Words’ End

Woke up a few times in the night (our own fault, starving the poor kitty of both food and attention for hours!), then definitively at 5am – which was fine, since I’d fallen asleep before 9pm.

Had a beautiful, lazy morning in bed with my love.

Drank coffee, also in bed.

Took a shower.

Took him to the bus that goes down to Kingston, RI where the main URI campus is.

Came back, had breakfast. Cottage cheese is a superb carrier for nutritional yeast, if you’re into savory breakfasts.

And now it’s 8:15 and I’m about to sit down working. It’s quiet and light. Bliss!

Re-reading my previous long post about Burning Man is strange. I feel like I’ve lost my facility with language, especially as compared to a couple of years ago when I took that nonfiction writing workshop. Time to find a writing voice again.

As part of getting back into Roland, I’m reading about Pierre Riché’s The Carolingians (Michael Idomir Allen, trans.). Very well written, one of those academic books that read more novelistic. And oh, this is why his name was familiar! He also wrote Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, translated by Jo Ann McNamara, which I came to own by a fluke (probably the booksellers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress) and loved as well.

Was just talking to Cam Fraser, cool guy I met in Alberta at a graduate students’ humanities computing conference a few years ago. This is sort of a memo to self, but is also a great example of how THE INTERNET has changed the academic life. Multitask by chatting while writing a conference paper, get idea for a totally different thing, record it, go on. I *heart* these moments.

Cam: have you thought about bringing your cooking into your academic work?

me: Nnno. But it sounds like fun. How would you suggest I go about this?

Cam: boy, I have no idea.

me: drat.

Cam: Maybe something to do with bodies…

Cam: I’m thinking of the scene in “Woman on Top” where she’s smelling a chile and ends up cutting herself

me: hmmmm

me: Seriously, though: hm. Maybe I should take a look at how people (the *general populace*) procured and consumed food over the ages. It’s gone from a communal thing to a family thing and back so many times, I wonder if it’s correlated with the amount of cultural transmission that goes on.

Hmmm, indeed. Raw, but interesting.

Jenna Wells, a student at McMaster, is presenting a site that hadn’t been on my radar previously, but is actually somewhat similar in concept to Roland^HT. The site, written entirely in French, is Hyperlistes, and treats a body of medieval French poetry. Apparently, listing things in your poems was a popular thing to do; the project’s participants have encoded items in these lists and cross-referenced them by theme. Nifty.

EDIT, with notes to self: just talked to Madeline Jeay, originator and brain behind Hyperlistes. She mentions that street poets in Brazil did something called poésie de cordel, in which… I think they hung sheets of paper off of ropes in sequence and then sang the songs. Or something. I must research this further, because Madeline seems to remember some of those stories being about Roland. She says that Paul Zumthor’s Introduction a la poésie orale may mention it; she vaguely remembers Zumthor talking about it when she studied with him. (!)

All I wanted was to have all of the tags I’ve used so far in a project (in multiple files) at my disposal in drop-down lists in oXygen.

Problem is, while oXygen is great at learning all of the elements and their attributes you’ve used so far in a single document, this knowledge cannot be easily shared between documents.

Creating a DTD turns out to be impractical, because then I cannot easily add new elements to it.

The solution was, as usual, simple: with each new file I create, I include all of the previous files into it as entities. This way, oXygen sees all of the elements I’ve used thus far, and has no trouble learning new ones. When I’m done editing the newest file, the entities referring to other files are wiped.

This makes editing so much easier!

Halley questions the week’s seven-day length, and I for one am with her. Actually, it’s more that April (well, post-friends’-wedding last weekend really) is one continuous work stint.

You know, I like it. It’s liberating. I don’t get to ignore laundry or bills or my teaching for too long; but most tasks can be put off if they need to be – and these days there are tangible results after every encoding stint, spurring me on. This, these days right now, is when I get to actually say what I’ve been waiting so long to say about the Roland corpus. I say it by putting angle brackets around my argument. By this coming weekend, I’ll have enough encoded that we can start playing with the semantic patterns that emerge. It’s been a long time coming, but now that it’s less than a month to presentation, the work is flying, exhilarating. I feel focused, and remember once again why I love my work so much.

Goodness, I’m blogging queen for the day. Enjoy it while it lasts; you and I both know it won’t for long…

I’m confused. Robespierre, the French revolutionary-turned-apparent-dictator who was guillotined when the people had had enough. You know what I’m talking about. Well, S. T. Coleridge, in the third act of his “The Fall of Robespierre,” has Barrere making a speech. Here’s part of that speech:

…When the tyrant
Hurl’d from his blood-cemented throne, by the arm
Of the almighty people, meets the death
He plann’d for thousands. Oh! my sickening heart
Has sunk within me, when the various woes
Of my brave country crowded o’er my brain
In ghastly numbers—when assembled hordes,
Dragg’d from their hovels by despotic power,
Rush’d o’er her frontiers, plunder’d her fair hamlets,
And sack’d her populous towns, and drench’d with blood
The reeking fields of Flanders.—When within,
Upon her vitals prey’d the rankling tooth
Of treason; and oppression, giant form,
Trampling on freedom, left the alternative
Of slavery, or of death. Even from that day,
When, on the guilty Capet, I pronounced
The doom of injured France, has faction reared
Her hated head amongst us. Roland preach’d
Of mercy—the uxorious dotard Roland,
The woman-govern’d Roland durst aspire
To govern France; and Petion talk’d of virtue,
And Vergniaud’s eloquence, like the honeyed tongue
Of some soft Syren wooed us to destruction.
We triumphed over these. On the same scaffold
Where the last Louis pour’d his guilty blood,
Fell Brissot’s head, the womb of darksome treasons,
And Orleans, villain kinsman of the Capet,
And Hébert’s atheist crew, whose maddening hand
Hurl’d down the altars of the living God,
With all the infidel’s intolerance.

I can kind of see the reference… I think. Roland, in the Italian-connected cycle, is bewitched by a Pagan princess from China, and more or less travels the entire known world in search of her, madly in love. He’s blinded by a woman, etc.

But was Robespierre? I can’t find any information on him that would make the uxorious-dotard lines make sense. Nevermind that a French historical character making wholly disparaging reference to Roland is in itself more than a little strange. Help?

EDIT 23.47: Oh! It was Madame Roland. THAT explains it. From the Britannica:

(1754�93). The wife of a French politician during the French Revolution, Madame Roland greatly influenced the policies of the moderate Girondist faction of the revolutionaries. The Girondists professed moderate republican views and opposed the excesses of the more radical party.

Jeanne-Marie Phlipon was born in Paris on March 17, 1754, the daughter of an engraver. An avid reader, she absorbed the democratic ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and other 18th-century French philosophers. In 1780 she married Jean-Marie Roland de La Plati�re. He was a government official who afterward became a leader of the Girondist party.

When the French Revolution came, Madame Roland became the intellectual leader of a group of young enthusiasts who gathered in her salon. Her visitors included the famous and ill-fated leaders of the Gironde. At first even Maximilien Robespierre and Georges Danton, leaders of the opposing Jacobins, belonged to her circle.

So, this isn’t my Roland at all.

You may have heard (or read) my impression of the Roland legend’s German incarnation. Pfaffe (Priest) Konrad, sometime in the 12th century I think, translated the French Song of Roland into German, at the request of a wealthy patron. He did not pass on the opportunity to pepper the text with, literally, pages of moralistic sermon: “Oliver asked Roland again to blow his horn, and again Roland refused, and WOE TO HIM THAT IS TOO PROUD TO CALL FOR HELP FOR GOD WILL” etc.* So, okay, I thought; the Germans more or less knew the legend as the French had conceived it, with few changes except to make a religious martyr bordering on fanatic out of Roland. Seemed to make sense: in the days of yore, specifically during Charlemagne’s reign, both France and Germany were under his direct rule; and so the legend should be more or less the same, right?

Tutt’altro, as the Italians say. There’s a whole ‘nother thing.

A Google search reveals that the Roland-of-Rolandseck legend seems to exist in many versions. Here’s one whose wording I like. The “this” refers to Rolandsbogen, or Roland’s Bow, the stone window shown in the image. It stands on the Rhine, not very far from Bonn, in an area called Rolandseck (Roland’s Corner).

   This is all that remains of the fortress that was built as a toll castle by the archbishops of Cologne in 1100. After the “Rolandsbogen” collapsed in 1840, its restoration was paid for by public donations.
   According to the legend Sir Roland, a knight, built the castle for his bride, Hildegund, the daughter of the Knight of Drachenfels. Roland went off into battle against the Saracens and Hildegrund learned of his supposed death. She went into retreat at the convent on the Rhine Island of Nonnenwerth, and when Roland came home, he was heartbroken. Every day he looked out of his bow window at the convent and when Hildegund died soon after, they found him dead as well – at his window.

So, to sum up: the German legend retains the bit about Roland dying at Rencesvalles, but disregards it as rumor that is in fact untrue. Instead, Roland dies of lovesickness, staring out the window at the convent across the water, in which his beloved is wasting away in the name of love and Jesus.

*That isn’t an actual quote.

I have got to go to Belgium.

In a bellfry, in Ghent, there is a bell called Roland. According to one work of fiction, the inscription on it reads: My name is Roland. When I tell, there is a fire; when I peal, there is a tempest in Flanders. Longfellow wrote a poem about it.

Here’s a fun bit. Sometime just after World War II, Luigi Dallapiccola wrote a short opera – set in sixteenth-century Spain – titled Il Prigioniero (The Prisoner). (Click on the link for a plot summary.) An interesting addition to the Roland corpus, in its odd but unmistakeable parallel to the French Song of Roland. To wit: our knight is the champion of Christendom, whose heart’s desire is to deliver every heathen from their wicked ways by word or steel. Well, okay, mostly steel. Obviously, he fails to do that for the Pagans that kill him. The same pagans whom Charlemagne had just previously besieged for seven years in the Spanish city of Saragossa, the last Pagan stronghold in Europe.

Centuries later, the prisoner finds himself in that same city, and Roland the Ghent bell fails to deliver him from a most evil expression of Christianity.

I did a double-take at that one, but it’s there. I’m wary of trying to see connections where there ain’t none, so this is probably where I’ll stop with The Prisoner. Still, very cool.

Ethan and I have been talking a lot about the kind of xml editing environment that is available out there for free, or cheaply (read: to academics). I’m becoming more and more convinced that there isn’t yet a good editor for what I’d like to do. iBoggle at this! What I’d like to do is relatively simple, compared with the wild and crazy things people do with XML nowadays.

1. I’d like to edit documents without a DTD. While I’m encoding a file semantically, which constitutes research, I can’t have a DTD in place by definition, until I’ve encoded the document (possibly several times). Thus, I don’t care if myfile.xml validates against a pre-set DTD. I only care whether it’s well-formed.
2. I’d like to be able to highlight text, and with a keyboard or mouse shortcut call up a menu of all the elements I could possibly use at this point in the document, based on the elements I’ve used thus far. Once an element is inserted, it would also be grand to get a menu of the attributes used in it up until now. In both cases, there should be an option to add a new element or attribute.
3. I’d like to be able to view the thing in different modes – a full-on text mode, with all of the source right there, and perhaps a more wysiwyg mode, in which the cursor’s position would trigger a display of what element(s) I’m in at the moment, somewhere on the side.
4. I’d like for the editor to then be able to extrapolate a DTD from my code, if I ask it to do so. Or tell me exactly why it can’t.

This is the wish list so far. Of all the editors I’ve seen, only XMetaL and <oXygen/> have half-way decent interfaces. The former is only available for Windows. The latter is excruciatingly uncustomizeable, or else the Windows version is different from that made for the Mac, or else-else, the trial version does not include all the features of the full version. While that last option seems more probable the more I play with oXygen, documentation didn’t bother to mention it, and I spent so much time beating my head against it, that frankly, I’m not inspired to pay the $48 for an academic license. Moreover, the feature I want most – being able to quickly surround text in tags based on the tags I’ve used so far in the document – is wildly unreliable. If I create a new element, the program will not see it until I close and re-open the document; and even then, at any given point I get a seemingly arbitrary list of available elements.

Enough bitching, I just wanted to formulate all of this in writing while I’m in the middle of it. If anyone knows of an already-existing program that does what I want to do, let me know!

It’s International Women’s Day. Happy 8th of March!

Despite the lack of updates, it’s been an eventful month. I gave a talk at a brown-bag seminar at, well, Brown; and it went remarkably well. Ethan moved here from Seattle, which consumed us logistically for a week or two but, oh, is worth it. Both my work and my personal well-being are much improved.

Entirely selfishly, I am giddy to have access to both a ricemaker and a breadmaker now. Oh, and a wok. These implements of culinary creation, coupled with finding a couple of excellent Southeast Asian markets around Providence, have rather shaken up my daily diet in the best of ways. Incidentally, as long as you stay away from Thai Kitchen brand anything, I cannot recommend mamster’s Thai curry highly enough. Actually, here: take a look at his other food writings. They are as amusing as they’re informative.

E. and I have successfully (“victory!!”) collaborated on writing a paper abstract, which was submitted too late to be considered for a conference session, but we’ll find a venue for it. We continue to talk about the logistics of Roland^HT and I am hopeful for the project, if a little frustrated by not dedicating quite enough time to it. This last one should improve now that the exciting double-appointment, Italian-and-Comp-Lit faculty search is over. Amongst the applicants are a couple of really excellent women, and I fervently hope that one of them will join us.

I have begun to teach Italian to RISD students. They’re a trip, complete sweethearts, and that priceless combination of razor-sharp and willing to throw themselves into conversation in a language they barely know. It’s a really fun gig, and although it’s technically a distraction from what I should be doing (*cough* dissertation *cough*), it’s actually great for my own morale.

Tomorrow evening, I go in for a sleep study. That’s exciting! Perhaps we’ll find out why I become sleepy, regardless of how rested I am, if I sit in one place for too long. Becomes a bit of a problem when spending long hours at a computer, or, say, driving to Boston…

The weather had been improving until the weekend. Saturday it rained and rained; Sunday it was sunny and gorgeous; and today, it is snowing again. But the days, they are getting longer; and my mood is definitively on an upswing. We’re full of activity over here. I keep noticing little things and mentally filing them in the “to blog” category, and… well, you know.

Earlier this morning, right around 6:30, a skunk waddled across our neighbors’ backyard. It was light already, so either it spaced on the whole hide-in-daylight thing, or it was rabid. Cute.