Conferencing la la la

I'm at a nice, young conference, in a lovely East Coast city. It's been incredibly busy but basically a lovefest. I get to see my dear friends, talk scholarship and collaboration, get inspired by brilliant but short papers, and pass notes with friends when the papers are less than brilliant. One paper was particularly dull (or maybe Veralinda and I were just sleepy after our delicious vegetarian dim sum lunch), but when the speaker said something that sounded like "their semi-autonomous wombs" and I wrote "semi-autonomous womb"? on my notepad, Veralinda drew a round belly with little feet and I nearly fell over trying to suppress my giggles. It felt a bit like summer camp in high school- giddy and silly and fun. And utterly naughty. We were told we looked like we were up to no good. We won't do it again, I promise. Not at a serious conference, anyway.

My talk and panel actually went quite well, it seems. All of the talks on our panel seemed like great fun to listen to, though I was particularly nervous because my adviser from QSU (Quill & Stylus) was sitting in the front row wearing her serious listening face, which does not include a smile. This is not a conference I usually get nervous about- it's full of short papers, grad students, and down-to-earth people, genuinely interested in new scholarship and collaborative activities. A friend calls it "the little conference that could."

And yet when I saw my adviser, I became anxious. I think it's a little funny that she can still intimidate me like that, even though she is perhaps the most devoutly supportive senior scholar I have known (also the most rigorously critical, but I believe that's part of her being supportive). Thus I found myself making eye contact across the room with complete strangers, especially when I got to the dirty joke in my paper, rather than confront her face of intense concentration. Thankfully, she was encouraging and enthusiastic after the talk, reminding me to send her more of my manuscript, so I was able to relax and finish the evening off with delicious sushi and conversation with a dear friend and two new ones, and then several drinks and general camaraderie in the swanky hotel bar.

Voice of the Voiceless

When I was growing up, my parents had a game they played: my mother would talk to one of the pets, and my father would answer for the pet, not in a high pitched or animal-like voice, just in his own voice. He called it the "voice of the voiceless."

About two and a half months ago my cat Saffron literally lost her voice. At first it sounded like she was a little hoarse. And then, I thought, maybe she was meowing silently- opening her mouth and puffing out her chest - deliberately, as a kind of cat-like politesse. As if she were trying to say: "I really want this, but I'm too polite to cry for it, so I will just indicate my interest with a gentle, unvoiced bleat."

But in fact, much to our consternation, she was unable to produce any sound whatsoever. She would wheeze and rasp but nothing would come out. Then she would exhaust herself. This went on for a week or two, and thus began the first of many visits to my local veterinarian, who took a blood test, listened to her chest, sedated her and looked at her larynx, took x-rays, gave her antibiotics, listened again to her chest when I noticed wheezing, and finally referred us to a cat-internist a month and a half (and $250) later. There was talk of cancer, of laryngeal paralysis, both serious conditions requiring thousands of dollars of surgery and no guarantee that the cat would survive.

The specialist was wonderful, but she ordered a few of the same tests since she didn't trust the family vet's interpretation of the results. She also ordered general anaesthesia, a tracheal wash, and several diagnostics on cells she collected from the wash. $757 and a zonked, partly shaved cat later, the diagnosis was probable mycoplasma-induced feline asthma. Saffron was put on 3 weeks of liquid doxycycline and I had to switch to a less dusty litter.

So I did so, and- miraculously, it seems -her voice has finally returned in full. It started out as tiny, faint, mews, and then gradually matured into what someone close to me recently described as a touch-tone phone's beeps.

Saffron got her voice back around the time Obama won the election, and I started spending time with someone new (sometimes I wonder if this is more than coincidence). There is no sign of asthma and no sign of infection. We have been very happy ever since. But we are switching vets and we are getting pet insurance. I'm trying not to think about the $1000 it took to put my cat on liquid antibiotics.

Election Observations

1. I didn't think I'd actually react so emotionally when Obama won. There were tears. There were hugs and cheek smooches. There was shouting and wahooing and jumping up and down and delirious texting. I must have embraced at least 8 or 9 people I have never met before. Unfortunately, I was suffering from an awful case of anxiety-induced indigestion which made it feel like there was a phantom lump in my throat the whole time, so I didn't enjoy the Obamalove as much as I should have. I should have let a certain person kiss me.

2. It was also a night to bridge generations, a night for all the parents who fought for peace and civil rights to share with their kids. I saw a very sweet neo-bohemian middle-aged mom (You know, with scarves and boots) with her arm around her hipster teenage daughter at the election results party I attended. The mom couldn't have looked prouder to be sharing this night with her daughter. Right before Obama's speech I was on the phone with my own neo-bohemian middle-aged mom (in another swing state that went blue) marveling about Obama's big win, and most of my friends took jubilant cell-phone calls from their moms too, well past the bedtime of most moms, neo-bohemian, middle-aged or not. Yay moms!

2. My state went Democratic all the way (Senate, Prez and Gov) for the first time since I was eight months old. I don't know if this changes how red-statey it still feels on a day-to-day basis, but only time will tell. If my formerly red state is now main-stream blue state, will that affect the conservative students on campus? I've only been here 2 years (minus the summers), but I tend to think of my students as mostly conservative- but more pedestrian and politically apathetic than anything else, which I attribute to our state (and country) having been conservative for the past eight years. With the country democratic, will blue be the new pedestrian? One can only hope . . .

3. Despite the wonderful progressive sweep across the nation, I am so saddened to learn that 52% of Californians voted to ban gay marriage (along with Florida and Arizona). Although it shows that Rovian tactics won't work this time as they did in 2004, when the five states with an anti-gay marriage refferendum all went for Bush, it is disheartening and truly disappointing. Add to this Arkansas' decision to diminish the rights of gay and lesbian couples to adopt, and we have a strangely divided country still.

4. I highly approve of Obama's first promise: to get a puppy.

The Next Chapter in Academic Clothing

A colleague sent me this link. I think it says it all:

The English Department

Addicted to Electoral Mapping

I've always loved cartography. I spent the better part of a month in the map room of the British library this summer, looking at Renaissance illuminated printed maps (Mercator thought there were camels in Siberia!), figuring out a way to work them into my last chapter, and my book in general. My book isn't about maps per se, but I wish it were. Literary landscapes have always appealed to me and I'm anxious to get back to working on space again after this book is finished.

It shouldn't come as a surprise, then, that I am hooked on those interactive electoral maps connected to polling, the ones that help you predict who is going to win what race. The main reason playing with these electoral maps has become my latest addiction is because new polls come in every day and the numbers are different every time. My favorite map by far is Pollster's, which delivers the results of the most recent poll when you mouse over each state, and can also be changed to reflect the races for senate, house and governor across the country. Click on a state, and you get a line graph based on the state's poll history. It's fun to see the blue and red lines crossing back and forth. It is updated daily, sometimes hourly, so although its results are more up-to-date than the maps at the Times and the Washington Post, they also shift fairly frequently. If you like Pollster's state graphs, try fivethiryeight for more graphs and creative visualizations than you can imagine.

Of course as my mother and I discussed this evening, the actual physical space of the map matters not at all when translating polls into electoral votes. In other words, the geography of the map- it's very mappiness, if you will -is not the point of colored, clickable states. But I like the map just the same. I like being able to have the cursor meander from Virginia over to North Dakota, then down to Nevada. Pollster has N. Dakota leaning towards Obama, whereas the New York Times dubs it "Solid McCain Territory."

As of this moment, the Washington Post gave Obama a slight lead with 207 electoral votes predicted, the Times gave him 196, and Pollster has him at 272. When I check again tomorrow, the numbers will probably have changed for Pollster's map. It's scary and exciting and fun and totally, utterly addictive.

Yes, I know I'm a little nerdy about the map thing. But I do happen to have an excellent sense of direction- I once spent 6 hours cutting a crazy swath through the non-touristy parts of Venice and brought everyone back safe and well-fed. I have no sense of how this election is going to turn out. I'm lost. But as I mouse over the changing landscape of opinion, it feels for a moment like I do.

Observations in October

It's starting to get chilly. The fall color is gorgeous. My heat has been shutting off intermittently for no reason and is really hard to get back on. Today the landlady finally hired a specialist who fixed a number of things and installed a fancy new thermostat. It seems to be working fine, but the next 24 hours are key. There is some sort of an animal in the attic, or was. My landlady sent her ex-boyfriend-turned-handyman up there and he cleaned up a lot of critter-refuse. So far it has not returned.

I gave a talk at Nearby University today for my early modern reading group- a talk on part II of my final chapter, the one I'm calling Chapter That Is Spiraling Out of Control. My audience was really gracious, sitting through all 45 minutes of me throwing various forms of information at them, including bits of history, philology, inventories, travel writing, commodities, and some Really Difficult poetic syntax and language. Their comments and suggestions were remarkably helpful and I'm blown away by the fact that they appear to have actually understood what I was trying to say. Maybe I need a new nickname for my chapter.

No more fellowship applications due for another two months. Yay! To take advantage of this small respite, I'm dreaming about throwing a "Great Depression" party. We could dance to early jazz, wear fedoras and boas, drink gin out of teacups, and party like it's 1929.

13 days left until the election.

Eeeek!

That is all.

"A Bracelet of Bright Hair"

I've been working with Donne's post-mortem love poetry for several years, and I always like to teach "The Funerall," "The Relique" and "The Damp" together, since each one imagines what happens to the lover's corpse after he has died. The first two poems describe the lover's corpse wearing "A bracelet of bright hair about the bone" (Relique, 6) and "That subtle wreath of hair, which crowns mine arm" (Funerall, 3).

Today I decided it would be good to show students an image of a memorial hair bracelet along with some memento mori jewelry before turning to the text (who knows, maybe I'll inspire a student). I usually show a Victorian braided hair bracelet and locket with hair, since hair bracelets from the Renaissance are less likely to have survived. But I wanted to see if there were any earlier examples and so turned, naturally, to my dear friend the giant searchable database of images from the collections of the V&A, which houses one of the largest European jewelry collections in the world. This database of digital images, by the way, is completely open to the public. So I searched the collection for "human hair" between 1300 and 1700. And remarkably, I found these artifacts.

These are finished pieces of needle lace worked in human hair c. 1625-1665. Very few survive, as they were quite fragile. The V&A has a few, two of which have been photographed for the online database. They had a button on one end, and a loop or hole on the other, and were most likely worn as bracelets and made by women (the V&A cites "The Relique" as evidence that they were very likely love tokens).

The delicacy and ingenuity of the work is astounding. Both display birds and crosses, but the first piece is freer in style, depicting a dog, an owl, a stag and several species of flowers and fruits (click on the images to enlarge them). The animals have eyes, feathers, rendered muscles. The flowers and fruit have seeds, petals, shadows. The second has an oak and acorn motif. They may have been finished with horsehair, and some kind of resinous gum.

Both of Donne's poems imagine that the bracelet contains a portion of his beloved's soul, corresponding with the early modern belief in corporeal resurrection. In "The Relique," the bracelet functions as a kind of homing device, calling his beloved's corpse back to his grave on Resurrection Day. The idea is that since the body houses the soul, everyone's lost body parts would summon one another across the earth at Resurrection- teeth, skin and bones seeking one another out for reassembly like the dry bones in the valley of Ezekiel 37. This would be particularly arduous for Catholic saints, whose several body parts had been dispersed across the world as relics.

I had always imagined the "subtle wreath of hair" as a simple braid, never as something so gossamer, intricate, and figural. Yet it's easy to see why such a beautiful product of one person's handiwork might be thought to contain a portion of her soul.

Gun-totin' Obama Guy

I haven't posted here in a while- things are very busy for me this semester. I have lots of essays and grant applications due, as my last post intimated. And when I'm not trying to make these deadlines, I've got talks to write, search committee work, papers to grade, and volunteering to do. So my plate is full. I miss sleeping late- I did that this morning for the first time in two weeks. It was luxurious. But I felt guilty afterwards.

Yesterday I went out canvassing to a diverse, poor, working-class neighborhood north of the city. I only registered one person to vote, but I did meet a very pro-gun Republican who emphatically announced that he and his whole family would be voting for Obama this time around. His rationale was strange, so I'm repeating it here. First he quoted Bill Maher, calling the Republicans "Daddies" and Democrats "Mommies." He said that he felt Republicans were better for the country in times of stability, but that Democrats were better at "cleaning up the mess." (I guess that's what he thinks "mommies" do). He said he believed we need at least 12 more years of Democrats in the white house before it will be stable and safe enough for the Republicans to take over. To me, this sounds like he thinks Republicans are pretty incompetent over all. But I didn't say anything. Can anyone explain this logic to me?

Dead Lines

I've always found the term "dead-line" so morbid, so fixed, so unalterable, so threatening. No wonder it's a modern (rather than early modern) word. Good little historical materialist that I am, I much prefer my lines to be plastic, alive, unfixed.

What exactly is a dead line? Is it a condition of modernity?

According to the OED, the first use of "dead-line" as a kind of boundary (1864) described a circumference of safety drawn around a soldier. Outside the "dead-line," the soldier was liable to be shot.

Deadlines are also the early 20th century term for guide-lines "marked on the bed of a printing press."

In the second decade of the 20th century, "dead-line" came to be associated with the time limit for submitting a piece of writing to a journal or newspaper publication.

This last definition is the one that obtains today. It suggests that if the piece of written work isn't turned in within the given time limit, it will not be given literary "life" in publication, thus it falls outside of the invisible time line, and "dies." Of course we sometimes internalize this and worry that if we miss a deadline, a part of us- like an opportunity at posterity, prolonged literary life - will die too.

But for most academics (fellowship, job and conference deadlines excepted), deadlines are more like guidelines. Nobody wants us to turn in or be held responsible for publishing shoddy work, so we ask for a reasonable amount of extra time to get it right. How much time we request depends on the work we are doing. And, in general, the more prolific and well-known we are, the more that deadline, like gold to airy thinness beat, is stretched out.

Anthropologie, Eat Your Heart Out

As part of their "College Issue," the Sunday New York Times Magazine today ran a series of photographs of professors who "make academia look good." One is a dear family friend, who is pictured looking smart and debonair (as usual).

Check out the slideshow here: Class Acts

Though I wonder how many of them actually own those clothes, it's still a delight to see professors looking and acting cool and awesome (though of course it might be more fun to see them letting down their hair and totally rocking out). I'm convinced that some of that awesomeness contributed to my decision to become one myself, superficial though it may be.

Postscript: a rapid e-mail communication between my mother and our family friend revealed that not only did they not get to keep the clothes, they didn't even get to choose them. You can sense some of them gently disapproving in the accompanying text.

Do you think they were nominated by their students, or by their colleagues?

Found in Translation

If only this room actually existed and we could send writers there.

This is from Engrish.com. Sometimes the paradoxes of Engrish (mis-translated English) reveal odd, wistful truths. As in this rather Existential example:




Not all Engrish derives from mis-translating Asian languages into English. Some of it is found in British and American English as well:

http://www.engrish.com/2006/06/its-portable/

http://www.engrish.com/2008/06/thats-no-hockey-puck/

OMG- Anthro Update

In the comments section to my annual back-to-school-clothes post on Anthropologie's "Archive Trousers" (second generation "Tenure Trousers") the wise and delightful Renaissance Girl archly said she'd "like to see the adjunct trousers."

Well, here's something that comes close: The "Visiting Professor Cardigan."

I swear I don't make these things up. But they're too good not poke fun at (and surreptitiously consider buying).

This is a cardigan anthro has had up for sale for the past two years, and I've always wanted one.

Its haphazard buttons make me think of Robert Herrick's lyric "Delight in Disorder" ("A sweet disorder in the dress / Kindles in clothes a wantonness"). But by the time it gets cold enough around here for me to consider the exorbitant cost of what really just looks like a sweater buttoned up the wrong way, it always sells out.

$198. Because of course a Visiting Professor can afford to look artfully shlumpy.

Feel the irony, people.

Early Modern Show and Tell

My upper-level undergraduate Renaissance Poetry course is the most fun I've had teaching- EVER. And why? Because one of our rare books librarians decided she wanted to collaborate with me on the course. I said "yeah, sure, why not?"- I already bring my students up to rare books several times a semester. It might be nice to bring the rare books to them for starters. So long as she let me lead the discussion. And it's working really well.

Every day she brings a different old book to class, sometimes 2. Her choices always tie in to our discussion and reading.

Last week we read "Astrophil and Stella," and for our second day with the sonnet sequence, for a discussion on Sidney's "school-boy writer" persona, she brought along a 1591 edition of the poems, plus a 1627 book of grammar-school rules. When I suggested we read a few of the sonnets aloud, we passed around the early modern book, and the students got a chance to struggle with reading from a 16th century text. Which generated quite a few giggles, but also brought the experience down to earth. Pretty soon, they were volunteering to read, which is rare at a place like this (maybe rare everywhere? Except for the peppering of theatre majors in most upper-level English classes).

Anyway, teaching's fun this year. Every day, actually. I highly recommend that everyone try this out- if you haven't already. I'd be interested to read in the comments section about some of your own experiences with collaborative teaching. Did it work? Did it backfire? (I'm still a bit worried that the students will remember the old books but not Sidney).

Little Post On Feeling Appreciated

I used to chomp at the bit and stomp my feet waiting anxiously for people to notice me, to invite me to contribute to books, give talks, be on panels, anything. My colleagues ahead of me told me to calm down, do my work, forget about it. Eventually, things would happen.

So I did. Sort of. Having a blog helped.

Then this summer, things changed- quite suddenly, actually. It wasn't tied to anything important of mine coming out in print (the important things are still forthcoming for, like, EVER). It just started happening. First I got invited to contribute to an anthology. Then Major Important British Scholar took an interest in my work. Then another anthology invitation, &c. I think maybe The Library fellowship helped.

Yesterday I was invited to give a talk at a Very Nice (and Important) Place, which I shall call University of The City (UTC). And there is a small honorarium.

(By the way, the person who invited me was a remarkably talented and mature UTC grad student I met during one of my research trips this summer. So don't ignore the grad students. They can and do make things happen).

I've not yet been invited back by my graduate program at Quill & Stylus University (QSU), but I'd rather not go back just yet. It's only been three years and I'm still relishing my time away. Besides, that particular kind of evisceration is best endured after securing a book contract.

I hope this is the start of a good semester- first day is tomorrow. I'm bringing along a rare books librarian (and some rare books) for first day show-and-tell.

Anthropologie outdoes itself with "Archive Trousers"

I didn't think it was possible to tap the professorial and grad-studenty market any better than with "tenure trousers." I was wrong. What can a woman who already has tenure trousers possibly want? More research leave, obviously. May I present to you:

Archive Trousers

Made with a bit more stretch than tenure trousers- as the catalog puts it rather coyly (channeling the male gaze) "the better to allow you to reach that leatherbound volume on the highest shelf," which I take to mean "your ass will look great in these if you want to show it off." I doubt any of us archival researchers will be reaching up high for leather-bound volumes, but maybe the added stretch will help us contort in our chairs during all-day laptop transcriptions from giant foam book-rests. These, then, are perfect for the MLS market- but what's with the Minnie Mouse buttons in front?

And for the woman with both tenure trousers and tenure (presumably at an imaginary institution that pays Really Really Well), there's the vaguely Elizabethan influenced:

Lady-of-the-court-dress

She'd probably buy the dress because she's enchanted by the "Basque waistline," something only those with tenure trousers can possibly understand.

Finally, of particular interest to my own field are the Via Appia and Trade Route trousers, and for the early Modernist (as opposed to early-modernist), Suffragette T-straps and Buckminster's Reverie Tieback.

Not quite as pretentious as J. Peterman, but certainly appealing to intellectual, rather than financial capital. The irony is that without financial capital, one cannot afford to buy their frequently poorly constructed clothes. I'm not ashamed to say that I've added "Archive Trousers" and "Suffragette T-straps" to my wish-list. But I'm waiting for them to go on sale.

Araucana in America

Yay! . . . Also:

Arden Shakespeare Controversy

Seldom does the rigorous, time-consuming work we do as editors get any press, even though edited editions probably reach more readers in one week than our academic monographs will in their brief lifetimes in print. The gold standard for scholarly editions of Shakespeare has always been the Arden Shakespeare, which is not only thorough, informative and sometimes challenging but also an excellent teaching apparatus. As an esteemed colleague at the Folger confirmed, these editions usually take upwards of 6 years to complete. It is not unusual for them to take a decade.

As an early modernist of the philological persuasion, I am most fond of Arden Shakespeare editions for their historical attentiveness to Shakespeare's language. It is thus very disappointing that at this moment, when a highly anticipated Arden edition is in the spotlight- one that promises to shed new light on language and the material text - it's because we may not get to see it, read it, enjoy it or use it:

Chronicle Article

Reinstate Pat Parker Website

I don't give a fig

I picked these off the tree a few minutes ago, and there are 10 times as many still ripening.

Two days ago I wrapped the tree with biodegradable breathable tree tape, then smeared the trunk up and down with something called "Tanglefoot," an environmentally safe sticky-stuff (made of wax and resins- it actually smells lovely and reminds me of my Ormonde Jayne Black Hemlock perfume from London) that keeps ants and other crawlies from climbing up the trunk and eating all the figs. Note to self: cover head and arms next time. Tanglefoot is also tangle-tress.

I love the color- kind of a golden turning to mauve (click on the photo for an extreme close-up). I was expecting a purple, so I actually let a few get too ripe and start to shrivel up on the tree- the darker ones in the picture are beginning to sport wrinkles too. I guess the light color is just part of the variety- I think these are Celeste figs.

I plan on stuffing with goat cheese, skewering on rosemary, drizzling with olive oil and tossing them on the grill. They are also really good like this wrapped with prosciutto, for those of you who are not veggie or kosher (or like me, lapsed in both).

Anyone have any other recipes? It looks like figs are going to be a major part of my diet for the next month and a half.

Blush, blush.

Emily, adrift on the The Seacoast of Bohemia, nominated me for this virtual hat tilt, and I am tickled pink.

I wish I could nominate Emily, but she's already received one, so here's my list below.


I nominate the rather dormant but still quite brilliant Blogging the Renaissance. Because it started this whole Renaissance blogging thing and this blog has a virtual blog-crush on it.

Beautifully written, perceptive and fun is Sign of the Spider, another blog that this blog is crushing on. Plus, it's got great virtual ink-blot visuals.

Jonathan Sterne's hilarious academic blog is not in the least dormant. It is also very smart (and very funny). In sum, it's Super Bon!, and totally blog-crush worthy.

Also dormant and good is Northern Humanist.

Two of my favorite blogs (and people) recently documented their trips to Israel with compassion, wit, and a keen sense of social history. These are A Wisconsin Yankee in King David's Court and From the Couch in New York.

I've begun reading Green Thoughts regularly and am generally in awe of its elegant openness.

Finally, Rants of a Feminist Engineer remains brave, funny, poignant, and admirably feminist, whether its writer is anonymous or not.

Okay, I've just noticed that all the blogs I've nominated are authored by academics who are also my friends (except Green Thoughts who is an academic but I don't think we know each other in real life. Yet. Or I could be wrong, maybe we do!). I should really branch out a bit more . . .

If I've nominated you and you want to play along, then follow the rules below. If you've got better things to do, then go do them. I know I do.

1. Put the logo on your blog.
2. Add a link to the person who awarded it to you.
3. Nominate at least 7 other blogs.
4. Add links to these blogs on your blog.
5. Leave a message for your nominee on their blog.