Words’ End

You’ll notice I’m skipping the eighth prompt. Yeah, that one was a tad too narcissistic for me.

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

What social gathering rocked your socks off in 2010? Describe the people, music, food, drink, clothes, shenanigans.

Three years ago, then-five-year-old Eleanor asked Mark if she could please please PLEASE go to Burning Man. He said something to the effect of, not until you can take care of yourself in the desert; not now, for sure. And she said, we should have Burning Man right here, in our backyard! Thus, BackYard Burning Man was born.

This past summer was BYBM’s third year, and it was soul-warming, all day. Mark and Eleanor, graciously hosting out-of-towners, worked at their place all day. In the afternoon, Rosa and I joined them to do what we do best: help with food (and, secondarily, the rest of the prep). Colorful streamers everywhere; a couple of open tents with gorgeous brightly-colored curtains; crafts for kids and grownups. Beer and big-girl drinks in the coolers; a pot luck of tasty foods; the grill going. My funky food contribution this year were little chocolate cakes made in scooped-out orange shells, wrapped in foil, “baked” on the grill. Campfire cakes, they’re called. Wicked fun! Try it—but do use decent ingredients. We had gluten free chocolate cake mixes and quail eggs, to accommodate some friends who don’t do gluten or chicken eggs, and it came out phenomenal.

A brief aside for Bostonians north of the river: Seabra supermarket in Somerville reliably has good, cheap quail eggs. And a bunch of Latin American foods that make it one of my favorite groceries around here.

Yeah, this isn’t really Burning Man. It’s not even Firefly. There’s a gas grill and modern plumbing. At the last two, there’s been a bouncy castle. (I had no idea how easy it was to rent one!) Really, it’s a mid-summer party. But it’s not just that. For one thing, it was conceived and executed (with help from her dad and friends) by a kid who gets pretty creative with it, I’ll tell ya. There must’ve been two dozen or more children there over the course of the day, and activities involving making things. There was hooping and juggling and belly dancing. In the evening, when most everyone had left, MartinH brought out his guitar and we sang and sang, The Beatles and Paul Simon and I don’t even remember what else. Fairy lights everywhere.

That’s magic I love.

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

Where have you discovered community, online or otherwise, in 2010? What community would you like to join, create or more deeply connect with in 2011?

To my great surprise, I discovered community in my field.

When I went to my first digital humanities conference in 2001, back when it had the unwieldy name ACH-ALLC, I thought I’d discovered community. Perfect strangers sought you out and asked you about your work. Then you asked them about theirs, and next thing you knew, you were spending the many coffee breaks and every evening chatting about text encoding and digital map work and dogs and cooking. Seasoned scholars mentored us whipper-snappers, first informally for several academic generations, then formally through mentoring programs. There’s a vibrant DH presence on Twitter and in the blogosphere.

I’ve felt part of a community ever since then. Even so, work was quite lonely sometimes. Writing the dissertation is inherently lonely. And between graduation and about a year ago, my immediate vicinity was pretty low on DH.

Within the last year, things have shifted. My own horizons expanded: I’m finally comfortable with my place in the digital library world, insofar as anyone with no library degree can be. Digital humanists on Twitter have prompted me to write and think about new DH topics. I disovered DHSI for myself, and met even more brilliant people, among them Julie.

Can hardly wait to start the new job. (On Monday!) The pragmatic (if not explicit) mandate to build community is practically in the job description. And next year, more of the same, please.

And more of my personal community! Which I’d write about here, but it’s late, and I didn’t discover it this year. No, it’s been around for a long time, for me. The whole DH thing, though… still startles me at the end of the year. It’s been a long year, fundamentally a good one! So yes, more of the same, please.

A day late, and what of it?

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

What was the last thing you made? What materials did you use? Is there something you want to make, but you need to clear some time for it?

The last thing I made was dinner for twenty.

I used to self-identify as a person who makes decent-to-great food and feeds it to her friends and loved ones. My most magical, quietly vibrant self manifests in the kitchen.

During and following my excruciatingly protracted divorce, cooking became difficult. Everything was difficult, but cooking was the most surprising—and the most frustrating. I had lost the life that had been there just a moment ago, and with it my most reliable (up to that point) inanimate tool for connecting with the world.

Been getting back to it slowly, lurching a bit back and forth. Still, I go through dry spells. A recent one annoyed me so much that I immediately made plans to cook dinner for twenty.

Honestly, I wish I could afford to do this more often. It was SO MUCH FUN. I spent several days shopping (in like five different places), and a full evening and following day cooking. It was a mezze sort of evening — I made two different bean dips, and a beet something-or-other, and lamb kabobs served as individual meat pieces, and there had to have been something with eggplant. I don’t even remember what else. (Were you there? What did you eat?)

What I took away from it was the laughter and warmth. They did that, some people I love came over and filled the place with light, and all I had to do was have a good time in the kitchen. Everybody wins.

As for something I’d like to make if I only had (made) the time… I’d love to do cross-stitch again. Something gorgeous and symbolic and pagan and shaded.

(Oh! A deviled duck egg salad! As good as deviled eggs, but salad.)

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

How did you cultivate a sense of wonder in your life this year?

For the most part, like I do every year. I hung out with children, looked up at the night sky, learned new things, took different walking paths, watched for patterns. Observed people go about their lives, colliding. I did things to expand my mind, man: nothing like an altered consciousness after a couple of hours’ silent sitting to make you look around anew.

This year, I also floated in a clear turquoise and looked up at the brightly lit sky. Months later, I wandered around the streets of San Francisco, startled to be feeling so at home.

(I’m participating in Reverb 10. You can, too!)

Moment. Pick one moment during which you felt most alive this year. Describe it in vivid detail (texture, smells, voices, noises, colors).

Here’s one I don’t mind sharing.

My sister-in-law Jo Ann and I are driving. We’ve been in Quebec with the rest of the family for several days now, and it… hasn’t been easy. We escaped into twilit Quebec City, saw a random long bridge and took it, and discovered for ourselves Île d’Orléans. It’s every bit as pastoral as travel books say. It’s 34x8km, and there’s a main road going all around it. We drive all around it.

Weather is perfect. Probably about 20 degrees Celsius, a slight breeze. We are driving slowly with the windows open. It’s quiet enough that we can hear the crickets even as the car is moving. Lights here and there, close together enough to illuminate most of the space, but far apart enough that each shines brightly in the dark. Water is all around us, so everything smells like a river; the air is damp but soft and light. Jo and I are quiet, a lull between fits of animated conversation. Every once in a while we pass an inn or a restaurant, and in them white noise of conversations that dissipates as we leave the crowds behind. They’re like wind in tall trees.

It’s bright slate streaked with a pale pale blue, with accents of fading pink and orange and red. Everything is silhouetted.

Some friends of mine are using today as an occasion for making lists of 77 things that… well, you get the idea.

I’m in Sleepy Hollow again, visiting my brother and family (cast of characters, again: Zhenya = brother; Jo Ann = sister-in-law; Tesher = nephew; right now also Jo’s mom Linda, who lives in Maine). Tesher and I stayed up super extra late to make this list.

I gotta say: the things below are stuff external to us. But he’s definitely one of MY 77 things.

(more…)

Recently, Martha Nell Smith was awarded the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award by the University of Maryland, where she teaches. At the second of the above links you’ll find a video of her lecture, given on the occasion of this award, “The Humanities Are Not a Luxury.” In the wake of SUNY Albany’s astonishing decision to cut some key programs—French, classics, Russian, Italian and theatre—Smith talks with humor and a stable sort of passion about the humanities as an essential, indispensable part of what we do and are. Here are some of the things that she says:

There is no frigate, no bus, no plane, no space ship, no car, no train—none of these is like a book, like a song, like an operatic voice, like a painting, like a sculpture, like a drama. To help us imagine other lands and cultures, to help us cultivate that kind of compassion and empathy required for democracy, for practicing equality as a fundamental value, instead of the more primitive ‘better than’.

And also:

We should remind our administrators that the kind of education that enabled broad access to highest quality instruction and research, and made these United States a world leader—that kind of education can never be a gated community. And it must be worldly, reaching beyond any nation-state. Healthy, too, are reminders that business management is really not the best metaphor for knowledge workers. As was noted in a recent article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, a better metaphor for knowledge workers is that of gardener. We work in fields. We cultivate.

What I’ve been pointing out is that unless you’re at home in the metaphor, unless you have had your proper poetical education in the metaphor, you are not safe anywhere. Because you are not at ease with figurative values. You don’t know the metaphor and its strength, and its weakness. You don’t know how far you may expect to ride it, and when it may break down with you. You are not safe in science, and you are not safe in history, unless you are at home with the metaphor.

Smith rejects the rhetoric of a crisis in the humanities, a phrase often uttered. For more on the state of the humanities, see Stanley Fish’s recent NYTimes opinion pieces: “The Crisis of the Humanities Officially Arrives” and its sequel, “Crisis of the Humanities II.” I find it more than a little odd that not once does Fish mention digital endeavors of any kind, but can’t say I’m surprised. He didn’t mention them two years ago when asking whether the humanities would save us, either. I don’t subscribe to Fish’s opinions, but the articles and comments on them are thought provoking. Martha Nell Smith’s lecture, on the other hand, I heartily endorse. It’s well worth the hour and ten minutes it’ll take to watch the video.

I came into work early today, and am taking some time to watch Martha Nell Smith‘s Distinguished Scholar-Teacher lecture titled “The Humanities Are Not a Luxury: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century,” given this month at UMD. I love listening to Martha Nell talk: her perceptiveness and her wicked sense of humor are a good in the world. So, as much as I wish there were a transcription of the lecture, I think the video is worth watching, and recommend it. (The lecture proper starts around minute 11-12.)

Meanwhile, though, have a quote from Audre Lorde:

For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

I’m in New York this weekend, visiting with family. Tesher is ten this year, lanky and giggly and energetic and sometimes a little… loud. You know, a ten year old. He loves BB guns, and also loves making art — painting and drawing are his favorites — and he’s getting to be pretty good at it.

Tonight we watched the first Matrix movie. He’d never seen any of them. His mind: blown, of course.

Got to the scene wherein Trinity asks Tank to load her up with the knowledge she needs to fly a particular model of helicopter. Tesher, by this point, is bouncing up and down and cheering. He’s agape at the implications of this one, though. An the first thing he says, imagining himself in the midst of the action, is: “‘I want to paint like Matisse!’ — boom!!!”

Yes, kid. You are, in fact, awesome.

Seasonal changes, for the most part.

Many of my friends are busily packing for Burning Man. I’m not going this year, and it’s the right decision, and mostly I prefer it to going (this year), but damn, I miss the playa.

Today I experienced a full-on blood sugar crash for what might have been the first time ever. Martin said, when I got home, “Wow! Congratulations on going this long without!” Honestly, I can do without ever experiencing this again. The 25-minute walk that was the beginning part of my after-work commute ended in me entering the T station, shaking. The train came pretty much immediately, and by the time I got out at Davis three stops later, I couldn’t see or think straight. The ten-minute walk from there to my house was unthinkable, so I sat at a cafe and ate a croissant. And then another one, this time filled with sweet cheese for more fat and sugar. Then I walked home, and felt vaguely week by the time I got there.

What the hell? I hadn’t starved myself today, far from it. I was a bit low on carbohydrates, but not that low. But maybe it just wasn’t my day. Twenty minutes ago I dropped a laptop power supply on my toe; my allergies have been acting up; and mere moments ago a tree fell down right outside my window. It would’ve fallen on top of my car, except Martin was borrowing it to transport some heavy paper objects and moved it a few minutes prior.

I’m going to sleep now. Please don’t let the world blow up in the next few hours. And please let me successfully fight off this cold by morning.