Monday, November 16, 2009
Thursday, August 20, 2009
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.
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
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.
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.
Tuesday, July 28, 2009
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."
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."
Friday, July 24, 2009
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!
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!
Wednesday, July 22, 2009
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.
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.
Saturday, July 18, 2009
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.
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.
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