E., to me, as I balanced precariously on the living room couch, reaching to get yet another Farscape DVD out of his computer:
“You got something you want to do with that disk, or are you just gonna wave it around?”
Good Monday morning.
To my Boston peeps
What better way to start off your Saturday (that’d be tomorrow) than a panel at the New England Modern Language Association conference, at which yours truly will present a scintillating paper on the Virtual Humanities Lab?
Seriously, it’s a great paper. It is totally accessible (not full of jargon), it’s fun to read, I imagine it’s fun to listen to, and it really is a great project. The session runs from 8:30 to 9:45am, which I assume automatically precludes 99% of the locals reading this from going, but it’s worth a try. Afterwards, you can go get caffeinated beverage of choice! Greet the day! Rah!… okay, I’m done.
If you’re interested in the rest of the session, go here and do a find for my name.
The Hyatt Regency Hotel Cambridge is that ziggurat-looking thing by the river, 575 Memorial Drive. We’ll be in a room called Thomas Paine A. It’s on the first floor.
Food for thought
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.
Drugs are good, mmkay?
Note to self: for the Nth time, when taking mood-altering drugs,* would you just please remember to take them at the right time in the day? Like, morning instead of 5pm?
Jeez. How long does it take to learn?!
*Thank you, modern medicine, for this relatively pleasant winter.
fe.male
Just spent a few minutes in the car listening to today’s Talk of the Nation on NPR. The topic is, why are there so few female voices in political journalism? The answers are, of course, complex, and the issue extends far beyond political journalism.
And a thought occurred to me, as I’m writing a paper to present this weekend at a conference: I tend to quote men. It’s true. Like most other people, I have an implicit bias towards men when it comes to giving automatic credibility to expressed opinions or published research.
Not getting into the whys and hows of this issue, nor indeed into whether it’s a problem (after all, there is more writing authored by men in the first place). But I’m going to make a conscious effort to cite more women over the next few conference papers, and see what happens. I’m curious as to whether I can actually find enough such citations to get to a 50-50 ratio.
Goodness, but time flies.
I’ll come back to the blog someday. Hopefully someday soon. For the moment, life is full of life!
I leave you with this poem. Safe for work, natch. I wish I knew who wrote it.
Edit: Fixed URL. It works now.
Nuked organic spinach with olive oil and salt.
Now that’s happiness.
Wonderful spinach, too: soft, moist and flavorful. Hard to believe it had been [flash-?]frozen. Another reason to *heart* Trader Joe’s, where we’ve started going for obscene amounts of food each time, since it’s all the way in Boston. The chest freezer was so, so worth it.
Reconnected with an old friend after a decade’s worth of silence, more or less imposed by me. It’s strange to be in that phase of the email exchange when you’ve already established that you had the right email address, but no substantive conversation has yet happened. I felt strongly about him, back when we were on the same continent and for a long while after. There are some things that I couldn’t take, and so I stopped writing letters; but the memory of him has stayed with me, vivid and inextricable and compelling and good.
And now we’re suspended: how have we both changed in each other’s eyes?
And how will I deal if the answer to either is “no change at all”?
Question for Seattleites.
I’m going to this conference in June. Thanks to the grant, travel is reimbursable, but only to a point; and it seems much less expensive to fly into Seattle and take the clipper ferry than to fly all the way to Victoria. However, the scheduling exigencies of flying to Seattle mean that I’d probably have to stay there overnight on 6/14 (Tuesday, and I’d be taking the 7:30am ferry on Wednesday) and 6/18 (a Saturday). At this point I don’t know how late things will run on Saturday the 18th, as the full program hasn’t been posted yet; I may have to stay in Victoria and go straight home on 6/19.
So, hypothetically: if I do this, would any of y’all reading this and residing in the Seattle area have crash space? Reward possibilities for hosting me include chocolate, a homecooked meal (you’d have to allow me the run of your kitchen for that), a low-maintenance guest of sunny disposition, my undying gratitude, and/or negotiable.
Working out some more
I’ve slacked some days, but so far I’ve stuck to biking at least 5 times a week. Given my track record with sticking to workout routines, this is pretty satisfying.
More satisfying, though, are the results I’m seeing. Weight loss, yeah, a bit; but also increased endurance. I can bike for a longer distance now, 7 miles as opposed to the 5 I’ve started with. Haven’t been pushing myself to increase the distance until I really felt like it, because that was a way to ensure I’d actually keep working out. The seven miles are getting much easier, today I felt that I could’ve biked for quite a bit longer. But there was work to do.
I want to be Grafton when I grow up.
Anthony Grafton, author of The Footnote: A Curious History, has also written Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800. I’m reading the latter as part of some research into the history of knowledge.
As an aside: there is no article on the history of knowledge in the Britannica, nor is it a Library of Congress category. Wild! The LoC has “Learning and Scholarship — History of,” but that’s different somehow. I can’t put my finger on how, though. Anyone?
Back to Grafton. Here’s the beginning paragraph of one of the chapters in Defenders:
Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man was no headline to excite the Renaissance public; but Amphibian Creates Culture was out of the ordinary even in the sixteenth century.
Well, that’s a good way to get the reader’s attention. Grafton writes so engagingly! You almost forget that he’s a rigorous scholar.
So, arts + sciences = culture, huh? That’s an interesting implicit assertion.
Edit: Holy s**t! Okay, I was too excited about that paragraph above to read any further, otherwise this beginning of the second paragraph would’ve struck me as well: “The fish who gave us civilization appeared at the beginning of the account of Babylonian mythology and history written by Berosus, a priest of Bel, early in the third century B.C.” Oh, so now arts + sciences = civilization! I wonder if Grafton is just being cavalier, or subtly making an actual claim. Given that he’s brilliant, I’d have a hard time believing that this wording was unintentional.
