Back to the Drawing Board

Oh, hullo first book manuscript. Yes, it's been almost a year. Welcome to open heart surgery. I'll just take the anesthetic myself, though if you don't mind. I need it more than you.

Well hello, there.

Good god, it's been a long time since I've written anything in this space. I imagine it gathering virtual dust-bunnies and feeling somewhat sticky.

I'm not ready to give it up just yet, though, because I went back and re-read that post I did almost a year ago about time and realized that I might be able to work some of the ideas into a new piece I am writing about lyric atemporality for my second book project. Which means that blogging is actually good for me as a writer and as a scholar, and I should do more of it.

Yes, that's right, a second book project.  Did I mention I finished my book and sent it out to the editor? And got a thumbs up from the first reader? That was back in December, 2011. The second reader's report should arrive any day now. Any day now. Cue sound of crickets chirping. More chirping, and a large tumbleweed drifts across the somewhat less dusty blogscape.

So in the meantime, while I'm waiting, I've started working on my second book project. I got the idea very early in the morning on my walk to work and immediately texted Veralinda because I was worried it was too sexy or trendy and not scholarly enough, but she reassured me that I'd give it the solid, scholarly, classical treatment because she is that good a friend and colleague, so she knew exactly what I was on about and what my angle would be. So I started plotting it out and writing research proposals, and managed to score some funding from my university for a six week trip to the UK to do some research on the first three chapters. I've already written about fifteen pages of one of them, so I'm really excited to get to the British Library, V&A, Warburg Institute and Bodleian to start looking at dead things that move around in early modern literature. Yes, dead things: mummies, corpses on judgement day, rejunvenated bodies rising from Medea's cauldron, eunuchs (you'll have to read the unwritten chapter to understand exactly how these are dead things), and hopefully zombies and vampires, too, once I can find some (perhaps I will venture into Shakespearean appropriation in popular culture, a la Twelfth Night of the Living Dead). Or maybe I'll just write about some good old metempsychosis.

In a little over two weeks, I shall travel across the pond to share a gorgeous Victorian house (with a patio and a garden and a piano!) with two friends and colleagues in London (Veralinda and let's call her Margaret), where we will keep one another motivated to get serious work done during the day, and go out and see plays like The Duchess of Malfi and have pints and glasses of prosecco at night.

Unless, of course, I receive my second reader's report first. Then I'll be revising. And the dead can wait.

Voici venir les temps . . .

It's my last full day in the reading room at my favorite library, and I'm trying desperately to see all the rare books I need to see, and to consult all the sources at my fingertips before I have to go home, put the final touches on my manuscript and send it out. Oh, and I start teaching again in a month, so there's that grad course syllabus to prepare (Note to colleagues: Do NOT open an email from a student in the summer if the subject line is "Reading List." It will make you very unhappy).

I've just returned a wonderful, very rare manuscript bound in vellum and created by the Goldsmith's Company. It's in two books, the first dealing with weights and measures, assaying gold and silver and the mint. The second, which is more along my lines of research, lists precious stones, and describes where they are found and how they are valued. This was very helpful for a few references in my chapter on pearls, but also for the piece I hope to write on Jessica's turquoise ring in The Merchant of Venice.

The book ends with descriptions of some hard substances that are decidedly not precious stones, but were also of great value in the East and were traded as currency: lack and indigo (red and blue pigments), ambergris, musk, and civet (animal excretions used in perfumes and aphrodisiacs). These things interested me the most, in part because what are dyes, perfumes and aphrodisiacs doing in a book whose title is ye knowledge of all sortes of Gemmes or Praetious Stones, describing the Places wheare they growe, their Names, Coullors, Vertues & Valewes, According as they are bought from Marchant to Marchant worthy their Studie, which profess themselues Iuellers or are desirous to be made acquainted with those Secrets of Nature? In other words, how is indigo a precious stone? Yet from an early modern sensibility, the inclusion of pigments and perfuming materials with gems makes perfect sense, as all of these objects were traded, along with spices, "from Marchant to Marchant" in the East Indies, Persia and the Ottoman empire, and all of these items were employed together with sugar and spices and mummia (mummy) by apothecaries in the early modern pharmaceutical industry (if you can call it that).

I learned a lot from this manuscript, and because it's my last day at this beloved archive, was sorry to have to say goodbye to it, just as I'm sorry to have to say goodbye to my new friends.

I'm feeling melancholy and out of sorts today in general, as when anything stimulating and inspiring--not to mention frequently frustrating--comes to an end. We had our last seminar yesterday, and I am very grateful for the new colleagues and friends I've made, but oddly sad that it's over.

Despite all of the work I have to do today, I'm finding it rather challenging to concentrate, feeling a little distracted. I move around as if I were under a spell, or as if I had taken some powerful drug, my heart beating a little faster than usual. (It doesn't help that I've been reading about early modern aphrodisiacs and Sonnet 119 is thrumming through my head). I will be relieved to return to the regularity of daily life at home. But today everything is triste et beau comme une grande reposoir.

Blogging about the New Media

So I've been in a summer seminar for the past month, at my favorite library. This is what we academics do in the summer: when we're not teaching as many summer school classes as we can manage in order to afford home repair, or churning out another manuscript or set of articles, we get paid to go back to graduate school. Except that it's like one of those accelerated summer-school classes that we teach, only grad-school style. This means 4-6 hours a day, 4 days a week, with a nightly reading list that far exceeds the weekly reading list I had from some of my most demanding professors back at Quill & Stylus. And if you're also trying to get a manuscript ready for a preliminary review, then farewell liberty.

Still, it's been a wonderful, stimulating and engaging experience. The seminar seems to span time, space, and dimension. It's too broad to describe here, and since I'm still writing under the gossamer veil of anonymity-ish-ness, I won't bore you with the details. But it's nearing its end, and the last two days have been devoted to readings, explorations, and discussions of The New Media, led by a brilliant pair of guest scholars.

We talked about film, database, archive and virtual space. We all created avatars and jumped around virtually on the Globe in Second Life (well, some people did. I couldn't figure out how to get off the roof of the balcony). We looked at a number of interactive on-line learning communities. But we haven't yet talked about blogs. A colleague mentioned blogs in an email message addressed to seminar participants today. The gist seemed to be "So, folks, what about blogs? Do they participate in the curatorial function of databases?" (We established last time that archives and databases kind of do have an author function and even an argument, even though many present themselves as being objective and all encompassing). Anyway, this made me think about my almost-defunct blog, and how only a couple of years ago everyone seemed to be participating in the academic blogosphere and now, well, notsomuch. That said there are still some wonderful academic blogs that I read regularly and for which I am grateful (shout-out to Flavia, and In The Middle!) I have to remind myself to blog, in a way that I never did before facebook, or twitter, or smartphones. Obviously blogs aren't just curated archives. I'm not sure they are archival at all, but they do participate in the collaborative thinking that goes along with new media. And what about blogs that are no longer active, like Blogging the Renaissance? Do people still read "dead" or "dormant" blogs, when there is no activity there any more? Or are they kind of like virtual archival materials themselves?

What will people think of blogs in times to come? What would Herzog's mutant albino crocodiles think of blogs?

A Delectable Discovery

When I'm spending so much time writing and researching, I like to escape now and then to a good novel on my kindle. When I'm not reading Spenser, Milton, and Donne, of course. My favorite historical novelists tend to be those that absorb the literary stylistic touches of their periods, like John Barth and Allison Fell, or who adopt a (post)modern style all their own, like Hilary Mantel and James Morrow. To give you broader a sense of my escapist reading tastes, the last few novels I've read have included medieval mysteries by Ariana Franklin, historical fiction by David Mitchell, Michel Faber, Ronan Bennett, Geraldine Brooks, Sarah Waters, James Morrow, and the early modern young adult fantasies of my friend and colleague Marie Rutkoski. Not to mention the literary fiction of my adorable beau, who likes to tease me when he sees me reading something fun by calling it a "trashy novel." This time, when he asked me what my "trashy novel" was about, I immediately called it rarebookporn, which left him a bit confused.

As fate would have it, I chose A Discovery of Witches, and finished it (579pp) in two days. Anyone who loves reading historical novels, fantasy, research, and early modern rare books ought to be aware that the talented historian Deborah Harkness, author of the remarkable book The Jewel House: Elizabethan London and the Scientific Revolution (New Haven: Yale UP 2007), has written this, and though by no means high art, it is still a fantasty romp that is nearly impossible to put down. I kind of felt as if it had been written just for me (and not simply because it ends with quotations from the two poets who feature in the final chapter of my book). If you mix what's seriously cool about material textual research with Buffy (and I realize that may already be a redundancy to those familiar with Joss Whedon's series, since in the Buffyverse a fair amount of strategizing takes place in rare book rooms and Latin and Aramaic are living languages), Brooks's People of the Book, Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell and Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials series, you might come a bit closer to what was so pleasurable about this book, but basically reading it felt like a vacation filled with magic and illuminated manuscripts and tiny pointing manicules and emblems and Giordano Bruno and sexy vampires in Duke Humfrey's library.

I am even more contented by the knowledge that there's going to be an Elizabethan sequel. Now, back to my manuscript. With the new chapter completed, it's off to thinking about language and the body politic in Poetaster. And I've got almost no time to lose, as I've seen the syllabus for my summer seminar, and it's more reading per day than I had in grad school per week at Quill & Stylus, which was kind of known for overloading its courses.

Procrastination can be Fun (and debilitating)

Speaking of time . . .

In a little under 2 weeks I will head to our nation's capitol, where I will spend 6 weeks doing some work at my favorite library in the whole world and participating in a summer seminar with a reading list as long as my bibliography.

I promised an editor that I would send him my book manuscript at the beginning of the summer as it was nearly completed when we met in January. Then I got sick (pneumonia--don't try this at home). Then I got better, and wrote to him, and we agreed that I needed more time. Then I got the brilliant idea of scrapping about 50 pages from one of my chapters and rewriting it based on a brief paper I recently gave at MLA. Then I got the second brilliant idea of turning my introduction into a separate chapter, and writing a new, short introduction to the book.

The work has been going well, though not exactly as quickly as I would like. I am not entirely sure I will be done in time to send the manuscript off by the end of June, though I sincerely hope I will. I'm about 90% finished with the sweet new chapter and I'm really happy with it. Then on to the intro-spin off chapter, which needs about 15 pages on Jonson's Poetaster, which will be smooth sailing and loads of fun to write. Then back to the new, shorter intro to give it an update on recent theory and scholarship. Then I shall double-check my intros and conclusions to all the other chapters, and set it free, only about 3 months late.

Since I clearly have this all planned out, and have been writing on average about 6 pages a day, every day, no days off, this should be no problem whatsoever, correct?

WRONG! For some reason unless I am at my desk during the school-year stealing a few hard-earned non-student-filled hours, or in the middle of an archival reading room surrounded by other scholars more diligent than me, heads bent dutifully over books and laptops, I am unable to stay focused for long stretches of time.

After two hours at the computer I feel great because I'm clearly, honest-to-god WRITING. So still feeling pleased with myself, I wander outside and pet the porch kitty (more on him later), water the plants, sweep the porch, swiffer the floors, make tea, go for a walk. Then I go back to work and carefully write another four to six paragraphs. Then I fiddle around adding footnotes and images and pulling quotes in. Then it is too late to do any more work at all because it is time to go to the gym, where I lift weights and do cardio intervals on the elliptical thingy without falling off, so I actually feel like I'm getting stuff done, and then I get to sit in the sauna or steam room and feel good about myself because I am being HEALTHY and getting THINNER, so yay! Then it is time for dinner and because it is now summer we get to cook and prepare yummy fresh things from the farmer's market, like salade nicoise or chilled pea soup or gazpacho and then have minted honeydew popsicles for dessert (adorable beau is a popsicle addict so we make them every week). Then it's time to maybe watch a movie and/or to read the New Yorker in bed with my adorable beau and our cat, so yay!

Then I fall asleep and dream dreadful anxiety dreams about putting a 20page manuscript in the mail, or about the apartment flooding and the landlord trippling the rent, or about losing everything I've ever written, or losing the ability to write or see or think or about going up for tenure suddenly tomorrow (by the way, I can totally control when I go up for tenure at this new job, meaning I can go up as soon as I get a book contract, or wait a few years, which is awesome, but also might be slowing me down a little bit). When I wake up, I rush to the computer to make things right. In other words, I only manage to get things done if I do them half-assedly and then put them off enough to cause me to fret and worry about it unconsciously to the point of waking up in a cold sweat, shaking with apprehension. My cycle looks a lot like this and this.

I recently started blogging again in the hopes that it would help me stay focused on finishing my manuscript. I'm not sure if it's working, but it certainly beats making tea or going for a walk. And hey, at least I'm writing stuff.

Keeping Time

Because I write about poetry and antiquity, I am always keenly aware of the way that time seems to keep us guessing. The lyric mode can suspend, extend, and rewind time. Just look at Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress," which moves from the longest length of time imaginable (apocalyptic), "vaster than empires and yet more slow," to the grave, where worms consort with his mistress's corpse, to the pounding heart beats of the last few lines. Or look at Shakespeare's sonnet 59, which imagines that time itself is revolutionary; all of this has happened before, all of it will happen again. The poet imagines encountering an illuminated miniature of his beloved in a medieval book, centuries before the young man was born. Or else he's imagining projecting an early modern book containing a portrait of his lover into the future, perhaps our future:

Show me your image in some antique book

Since mind at first in character was done

That I might see what the old world would say

To this composed wonder of your frame

Whether we are mended, or whether better they

Or whether revolution be the same

And then there's the way that music itself transports us into a different time-scape, one in which time seems to stop, or move at a different pace from normal life. It doesn't always happen, but when it does it can be sublime for the audience and for the performer. I remember distinctly that it happened one spring when I performed the Chopin Barcarole at Oxford, during graduate school. I went into a trance and it really felt as if the music was doing something to the fabric of time, stretching it, unwinding it, repairing it, folding and pleating it.

There's an excellent article by Burckhard Bilger in The New Yorker that came out last month, in which Bilger anatomizes David Eagleman, a neuroscientist and author who is fascinated by the way that the brain registers time differently depending on the situation. The brain can appear to stretch time, for instance, during a near-death experience. Eagleman has begun studying musicians. I'm more interested in what happens to our perception when we feel like we have somehow walked outside of time. You feel it in the early stages of a romance, when you stay up all night and the night seems to go on forever and ever and then suddenly it's daylight and whoops, it didn't go on forever and your romance grinds to a bumpy halt (cue Romeo and Juliet 3.5).

There's also the weird sensation we get when we remember and try to relive those moments. For me, they are all connected to music. When I play a certain piece, like Schubert's G flat major impromptu, or listen to one, like Beethoven's A Minor quartet Op. 132, I am again transported by memory to that place where (when?) time stood still. Only instead you can't get it to stand still again, and the experience is somehow cheapened. That's why we sometimes cry, because we know we can't rewind. And of course the experience of loss is heightened when it's Schubert or Beethoven, because somehow in their music, they both seem to yearn for the same thing and yet remain profoundly aware of its futility. When adolescence hit me like a giant blow to the head, I would listen to my favorite childhood record, Mary Martin in Peter Pan, over and over again, tears streaming down my face as I mourned my lost innocence. Ovid was right: change is the only constant. But sometimes I think I feel it a little too powerfully.

I recently learned that an old boyfriend, now a friend, has gotten married. I am happy for this old boyfriend, and very happy in my current relationship. I also have very powerful and intense memories of my time with the o.b. (old boyfriend), and most of these memories are strengthened by their association with music. Listening to him play the last movement of the Beethoven Op. 109 and trying not to look at his facial contortions, crashing through the fugue of the Schubert F minor fantasy together, lying side by side on his tiny bed staring at the ceiling and trying not to move, listening to recordings of the Beethoven trio Op. 70, No. 2, and to Op. 132.

We went our separate ways. We parted amicably (in fact it was the most amicable and satisfying break-up I have ever experienced). We dated other people, we stayed in touch as friends. We saw one another once in a while, and when we did, we went to musical performances, and it was not without awkwardness, confusion and nostalgia. I know people always select which memories to retain and then we edit and modify them, usually unconscious of what we are doing. Maybe the o.b. remembers things differently, or different things.

A small part of me wants to believe in revolutionary time. Not that everything repeats itself exactly, but that the past is still animated, that these old memories are somehow alive and ongoing. A part of me really wants those two young people listening to that quartet on the floor of that tiny Oxford room six years ago to go on listening to it and to go on thinking that time is standing still.

Returning to the Blog

I'm tickled. I really, really am. A few weeks ago, at an important early modernist conference on the West Coast, more than one person I admire (including the inimitable Bardolph, of the currently catatonic Blogging the Renaissance) said they missed reading my blog. As did Veralinda, in comments on the last entry. I always succumb to flatterers (and I don't mean it in the Renaissance, negative sense).

I've been so busy with the move and with my book I had forgotten about this space. I was also pretending to be trendy and acting like blogs were so ten minutes ago.

But now I find myself back here. Partly because I miss writing in this free, public-yet-intimate way, and partly because I read somewhere that if you stop blogging then blogger deletes your account and everything is lost. So much for posterity!

So I'm back. Still in the South, still finding it quirky, still marveling at life, writing, scholarship and early modern studies. Please stay tuned.

It's been a while

I'm afraid I've let this blog atrophy, but I've been finishing my book and undergoing a number of big changes, some unexpected, some expected, and all welcome.

Expected: I moved. I had an excellent first job, but as I eventually discovered, it was not for me (nor I for it). I went on the market extremely late in the season, applied to a very small number of jobs, made the short list on all of them. This time around, nerve-wracking though it was, I had all positive and confidence-boosting experiences. Even the job I didn't get, which was an interdisciplinary position at a very important ny institution and went to a tenured scholar whose work I admire, was still kind of a dream moment in my career: just to have come that far and allowed myself to fantasize about teaching there, living in the Village, and taking my students to exhibits at the Met, was loads of fun. But the right job chose me, in the end. I had always wanted to be at a research institution, and now I am at an excellent State R1 with a fine doctoral program, a large faculty (about 50 of us), and an Oxford program which is coincidentally down the road from my old college (go Keble!).

Unexpected: I moved further South! I am now in one of the so-called "deep south" states, a state that at the moment (well, since the '80s) is very conservative. I never expected this to happen.

Also unexpected: I love it here! My little college town, sometimes referred to as a "brain bubble" is full of over-educated, arty hipsters and vegans and yogis and local foodies and indie rockers.

Also unexpected: my adorable beau moved down here (from Brooklyn) and now we are trying our hands at co-habitation and domestic bliss. He seems to like it here, too. Also, I haven't seen anyone go so quickly from criticizing me for indulging the cat ("you're such a Jewish mother to her!") to outdoing me in spoiling her ("can I give her this yogurt?"). To be fair, he also trained her not to wake us up in the morning, a feat I have never been able to accomplish on my own.

Also unexpected: my students are smart and inquisitive and bursting with intellectual curiosity. They like me! They don't need to be told what questions to ask, they are already asking them. They stay after class to talk about poetry. They are also diverse and quirky and, well, not all that homogeneous a group. Okay, so this wasn't exactly unexpected at all, of course my students are awesome. But sometimes when one moves from an expensive private institution to a big, affordable state one (in the poorest county in the state), one doesn't know what to expect (perhaps also because expensive institutions tend to have somewhat inflated senses of their importance).

Expected: my colleagues are awesome. My department is, well, an English department (each messed up in its own way, pace Tolstoy). But mine's actually a functional one, with a tremendous amount of support for, and protection of junior faculty. Tenure rules are clear and specific. Procedures are followed, and a sense of democracy achieved. It's also a big department: I'm one of five practicing early modernists (the other four are senior faculty). My senior colleagues are strong and supportive and collaborative. In particular, they have of late been very encouraging and helpful in navigating the uneasy waters of academic book publishing.

Anyway, I'm thinking back to a year ago, when I felt unhappy and bitter. I'm kind of overwhelmed by how quickly things seemed to turn themselves around.

I don't post very often on this blog, in part because I'm finishing my book, and in part because I fear I've lost my audience. But for some reason I felt like I needed to finish telling the story it was telling last year. It's not the end, but at least it's finally happy.

Dinah Washington: I Don't Hurt Anymore

It's been a while since I've posted on this blog. It's been a crazy year, very busy, very up-and-down, and yet it seems that as the semester draws to a close, I've actually come out on top, rather than underneath. Or maybe that's just growth or something. Anyway, this song was in my head and I thought I'd post it here.

Musical Signs

I am not one for spiritual signs. But if I were, they would have to do with music.

I should explain about "The Theme." When I was in High School, I spent my summers at a large arts camp in the Midwest. Even though I never got a big role in any of the Shakespeare productions, or won the concerto competition, I loved it there. And at the end of every musical performance, the performers had to play the camp's theme. And the rule was no clapping. You were supposed to walk out humming it. And the camp's theme happens to be a beautiful little motif from Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2 ("The Romantic). It is like a sigh. When there is a vocal performance, the singers sing it in harmony, to the syllable of "lu" (Lu lu lu lu lu lu lu, etc) . And when little children perform it, it is always followed by "Sssshhhhhhhh" as they tell one another not to clap.

Even though The Theme is famous at my arts camp, and Howard Hanson's Symphony No. 2 well known, I have only heard The Theme on the radio twice.

The first time I was 17 and heading to one of my two top choice colleges for an interview and campus visit. At the time I didn't think I would get in, and the place seemed out of my league. Of course that made me want to go there even more. Anyway, as we drove up to campus in my grandmother's old toyota, suddenly The Theme came on to the radio. It was stunning. Right as we were pulling into the parking lot, there it was. We all sat in the car until it was finished. When I closed the car door and walked up into the sunshine, I knew it that no matter what happened, I would be okay. Of course I got in, though I ended up going to my other top choice, which was bigger and artsier, but that is a different story.

The second time I heard The Theme was the day before I was to depart for New York this January. I was feeling all sorts of stressed out about my move, wondering if I would be able to finish my book in New York, feeling sad about leaving a few good friends, feeling sick and congested and anxious about the future. I think I was driving to the tailors to pick up a shirt for a late season job interview (reader, I got the campus visit. Just not the job). I was on the exit ramp from 40 business, turning onto Knollwood St. to get to Stratford Road, and there was the theme. It was calming and peaceful and yet I found myself in tears. I could say that it triggered a memory of youth and innocence and happier times, but that wouldn't be true: my experiences at summer camp were just as emotionally complex as my experiences are now. All I know is that it was the right time for me to hear The Theme again. And that it brought me some sense of closure and peace of mind. Of course I remembered the other time I had heard it, and was hopeful.

The second musical sign came a few weeks ago. A dear friend (and an exboyfriend) was visiting for the first time from the UK and we made plans to hear a chamber music concert in Manhattan. We saw the Takacs Quartet at Town Hall on a Sunday afternoon. We didn't know what they would be playing, only that we hoped it would be late Beethoven since that is what they are known for. Lo and behold, the last piece on the program was Beethoven's Quartet Op. 132, with the incredibly gorgeous and ethereal third movement called Heiliger Dankgesang, "The Invalid's Prayer of Thanksgiving."

This was something we used to listen to together in Oxford. In fact, the first time I heard this piece was on my friend's stereo in his tiny rooms on Banbury Road. Hearing and seeing it live far transcended any experience of Beethoven quartets I have ever had. By last strain, I was in tears and the violist had to pause to wipe her eyes before starting the last movement. It amazed me that she could demonstrate such control over her playing and yet cry all the way through it, because it was so beautiful. It was good to share this music, at this time in my life, with a good friend. I felt like I was the invalid recovering from an illness. I have so much to be thankful for.

34

It's been a while since I posted on this blog. The move to Brooklyn for the semester plus the sinus-infection-that-would-not-go-away have seriously limited the amount of free time I have to spend musing about myself on the internets.

But I do have some thoughts, having recently turned 34.

33 was rollercoasterish. It was rough and confusing and uplifting, not all at once but in succession, and I am grateful for all of this in the end, because it reminds me that I am living, that this is experience.

In the beginning of 2010 I lost a dear friend, too early--much to early--to cancer. He was one of my closest friends and colleagues, arrived at my institution right when I did, in 2006, to start a tenure track job in another department. I miss him horribly, and am still only just beginning to understand what a life without him means. But oddly, here in Brooklyn, I keep remembering him and it's kind of like being haunted by someone in a good way. He came here to spend his 4th year leave with his partner this year, and in the end, to rest from his illness. I can't help feeling like his memories are part of this place.

I turned 34 two days ago. I've been fighting this awful upper respiratory infection for 3 months that has left me fatigued and frustrated. My biggest fear is that I won't be able to finish this book and get the manuscript ready to be reviewed. Thankfully, writing doesn't take up that much physical energy, but I'm hoping that this year I'll get better. Perhaps some of the frustrations of last semester weakened my immune system enough for this malicious infection to work its way inside. Though if that were the case, then the recent spate of good luck I've been having would have strengthened it. But I still have a lot to be thankful for: an adorable and witty beau who extolls me in verse, two healthy and wonderful parents (kinne hurra) and a growing number of friends and supportive colleagues the world over.

My year in fortune cookies

From 2009:

"You have a natural grace and great consideration for others."

Not so sure. Since I stopped taking dance lessons seven years ago I've started stumbling around and bumping into things a lot. I also have a big problem with interrupting people and talking too much. And as for being considerate of others, well, not exactly according to my most recent group of students. I can be tough, critical, abrasive. I let them know when they are wrong and say things in class like "where's the textual evidence for that claim?" I need to relax and be gentler with my kids in class. I think I should treat this fortune as something to work towards, not something that is already true.

"You find beauty in ordinary things, do not lose this ability."

Okay, I'll try not to. And I think this is probably true. Nothing thrills me more than a perfect fried egg staring up at me from a turquoise china plate. Or a simple lit window glimpsed from the dark street.

"Prepare yourself for a big change of events in your personal life."

Well, I guess it depends how one defines "personal life," but, yeah. There have been some big changes in 2009.

"Your name will be famous in the future."

But not in this life, apparently.

"Do not display your treasures or people will become envious."

Sound advice, and words I frequently need to hear. I get so excited about the things I love, I often forget that others have not been as fortunate, or might not see things from my perspective.

"Accept the next proposal that comes your way."

Okey-dokey. So long as it's something nice.

And the first one from 2010:

"You are working very hard."

MLA Bound

I am, once again, MLA bound next week. Off to snowy Philadelphia to deliver a paper, see old friends, and horse around in a place I used to live.

I'm dreading and looking forward to it. Dreading it because MLA still fills me with residual dread. It's just so huge. Sometimes it's really hard just to locate one's friends in the midst of all the posturing and networking and nervous job candidates and competitive colleagues. And dreading it because the economy's so bad, there are few jobs available for anyone, and even my alma mater has canceled its annual party. It's a dark, dark time.

But let's face it, I'm a nerd. I totally love the work that we do, and so I am looking forward to it because part of me cannot wait to give my talk, and meet the important person who agreed to chair our panel, and reconnect with scholars whose work I admire.

But if you're one of my friends and you'll be there, and you're also feeling overwhelmed by the massiveness that is MLA, please get in touch with me and let's arrange to meet up. In advance.

JUDY GARLAND: 'MEET ME IN ST LOUIS'. 'HAVE YOURSELF A MERRY LITTLE CHRISTMAS' WITH SNOWMAN CLIP.

Maybe it's me, but I find most pop songy holiday music as irritating as it is inescapable this time of year. So I'm always glad when a little jazz standard by Irving Berlin ("White Christmas") or Mel Tormé ("Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire") comes out over the loudspeakers, only partly because both composers were Jews who knew that Christmas sells. They were also elegant composers who knew the thrill and complexity of a long, drawn out musical phrase.

Another Jew who capitalized on Christmas was Yip Harburg, who wrote the lyrics to my favorite Christmas song of all time, "Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas." I like it because the original lyrics are so dark and ironic and uncertain.

Meet Me in St. Louis was one of my favorite movies as a little girl. And this scene in particular. Have yourself a merry little Christmas indeed. Then run outside and smash all the snowmen, because you have to move to New York.

This Little Light of Mine

It's a gorgeous day: bright blue cloudless sky, red gold leaves in the trees and underfoot, and warmth under the dappled sun. As I tramped through the leaves in the backyard, half listening to my neighbor summon her cat "Cowgirl! Here kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-kit-TEE!" which makes me feel like I'm in the country, I noticed that the familiar call was mixed with a strain of bright music. There is a church on my cross-street, a tiny white box of a building that I never paid much attention to. But today I could hear a small gospel choir inside singing

This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
I'm gonna let it shine
I'm gonna let it shine
This little light of mine
I'm gonna let it shine
Let it shine, let it shine, let it shi-ine

My mother used to sing this to me when I was very small. Hearing it today was kind of transcendental.

Underneath

Being under review again is challenging, since I've started to make progress on my manuscript revision. The review can take up a lot of psychological and emotional acreage, leaving little room for focus on my current projects, if I'm not careful. And it gets scarier and scarier in the years leading up to the tenure decision. I'm only 3 years in and already I'm worried.

Reading one's colleagues' critical reports is a bracing experience, but I'm trying my best to take them to heart constructively by thinking about how I can use this as an opportunity to change as a teacher and as a scholar. I'm trying to read them as assessments rather than evaluations. And I'm hoping they'll keep me on.

I have also realized I am not a fan of certain words and phrases that tend to crop up in such reports. It's probably because right now my mind's landscape is being overtaken by thoughts about the review and its uncertain outcome. But for some reason the verb "evinces", even used in a positive way, freaks me out. It has nothing to do with what the word means. I think it has something to do with the way it sounds- kind of like a sharp knife slicing away at paper.

Haiku Dissertations

I recently came across these beautiful haikus (via an email from an adorable beau) based on doctoral dissertations.

Somehow I'm more impressed by these scholars' abilities to write haikus based on their projects than by the years of research and argumentation that went in to the original projects. It's so much more difficult to reduce one's argument to seventeen syllables.

I think perhaps I ought to try to write a few of these about my book project, and maybe they will help me clarify my proposal.

HAIKU DISSERTATION

Yellow Leaves

I'm back in the South for the time being. Montreal and New York were wonderful, but I've had to come back here for a while, to work, until I can find a subletter and a sublet elsewhere.

I've just turned in my 3rd/4th year review dossier (sigh of relief, followed by sigh of apprehension) and am settling in to writing, or fixing up my manuscript.

The weather's been cool, and the leaves are starting to turn. I'm switching from sandals to boots, tights, jeans and cardigans. It's not cold enough to turn on the heat just yet, but it's cool enough to smell woodsmoke and cold wet grass in the air, go for a short walk in the park and return to brew a pot of tea for the afternoon's work.

I love autumn. I think maybe I say this every year around this time of year, but I believe I think better, write better, work better when it's just starting to get chilly out. The air is thinner, crisper, my mind is sharper. Or maybe it's all the mugs of tea I'm consuming. At any rate, I am grateful for the arrival of autumn and for my leave- there are few things I would rather do than sit down with a pile of books and a pot of tea, wrap myself in a wool cardigan, and settle down to read or revise, with a nearly comatose cat nestled in my lap.

retourner à Montréal

Tomorrow morning- eye blinkingly early - I'm going to take the 11 hour train from New York to Montréal. It will be my first time back in the city in two years, which is almost unbelievable to me, given that I still dream of Montréal and still think about myself as having come to the south from there, kind of as if I lived there longer than I actually did. Of course it helped cement that feeling of being "from Montréal" in my head, when I kept going back to Montréal for a year and a half after I moved south (I was dating someone who lived there).

But anyway, it's been two years. My French is rusty. My vocabulaire Québecois even rustier. I can't seem to remember the proper order of the streets that ran between my own street, Rue Drolet, and the main street Boul. St. Laurent, even though I walked past them several times a day for a year, and for some reason I find this vaguely disturbing. Henri-Julien, Laval, Hôtel-de-Ville, Coloniale, St. Dominique. There, I think that's right. (I just checked google maps and had forgotten de Bullion- how could I have forgotten de Bullion?!). Every day I would walk along Avenue des Pins from Drolet to St. Laurent and pass these same streets. I'd pass the Theatre des Quat'Sous, housed in an old synagogue, and the fancy restaurant Laloux where my parents once took me and where we ate coqilles st. jacques cooked with creme, orange rind and pernod and they served mousse de fois gras instead of butter with the bread. It sat across the street from a humble little potato place, Patate au Four, which I never tried but liked the idea that it was open late next door to a Buanderie- so you could get a piping hot potato if you were stuck out in the cold, dark winter doing your laundry.

This time, I'm not going alone. There is a fellow traveler (an adorable beau), who speaks better French than me but has never been to Montréal. I can't wait to show it to him. But it will also be good just to walk those streets again, speak that weird mixture of Canadian French and English, see my old friends, and wander through the used bookstores of the Plateau, stocked with beautiful francophone books and huge collections of discounted classical music CDs. I think I still have my 10% off discount card for the Bouquineries St. Denis and du Plateau, which I remember had this great window on Rue St. Denis full of curious book specimens, all of which I coveted. And of course we'll see some French cinema and visit Mile End, with its mixture of Portuguese cafes, Greek delis, and Orthodox Jews, and the Spanish and Portuguese places in the Plateau, and the lovely Café Côté Soleil on St. Denis to have a Montréal brunch, and then go for a walk up the "mountain" maybe with a picnic lunch from Marché Jean Talon and I'll see my friends and colleagues too- three days is starting to seem a little too short to fit everything in.