objects were not treated as monuments that ought to be preserved in the way that modern conservators would preserve a medieval book. Instead, Parker had no qualms about separating, joining, erasing, annotating, and generally manhandling his books. So, the "monument" he's after must not be the physical form of the book, right? And yet Parker was determined to use the script of Old English manuscripts (a feature of their particular form) for his printed editions and to passionately defend this as a way of demarcating and memorializing an Anglo-Saxon past that included texts in both English and Latin - even the Latin text of Asser's Life of King Alfred, which was not, so far as we know, written in Anglo-Saxon minuscule, was printed in Parker's Anglo-Saxon types. This gets right to the heart of the question, what is preservation. Either Parker was a two-faced, lying cad, or else "preservation" meant something different to him and other early modern library-builders than it does to us. I am inclined to side with Jennifer Summit on this one, but this is not the place for me to embark on my explanation about diachronic textual communities.

Now, the further link with muniments (fortifications, ammunition) becomes really interesting when I stop and think about Parker's suggestion that learning your way around the "Saxon" typeface will also help you learn Irish (written in Insular scripts, after all), which will be useful for the Elizabethan state: anyone "engaged in any duty of embassy or entangled in any other way in the affairs of the island" will be able to extend knowledge of these characters to knowledge of the language. Recalling that the link did not originate with Parker, is it nevertheless safe to suggest that this is one of the ways in which his monuments become muniments? What about the fact that Parker saw his editorial work as fortifying the Anglican church? That may be flogging a dead horse. Dead horse or not, I clearly need to think more on this.

He might as well have worn a .45 on either hip

I was so excited last night that I could hardly sit still thinking about it, anticipating my first teaching experience with math since completing my undergraduate math degree. I love teaching math. This time, it was only for a five-minute microteaching exercise, but still! Since I only had five minutes at my disposal, I taught them the story about Andrew Jackson that helps you memorize the first fifteen digits of the decimal representation of e. (You know: e.*) I was relieved that they actually got into it and enjoyed the storytelling aspect of the lesson-ette. I am not, ultimately, very good at math--that's why I'm in grad school for medieval studies, not mathematics--but I will never understand how people can see it as dry. So, I guess I'm pleased that one girl said that it was nice to have someone take as dry a topic as you can get and make it exciting, but it's still a little sad. And yet, that's part of what I love about teaching math, knowing that I can actually be useful in that particular way. What a shamefully self-centred reason that is for loving something, but I do love it. About a month or so back, I said to my supervisor, "I can't tell you how excited I am to be teaching math again," to which he retorted, "Don't tell me!" I guess I should get that dissertation finished up instead.

But don't imagine that I'm going to let math escape from my medievalism.


*I actually think that Wikipedia's article is better at breaking up and arranging the material for people to look at, although I do not claim to have checked their stuff. Should this be an embarrassing admission? I suspect that more and more of what appears on Wikipedia is pretty well vetted by relatively expert people, though I still caution my students against citing internet sources where no authority can be verified and no identifiable individual or institution will take credit for the content.

EDIT: I wonder if part of people's aversion to math, even when it is expressed in terms of yawn magnitudes, might not be related to the fear and sense of inferiority that is so prevalent. How often do we simply need to feel a sense of competence before we can register interest? Or how often do we take refuge in accusations of "boring!" when we feel inadequate? These are sobering questions to direct at myself.

A Toe in the Water

I am not yet certain that I am a blogger. In fact, I have a sneaking suspicion that I am not, but I am going to give it a shot. I have kept a daily journal since I was twelve years old, and I am also contemplating the place of that habit in my life. One major advantage that journaling (by which I mean writing by hand in a smallish codex) has for me is that I prefer the act of writing by hand on a piece of paper, as well as reading off of a surface other than a computer screen. (I also love to write proper, snail-mail letters.) Writing in my journal every night is a mechanism by which I decompress after a day spent in being "on," a time to calm myself enough that I'll be able to lie down and sleep. I do not always reflect very profoundly on my experiences and thoughts, and a good deal of the benefit seems to lie in the dedication of that time as quiet and private. I sometimes use my old journals as ways of fixing dates and events, but another benefit I've seen myself really embracing in the last couple of years is the chance to plan my life a little bit. Sometimes (quite often, in truth), this involves writing out a list of things to be done the next day and thinking about logistics and the ordering of that list. I also record longer-term plans in various formats, and I think that, for me, this is part of that decompression, being able to lie down with a quiet mind. I am comfortable altering plans, but I always find that I prefer to alter, even drop, plans and think on my feet *after* I've considered things and established priorities, rather than to simply improvise with no sense of what is most important to me or where I'm ultimately trying to get to. So, this aspect of my journal time has become important, almost eclipsing the more obvious purpose of reflecting on what has already passed.

So, where does a blog fit into all this? If it has any purpose for me, then that purpose must surely involve the opportunity to think through ideas in a forum where I must be ready to receive feedback. Even if no one ever reads any post on this blog, I will think differently about the coherence of my thoughts than I tend to in my journal. For me, that will be useful, in of itself, because I struggle to produce whole, readable drafts of, well, anything: chapters, articles, you name it. I hope that I am getting better at very, very short pieces, like abstracts, but even then, my record of acceptance is not stellar.

Another benefit of a blog is the potential for a sense of communal participation. I have, only partly through neglect and rather more than that through conscious choice, come through grad school without using a carrel at all. This means that I am always sitting in some public place or other on campus, every day. So, I do see people, even good friends, on a regular basis, but there is another kind of isolation that sets in once you begin working towards the qualifying exam and then the dissertation completion. Intellectual isolation, if you will. I struggle with the loss of the chance to talk through (or listen to others talk through) readings and ideas, as I had in seminars. Part of this is related to the reasons I find it so difficult to write complete pieces: I process things more in terms of wide-ranging, instinctively formed connections, not generally as logical threads that can be followed. Or perhaps it's like the grandmother Irene's thread in The Princess and the Goblin, which does not always seem to be leading to where it's going - for I usually manage to get there eventually, but, my word, it's painful. (I am not suggesting that no one else struggles with this, but I will not presume to speak beyond my own experience.) So, conversation allows me to do quite a bit of following (even if much of it is embarrassingly inarticulate) without having to have already imposed essay-style order on anything I'm thinking about.

Another reason that I struggle with this loss is simply the feeling of isolation. Suddenly, there is no built-in chance to talk about what I'm doing, to just be another person who's reacting to texts ("texts" used broadly to cover just about anything), and feeling and thinking like a human being. I love my committee, three fantastically talented scholars who are all assertive and opinionated, but I feel like I have to be really stuck before it's okay for me to go to one of them and say, "Here's this thing I've been thinking about, and I wonder if we could talk it through for a bit here." You can imagine how often I'm willing to impose like that. It just kills me, wishing I had an excuse to make an appointment, just to chat about intellectually interesting things. So, perhaps this blog will allow me to feel that I can still engage with others before I have to present my polished arguments for assessment. (Does anyone else find that by the time you get your ideas down in some kind of finalized form, you are no longer sure, if you were even sure to begin with, whether or not you believe them? I am fearful that this sensation will endure throughout my entire career.)

All right, I've convinced myself to at least try another post or two. Future topics: how the Truth of the universe lies in distance running, the need for disciplinary multilingualism, and why medievalists should do math, too.

EDIT: Another probable future topic: Why I fear that a blog encourages a narcissism I need no help cultivating.