travel – Page 2 – Words' End

December 9, 2007

bang on de drum

Friday afternoon I left town just a bit too late, too close to Friday traffic going out of the city along the Pike. That and the slush coming down from the sky made the trip to Inspirit Common in Hadley a two-and-a-half-hour one; good thing that just before leaving I had downloaded some talks by Ajahn Brahm (thanks for the suggestion, Rob, what I’ve heard so far is good).

Together with Emily and Bucky (the friends who own and run the above-linked mind-body-spirit center) and their six-month-old son Kadin, I went to a drum-and-dance event. And for the first time ever I played a djembe in a drum circle, for half an hour or so. It’s a rush! I came in with this tightness in the middle of my chest, which almost worked itself out in the course of trancy dancing to the drums, but it was still there afterwards. Sat down to make rhythms, next thing I know there’s a lightness where the bad used to be. Later on in the evening Bucky said, “It opens up the heart, doesn’t it?” That’s exactly what drumming did for me. I will buy a djembe before I buy an iPhone, and that’s saying a lot.

Driving home late at night, I took the long way along Route 9. On and on and on through endless trees and industrial towns and mist. The road looked like it belonged in Neil Gaiman’s stories.

December 4, 2007

tease, and other travel

Subject line of a spam email: “saskatoon typography festival”. My first reaction: Damn, I want to go!

But, speaking of travel: I’ll be in Chicago 12/27-30 for a conference. I have a hotel room for the nights of the 27th and 28th; does anyone reading this have, or know of, a place I could crash on the eve of the 29th? My plane leaves O’Hare at 9am on the 30th, which means I’ll want to be there by 7:15-7:30ish; so proximity to public transport would be lovely. Bribes of chocolate, genuine Boston saltwater taffy, a drink and/or dinner available.

November 13, 2006

too much jetsetting

I’m so tired of travel.

On Friday I came back from the latest – to Maryland on Tuesday, to give a talk at MITH; and then DC for the Reinvention Center conference. This was my fourth trip in just under two months: the other three were to Nebraska (digital humanities workshop), Fredericton (text-analysis conference) and Chester, Vermont (Readex Digital Institute, which got extensively blogged here). On Tuesday I leave for Chester again, to return on Wednesday after a meeting. This is the blessed last trip for the foreseeable future.

Don’t get me wrong: all the events I went to have been fabulous (see below), and I’m looking forward to going back to Readex. But – and I’ve known this from the start – this is too much travel right now.

The talk at MITH went well. I guess the crowd was a bit diminished compared to their usual; it was election day, and there was a Human-Computer Interaction event precisely coinciding with my talk. Nevertheless, it was a good group, and boy, they really mean it when they call these things “Digital Dialogues.” They jumped right in about five minutes into my talk, and the lively conversation didn’t stop for the next hour and a half or so. I showed the Virtual Humanities Lab and we talked about collaboration, its logistical issues and benefits-vs-drawbacks and ways in which VHL can be made a more friendly collaboration environment. It was great to receive feedback from people not only interested, but way more knowledgeable about the state of the field. It felt easy to be there; they’ve created a great atmosphere both for conversation and for work.

Wednesday I took advantage of MITH’s generous offer to use their “coffeehouse” space for work. That evening I found myself at the downtown Washington hotel where the Reinvention Center conference was to take place in the next two days.

I’ve a ton of notes from that conference. I only got to go because my dissertation director was leading one of the sessions, and asked me to be his session recorder; this way the Center gives a few grad students the opportunity to see what’s going on in research universities around the country, while at the same time getting young’uns to more or less write the proceedings. A more than fair price, I must say.

So I’d been reasonably interested in the conference, but had no idea how useful it would be and how much new information I would get that will be applicable in my near-future work. For one thing, I saw the largest concentration of high-level university administrators that I’ve ever seen before. Not sure what the ratio of administrators (and staff, like librarians) to faculty was, but it felt something like 2:1 or maybe even 3:1, and perhaps 300 people in attendance. (I may be wildly off here. It’s just an estimate.) I’ll have to go over my notes later and perhaps write it up here, if I get to it.

If I get to it. Friday I came back; and yesterday my adored husband took me out for a romantic evening out that stretched well into this morning. I had no idea what we were doing; turned out, we were going to an Ani DiFranco concert. Well, holy shit: I hadn’t been to a concert in a long, long time, and had only seen Ani in concert once. It was a treat. Not only does she rock the the house, but she is touring while quite pregnant, and her happiness with where she is and what she’s doing could be felt all the way at the back bar where we were standing. She had with her a stand-up-bassist and a percussionist with a xylophone and a steel drum and a bunch of other unusual rhythm instruments. Beautiful sound, mostly good crowd, amazing energy.

Then we reconnected over dinner and conversation and general dalliance. This past summer, going into early fall, was difficult for both of us. We both had to reduce and eventually stop taking anti-depressants: welcome to U.S. health care, which left us scrambling for two months (three in Ethan’s case). In the fall we both dove into new work, and have been trying to catch up with each other ever since. Last evening (orchestrated in part by a kind friend – many thanks!) was a badly needed one.

And now… now there’s more work. The final VHL report to the NEH is due at the end of the month. My write-up of our session at the Reinvention Center conference is due at the same time. I’ve got a job app to send out tomorrow, blessedly almost done but still on the to-do list. Tuesday-Wednesday there’s the trip, and my next task for the dissertation is the transcription and encoding of around 600 lines of poetry. Then there’s another fellowship app to get together.

And then there’s the social life, without which Vika gets to be a dull and sad girl. Tonight we were treated by our fabulous housemate to Marie Antoinette the movie, which had an unexpected soundtrack (Aphex Twin!) and was generally not half bad. Monday (tomorrow!) we have a friend visiting. Haven’t seen her in a long long time, so I’m really looking forward to it, and to the inevitable good food associated with the visit.

So what do I do? Instead of getting some sleep I write a long blog entry. Ah well, at least now I have a de facto to do list. There’s more to write about – details of the movie, Sean McMullen’s The Miocene Arrow which I’m enjoying these days, my relationship with the uncertainties of life after May, various anxieties about whether I’ll finish the dissertation in time. But all these can wait. Good night now.

October 5, 2006

Leave it to yet another public gathering…

…to get me blogging again. I hope.

Much has happened on the personal front. For one, I’m back to the PhD gig, writing my dissertation this year. Been kinda re-evaluating this whole blogging thing, but for now I’ll just try to blog the 2006 Readex Digital Institute in scenic (whooboy, is it scenic! seriously) Chester, Vermont.

May 9, 2006

NYC – small gather?

Next Wednesday the 17th I’ll be in New York, to attend the presentation of the Richard Lyman Award to one of my favorite people and an honored mentor, Willard McCarty. If you are interested in humanities computing, work in it, and/or know Willard, come show your support and appreciation, not to mention meet interesting people:

3-5pm Lyman Award recipients lead a discussion of the American Council of Learned Societies’ Report on Cyberinfrastructure in the Humanities and Social Sciences
5-6pm Presentation of the Award to Willard McCarty, Reader in Humanities Computing, Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King’s College London
6-7pm Reception in the Library’s Margaret Liebman Berger Forum

If you’d like to attend, please call Martha at 919.549.0661 ext. 156 to get put on the guest list. (It’s free to attend, but they’d like to know how many people are coming, and if you tell them you’re working on something related, they might be able to introduce you to like-minded souls.)

I’m planning to get there… well, early-ish, not too early. Lunch, anyone?.. 1:30ish, maybe 1ish? Anywhere in the city that (a) has good food and (b) is cheap. After the event I’ll probably be tied up.

September 28, 2005

Summit, evening the first.

I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia at the summit on digital tools for the humanities. It’s almost 10:30pm, I’ve got to catch a 7:30am bus to campus for breakfast and a day of intense work, and I’m jazzed to the point of spinning in the elevator.

The flights were fun, and even flying out of Providence at the ungodly hour of 6am was rewarded by one of those perfectly cloudless full-rainbow-spectrum sunrises. I read and read materials for the summit, and am happy to report that I completed the reading before getting to the hotel. The hotel gave me a warm chocolate-chip cookie upon check-in.

Today was a reception and dinner, followed by the usual greetings and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a computer scientist from U of Toronto. The man knows how to talk. He gesticlated wildly, looking at times as if he was about to leap towards us from behind the podium. He talked quickly and intensely, and yet managed to keep most of the audience.

Here are some points he brought up, rephrased by me; any brilliance is his, flat language would be mine. I haven’t entirely digested all of this, so present it mostly without commentary. Your thoughts, though, would be much appreciated.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Controversial revelation of this talk: computers don’t actually exist. There do exist many devices, but what are they?

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail.

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorse between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (“if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…

That’s it for now. If you’re interested in one or more elements of this, comment and we’ll talk (in comments). I’m too tired to attempt an actual argument. Tomorrow is another day, with more photography and some serious hyperte… I mean, blogging.

June 16, 2005

reflections on nature

Victoria, BC, 5pm on Wednesday June 15th

(that’s yesterday)

I am jet lagged all to hell. First we went two (one?) hours back, from Denmark to Iceland. Then we (I) realized that it just wasn’t going to get dark in Reykjavik at all; it’s close to summer solstice, and we were after all in the land of the midnight sun.

Then we flew from Iceland back five hours to Boston, from whence to Providence by bus in the evening. One full day and two nights at home, and off to Seattle – another three hours back.

So, all in all, nine time zones broken up over several days. My body has stopped trying to figure out what time it is and sort of floats through time and space, alternating between running on fumes, perking right up at random intervals, and threatening to shut down completely with distressing frequency.

In the course of all these travels, nature has been gloriously varied.

Denmark is lush and green, punctuated by vast fields of blinding yellow rape plants, purple and pink and white flowers by random bodies of water, and sky-high sky. Sometimes it’s grey, other times pale blue and whispy white, but it’s always high up above you. Denmark has space and rolling shallow hills and wide wide bike lanes, as wide as for cars! It rained more than I would’ve liked, but such is spring in that part of the world.

Iceland is… like nothing I’ve ever seen. Its volcanic soil clumps up softly. Get out of Reykjavik, and all you see is this clumpy fuzzy rug and a few long narrow highways. Misty geyser steam in the distance, and mountains, volcanoes. SUVs everywhere, but they’re actually useful there, necessary even. Reykjavik is a mish-mash of funky architectural styles, some older, some with a decidedly modern aesthetic, none of them simple copies of mainland-European styles. Public art in the form of swoopy steel statues, as well as courageous men (on horseback or not), proudly green with bronze oxidation.

Boston, oof. Coming back to Boston was like getting into a steam bath against your will and clothed, and not being allowed to come back out. Muggy, oppressive. We spent half an hour or so waiting for the bus underneath a raised road, concrete all around us, beyond it grey pillows of sky so close you almost think you can touch them. Thank the technology gods for air conditioning at home and at work!

Seattle greeted us with mild-mannered evening sun, and for the rest of the evening proceeded to live up to its perpetual “60s, partly cloudy, chance of rain” weather forcast. This morning the sun didn’t wake and show his face until I was on the ferry to

Victoria, which is surprisingly like Denmark in its lush greenness. But it’s also sunny and mild, gorgeous in its pacific-northwest way. The bay where our ferry arrived turned out to be located near beautiful museum buildings and downtown. Lovely walk into town, a bit of shopping, some free wireless net time at the coffee shop where I had lunch but not coffee (see jet lag above), uneventful bus ride to the UVic campus, which is hyoooge and has many,

many

bunnies. ALL OVER. *dies of cute*

(The morning session is about to start. Hooray! I always get so… giddy at ACH/ALLC conferences. Skipped almost all the way to the room.)

May 30, 2005

Honeymoon photos, take one.

They’re up, and I am in big trouble. It’s way, way past bedtime.

May 30, 2005

Best. honeymoon. evar.

It’s 2am in Bergen, Norway. It didn’t really get all the way dark until about midnight.

I meant to blog more extensively while visiting Jill and her mum, since net access from your own laptop is a beautiful thing. But somehow I got sucked into catching up on all my net-reading instead, and… there’s just so much.

Norway has great seafood. Bergen is mountainous and half-hidden in rolling fog, it’s as though they’re living in a cloud. I’ve never been so bruised in my life (biking + sleeping on hard ground afterwards, for days on end), and am loving it. Having a bed to sleep in for the past two nights has been an insane luxury. Jill’s daughter Aurora is the sweetest kid since my nephew. Denmark seems Very Hilly when you’re lugging a heavy trailer behind your bicycle, but is actually Rather Flat. Fjords are gorgeous and unexpectedly (for us and for the locals) windy just when you dedicate an entire day to biking around one. The Danish campsite network is impressive and convenient, but morning pastries overshadow all of that by a mile. Camp stove was superfluous, since most campsites have kitchens. We’ve only actually cooked once, but ate out (including Copenhagen) for about five meals out of more than a week, covering the rest with energy bars and remarkably satisfying supermarket food. Snails and slugs abound and are cute; spiders are not cute but luckily don’t abound either. Cows prance and frolic, I kid you not. The last campsite we stayed at had goats that talked to you, and not one but three of those huge inflatable bouncy trampoline-like pillows that you can flop and bounce on (and we did). Ferries rock, and – Molly and David, I feel like a traitor – Clif Shot energy packets are much tastier than Gu. Or perhaps it’s the texture.

I can feel myself getting stronger. Some biking-relevant muscle groups have gained a surprising amount of definition already.

It’s like a dream. Still a bit surreal, although we’ve been traveling for ten days now. To have and to hold such a brilliant mind and generous, patient, kind heart is a privilege, and isn’t lost on me. We’ve spent more time than I’d expected in companionable silence. At first this felt odd, since usually we can’t stop conversing, but it feels good, so to hell with the usual.

Tomorrow, ferry back to Denmark and ten more days of traveling. Net access from the campsites is spotty, and when it is available, it’s on the camp’s computer, not a wireless connection. (But it blows my mind that it exists in such boonies at all!) I’m internalizing much more than I’m able… well, willing to write. It’s too much effort to write. I’m retreating into my own head again, thoughts of family and humanity and my place in the world whirling like tiny mosquitoes all around me. How do you write about all of this when increasingly your MO is to live fully, day by day?

You don’t, is how. Especially not at 2:30am. Definitely time for sleep. I’ll leave you with a post I wrote on the plane over, many days ago.

—

Wed 18 May 11:01 Copenhagen time

I haven’t blogged much about personal life in a while, mostly due to time constraints. So much to do before honeymoon! I’m happy to say that, for the most part, the sudden rush of work in the last few weeks resulted in some happy developments. Now I just have to remember to pitch VHL’s new toys to some lists, and hopefully gather some interest.

Today is my mom’s 65^th birthday. For her, it’s still yesterday: she’s in Hawaii with a friend. Happy birthday, mom! We’re thinking of you.

I’m writing this on a plane from Reykjavik to Copenhagen. We left home at 4:30pm yesterday, and at 4 I was still doing the dishes. A bit of a rushed feeling persisted, but I noticed an undercurrent of that state whee you just can’t be bothered to do things any quicker, you know? It all worked out, in any case. Taxi to Kennedy Plaza in downtown Providence, on to a bus to Boston’s Logan airport, timed so that we would arrive three hours before our flight left. We figured, we had two heavy and very carefully packed suitcases with bicycles in them. If TSA wanted to check that stuff by hand, there might’ve been trouble: they’re notorious for, well, repacking things in such a way that they get damaged. In an attempt to avoid this, we even taped love letters to TSA agents to the inside of the bike cases, explaining that if they break, our honeymoon will be VERY VERY SAD.

I don’t think they checked us, unless it was behind the scenes. The entire check-in process for Icelandair took about 10 minutes, including standing in line (of which there was none). Perhaps there’s more havoc when it comes closer to a flight, but it was just… so… pleasant. I don’t think there’s an elevated terrorist alert in the northern countries.

And so we left! Zooommm, off on a 9:40pm airplane. Dinner was bad food, but I didn’t care, as I spent most of that flight asleep. Now, post-nap and Reykjavik airport Earl Grey tea ($4.50 a cup) and airline coffee (surprisingly full-bodied and tasty!), I’m wide awake and bouncy. In a couple of hours we’ll be in Copenhagen.

What we saw of Iceland on the descent, and then on take-off, was pretty amazing. Pretty snow-covered mountains, steaming geysers, water so blue. We’ll be there for about a day and a half on the way back, staying in an actual hotel – the only hotel reservation we’ve made the entire trip.

That’s right, no hotel reservations at all in Denmark. We have all the camping gear we need, including over a dozen different spices for cooking: is anyone really surprised? Didn’t think so). The the suitcases in which our bikes are packed turn into trailers (have I mentioned how much Bike Friday rocks? Because they do), and Denmark is flat. It also boasts fifteen or so national bike routes, and a large number of regional ones. Some farmers will let you stay on their land for stupidly low prices. Plus, there are reasonably-equipped camping sites all over. From what we saw, most come with things like showers and electricity, I’m happy to pay a bit more to recharge the laptop. Reportedly, some sites even have wireless access: a geek’s wet dream vacation.

We have… what is it, 24? 28? rechargeable batteries. And the charger, and a laptop, and a digital camera, and Very Bright LED lights for our bikes, and an iPod and an iTrip, and two sets of cheapo radio headphones so that we can listen to the iPod broadcast. [Note at time of posting: this failed to work. Ah well.] And probably other stuff I’m forgetting. (There’ll be photos on flickr, that’s for sure. Watch that space.)

Yeah. Low-tech this trip ain’t. And while we’re on the subject of tech: about a week ago I bought a new battery for my PowerBook, as the old one was dying slowly but surely. Power saving technology sure has come a long way: on the dimmest monitor setting (before it goes totally blank), with the battery settings optimized, we should get something like 5 hours of text editing. Probably less for movie watching and photo handling, but damn. Hoo-ray.

Tomorrow I go to visit Espen Aarseth and his department. Should be fun! [It was! We nattered about the state of humanities computing, games research in Denmark, working and living in Europe, and weather. Which was beautiful.] At the end of the month we’ll take a ferry from Hanstholm, in the northwest of Denmark, to Bergen, Norway and visit with Jill for a while. That, I know, will be awesome. Other than that, we have no set plans, except for a vague itinerary that hits most of the places we would theoretically like to see. But first we have to get used to biking with trailers and panniers full of Stuff. It’s a good thing Denmark is flat.

I’m glad to be out of USA&tm; for a while. There has been a subtle but insidious change in the air over the past several years; the political strife both national and international is taking its toll on the daily lives of everyone around us. Perhaps this has always been the case, and I’m just more sensitive to it now because I’m deeply distressed about the direction the U.S. has taken under Bush Junior. Right now, though, it feels as though with every passing minute I’m shedding another layer of weight I didn’t quite know I was carrying. And it’s not just the feeling you get when you go on vacation after a busy time at work. My soul is more at peace; I feel as though we’re flying toward sanity.

—

Life will take over in quite a hectic and unceremonious manner pretty much the minute we get back. And yet, I feel like this intense traveling experience is about all I can take right now, so I watch the storm of activity rage all around me but keep it at arm’s length, the eye of the storm suspended somewhere in the middle of my ribcage.

February 28, 2005

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.