Two thoughts are keeping my head above water these days. (“These days” being twelve days before I start sitting my writtens.)

Well over a year ago, I asked someone to explain the goals of the exam process to me. He explained it like this: Becoming a candidate means you are almost a colleague. Being a colleague means that the department can count on you not to embarrass yourself or it. If you go to a conference and are forced to write your paper in the 24 hour period before you deliver it, can you do it and still manage to be competent and make a convincing argument? When people ask you difficult questions about it during the Q&A period, can you answer them coherently and maintain a professional demeanor? In short: Is your knowledge sufficient?

That answer made the whole thing seem much more tangible and reasonable to me. I keep coming back to it now.

The other thing occurred to me recently, and I was telling Compatriot G about it yesterday while we were sitting in the gardens, enjoying the last warm day of the year and commiserating. (The three of us in the reading group are all going up before Thanksgiving.) Four and a half years ago, I left a very good job to come to graduate school. I’ve done nothing but think about this stuff since then, so one would hope I know something about my discipline and subfields by now. I have the good fortune to actually like my committee. They’re four of the smartest, funniest people I know. And now I get their undivided attention for awhile. I get to block out time to write about the things I like to think about, and then I get to sit in a room with all of them for two hours and talk about what I came up with. I’m at the point where I’m starting to get a handle on my approach to things, and I want constructive criticism. I want to know where I’m wrong and where I’m right. I’m about to find out.

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Driben: Unknown

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A longtime correspondent, himself a specialist in archetypes of the feminine, asks:

Interesting thread on my Victoria-L about redheads being associated with untrustworthiness. Do you know anything about this? How far back it goes?

As for the Victorians, I would imagine that this has to do with historical British attitudes toward the Irish. As a Victorianist, you’d know far more about that than I. There was always the Irish Question, and while Ireland doesn’t have the largest genetic pool of redheads in the world*, I’d think it would have been uppermost in the British consciousness.

*Scotland has a 13% concentration, as opposed to Ireland’s 10%. The gene exists almost worldwide, though.

Got a redhead question? Ask Ms. Vermillion!

Posted at 11:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

One of several by Anagram Bookshop

What people said about books in 1498.

Ancient Greek curse tablets

What we talk about when we talk about books

̶Back around aught-six, some folks had this crazy idea called ‘net neutrality...’ A short cartoon I’ll use in next semester’s Internet Tools & Issues class.

Adobe tries again with e-books: the Digital Editions reader

SlideShare, “a YouTube for PowerPoint.” (via jill/txt)

Not a book:
The Micropolitan Museum: The Institute for the Promotion of the Less than One Millimeter

Posted at 11:00 AM | Permalink

Today’s earworm is Koko Taylor proposing that we gonna pitch a wang dang doodle all night long. I’m cool with that.

It put me in mind of another expression I haven’t heard for awhile. In fact, I’ve only ever heard one of my grandmas use it: squealie worm. As in, “When he told her that, she ’bout had a squealie worm!” Or, “ She called up and was fixin’ to have a squealie worm, and I told her, I said BethAnn, calm down.”*

Mister Husband has never heard of a squealie worm. Google is particularly unhelpful. I should dig out my copy of Lyle Saxon’s Gumbo Ya-Ya, which contains many old Southern colloquialisms. Perhaps the squealie worm is a rare and wondrous thing, at least linguistically.

*For discussion of old-school southern echolalia, see Florence King's Confessions of a Failed Southern Lady.

Posted at 8:20 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Step One: Discuss where to eat dinner. Lovely local Italian place with very nice food? Lovely local Chinese place where the waiters know you by name?
Step Two: Decide on Red Lobster.
Step Three: Order the Endless Shrimp. Both of you.
Step Four: Wuss out after one order of shrimp. Oof.
Step Five: Go to Barnes and Noble. Lurk. Decide, shockingly, that there’s nothing either of you really needs at the moment.
Step Six: Stand around in the parking lot and talk about how neither of you is looking for a relationship because you’re both going on to a PhD program. Oh, wait! That wasn’t now! That was exactly precisely four years ago!
Step Seven: Decide to go to Target. Let your honey buy pants (for him), ice cream (for both), and stripey socks (for you). Also socks with sock monkeys on them (for you). Also pink fuzzy slippers with pom-poms (for you). Because there’s no better anniversary present than silly footwear. And it’s even better if you get them a day early because one of you has a Wednesday night seminar.

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There will probably be a heavier than usual dose of redheads, pulps, and photos as I make the 20-day run up to my comps. Ain’t nothin’ all bad, eh?

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(apologies to William Carlos Williams)

I bought this little red teakettle at an outlet mall the summer I moved to Minnesota. It makes me happy several times every day.

Posted to Favorite Things Saturday.

Posted at 11:35 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Via the excellent nonist, now discovered and blogrolled:
Eleven presses that made history
Hot library smut
The Virtual Typewriter Museum and The Classic Typewriter Page

And the complete works of Darwin are now available online (via Digital Koans and One Pot Meal)

Not bookish:
LucasFilm has C&D’d Diesel Sweeties. (No permalink available, but scroll to the 10/20/06 blog entry.)

Posted at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I made pozole for the first time last night. Wasn’t hard, and turned out mighty good. Since I was always too worried about authenticity before to attempt it, I thought I’d put the recipe for White Girl Pozole here.

First, you get some pork. If we were Really Authentic we’d get a pig’s head, but since we’re white girls we’ll just go to Super Target. Vaguely Authentic would mean short ribs, but god forbid Target have anything so un-yuppie. I settled for loin roast.

Then you whack it up into fist-sized chunks. All the serious Mexican soups I’ve had demanded a knife and fork, and I wanted to preserve at least that part of it. One must resist the white girl urge to dice. Or cube. Or mince. (Oh, how we love to mince.) I cut a 2.2 pound roast into six chunks.

Then I browned it in two batches, deglazed the pan, and covered the whole thing with water. I sliced up half a head of garlic, threw it in there, added some oregano (in place of epazote) and a can of chicken broth, and let the whole thing boil for an hour and a half. If it foams, skim it.

While that’s going on, cover a couple of chiles nuevo mexico with boiling water. (You might also use anchos or guajillos if you have them, but I didn’t.) Cover and soak for a half an hour or whenever you remember them. Then put on some gloves to cut off the stems and de-seed. Roughly chop and put in a food processor. Roughly chop half an onion and put it in there too. Whir with however much of the soaking liquid you need.

Add as much of the results to the soup pot as you like. When the pork is about half an hour away from being fall-apart tender, cut some potatoes in half and stick them in there too, along with a couple cans of hominy. I also added some shredded cabbage, but I think it’s more traditional to add that straight to the bowls.

Dice a tomatillo, chop an avacado and some cilantro, quarter a lime. Let everyone dress their own bowls. Pozole will cure what ails ya, which is good because we’ve both got colds. And it reheats very nicely.

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49. I cannot stand to have dirty hair.
50. I would conduct all my daily affairs from the bathtub if I could.
51. I love lists. They are orderly. They begin and they end so tidily.
52. I am a Dragon and a Pisces. (Impetus: who knows how many places)
53. I do better with a small group of really good friends than I do with lots and lots of acquaintances. Most of those really good friends are women. Not all, but most. [The “friends with women” part is a development of my 20s — before then, I had almost exclusively male friends. It’s still easier for me to be close to men than to women, though.]
54. I’m insatiably curious about just about everything. This is part of what makes teaching Sci/Tech Comm on an agricultural campus so much fun — I get to read and hear about all the stuff I’ll never get a chance to study.
55. When I was little, I had a Snoopy but slept with a Belle. She had several outfits that I saved my allowance for and bought from the Peanuts store, and my mom made her a blanket of her very own. She went everywhere with me for quite awhile. I’m pretty sure she’s currently in a closet at my parents’ house. (impetus: #57)
56: I have the inky wretch’s typical obsessive love of office supplies.
57. I can articulate my big and little toes separately from the rest of my toes. (Source forgotten.) My Dad can too.
58. When I’m writing, my hair absolutely has to be pulled away from my face.
59. I’m a wanderer, in a lot of senses. Someone once told me they check the blog before we meet up so they can see where my mind has been.

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Clancy and I are both quoted in a Minnesota Daily article on the launch of Citizendium and wiki use at UMN*.

My point was pretty simple: While Citizendium is indeed the long-predicted fork of Wikipedia, I don’t think it necessarily dilutes Wikipedia’s value or core following. The hardcore Wikipedians who handle the primary production and management of the project spend a fair amount of their personal time on this because they are dedicated to the project’s core values: open access, open source, rhizomatic growth, and egalitarianism. They self-select and often describe their increased participation as a transformative process (see Bryant, et al, “Becoming Wikipedian”). Citizendium’s ethics of expert direction will demand development of a different sort of community with a different ethos and value set. And I suspect that the built-in requirements of expert approval and direction will slow production considerably, much like the problems that plagued Nupedia. (One would think it will still run faster than that project did, though, since Citizendium doesn’t require a multi-tier review process.)

The best possible result would be that the two projects would complement each other, giving the Internets two rich, free, community-driven encyclopedic resources. Given the players involved, that’s probably rather optimistic — Sanger has not been shy in the past few years about voicing his unhappiness with the governance rules and general quality of Wikipedia.

So we’ll sit back and wait. No matter what happens, this will be something that digital text researchers will be talking about for awhile to come.

* I’m never sure quite how to think of the Daily. On the one hand, it’s the University newspaper. On the other, it’s one of the largest university papers in the country, and the fifth largest in Minnesota. And they quoted me more accurately that some larger venues.

Posted at 10:55 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Jo(e)’s post on darlingtonia carlifornica reminded me to write about the carnivore window (two months ago now). And then almost a month ago I picked up another sarracenia and meant to blog about them then. So here, now, is a little photo essay.

They’ve been surprisingly easy to grow, for the most part. As long as they have the right substrate, reverse-osmosis water, and occasional insect, they’re good to go. I mist them fairly regularly, and they seem to like their south-facing, slightly shady window.

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Good Things, a la Billie. Because in spite of the sleep thing, I’m feeling pretty thankful lately.

• My students positively rocked their how-to presentations yesterday. We learned the technical differences between different kind of baseball gloves and how to purchase a good one and care for it as well as how to make Vietnamese noodle salad, origami cranes, and proper pizza. It’s not every day that one of my frat boys earnestly and effectively persuades everyone of the virtues of fresh mozzerella.
• Then lunch with a Med School compatriot who appears to be becoming a friend. We discussed The Project not once during a two-hour lunch.
• I managed to get out of Office Depot with only what I really needed, but what I really needed was such fun. (Post-it flags, a new clipboard, number stencils. I can’t remember the last time I had occasion to buy stencils.)
• Soy chai from Caribou Coffee. And a tiny stuffed moose with a bandit mask.
• It’s brussel sprout season, and I finally started buying the big, uncut stalks of sprouts at the Farmer’s Market instead of the loose, expensive ones at the grocery store. Amazing. More on that later, perhaps.
• Lovely husband who suggests unplanned Saturday morning in front of the TV. Ren and Stimpy reruns! The Gods Must Be Crazy! There should be Invader Zim.
• Grilled cheese sammiches for breakfast. And the sweet perversity of drinking stout out of a teacup last night.
• The apartment has lots of light. Especially today.

An Unexpected, Mostly Good But Annoying Thing:

• I’m enjoying working my way through The New Rhetoric. (“Enjoying” is a relative term; I guess what I like is the challenge. This is quite humorous, considering how much I bitched my way through the first 100 pages.) The problem is that I want to keep working on this text, but I’ve figured out the part I need to answer my exam question, and so I have to move on. I’m afraid I’ll have lost my momentum by the time I get a chance to come back to Perelman.

To Do This Weekend:

• Un-explode the house. There are books all over the floor in every room. Now there are only books all over the living room.
• Make a pre-emptive strike on the grading.
• Start drafting the syllabus for the spring course on Internet Tools and Issues, since I need to do book orders and a colleague has nicely volunteered to build out the WebCT site for a class she’s taking in Instructional Technologies.
• Cook something yummy.
• Read read read. Write write write.

Posted at 11:08 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I’ve been waking up at 4 a.m. for the past few weeks. Without fail. Without an alarm clock. I hate it, so I toss and turn for a couple of hours until I fall back asleep. And then I invariably oversleep — yesterday, Mister Husband finally woke me up at 9:30 so I could go teach my 11:30 class. Since I slept so much later, I have no interest in my normal bedtime, which would be around 9 or 10. I go to bed closer to midnight, and then I wake up at 4 again.

This will not do, especially with exams approaching. (It would make sense for my sleep to be messed up because of them, but I don’t have a strong sense that they’re the reason.) And it’s doubly annoying because I’m normally a very sound sleeper.

So today I just gave up and got up. Perhaps if I can make it through the day without napping, and with my normal amount of caffeine (a small cup of black tea), it’ll reset the whole shebang.

It seems like lately there’s a larger than normal number of folks with sleep problems in my part of the blogosphere. Ya’ll better not be contagious.

Posted at 4:46 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

1. My Narrow Mind (16 Horsepower)
2. The Final Rhino (Adrian Belew)
3. The Blues Are Brewin’ (Billie Holiday)
4. This Is Not a Test (Bikini Kill)
5. I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (Yo La Tango)

In other words: Barring filibuster of some sort, I will begin sitting my comps in 32 days.

I have nothing more to say about the matter at this time.

Posted at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

There was a mini-blizzard for about ten minutes. Now it's sunny and wet outside. (This is really best viewed large in Flickr.)

Update, 10:22 the next day: It’s been coming down hard again for the past hour or so, but the streets are mostly dry. It’s the Little Front That Tried.

Posted at 4:48 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

The squirrels are very fat and busy lately.

I made the last batch of salsa and the first batch of gumbo this weekend.

And now they’re forecasting snow for Wednesday.

Update, Wednesday: Yup, tiny flakes of snow. I’ll be surprised if it amounts to anything here, but the weather prophet says up to 10 inches above Duluth.

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After all this, I’m still learning to read in something resembling an efficient manner. Years and years ago, a beloved Lit professor told me that he read every single word of a book, including the publication info and title pages. As an impressionable young undergrad, I figured he must know what he was doing. (In retrospect, it was probably just an OCD quirk.) I never took the read it all mandate quite that far, but I have been in the habit of reading almost every bit of a book for way too long. And in this racket, it’s not even really possible. I’ve gotten better during the past couple of years just out of pure desperation, and have made some real progress toward efficiency since I started doing my exam review work.

I did read Adler quite awhile back, but was put off because a) you sort of need to read the whole thing, irony of ironies and b) because of everything I had learned about Adler’s philosophy during my Lit degree. Here are two things I wish I had read about five years ago (had they existed then). The next time a panicked first-year grad student shows up in my office looking for advice, I'm a-sending them here:
Rebecca Howard’s step-by-step method
How to Read in College, by Tim Burke

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BOLLES: Within The Law, 1924

One of the best parts of running the Redhead Project is corresponding with the fun, smart people who contact me about it. Alert reader Jack Raglin sent along a number of Bolles magazine covers that will be appearing in the coming months. He’s a pinup scholar who has been publishing some interesting work that I’ll start working my way through after comps, and was kind enough to mention some misattributions in previous Bolles postings that I need to look into. (Future post to come on that.) He also pointed out this gorgeous new book on Vargas by Reid Austin, which I’ve ordered. Thanks for everything, Jack!

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OSLO, Norway (Reuters) -- Scientists have found a fossil of a "Monster" fish-like reptile in a 150 million-year-old Jurassic graveyard on an Arctic island off Norway.

The Norwegian researchers discovered remains of a total of 28 plesiosaurs and ichthyosaurs -- top marine predators when dinosaurs dominated on land -- at a site on the island of Spitsbergen, about 800 miles from the North Pole.

“One of them was this gigantic monster, with vertebrae the size of dinner plates and teeth the size of cucumbers,” Joern Hurum, an assistant professor at the University of Oslo, told Reuters on Thursday.

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Q: Beatles or Stones?
A: The Who.

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C. showed up on my doorstep last night, fresh from a weekend trip to North Dakota. Her grandparents had transformed her sedan into a produce truck, and she bestowed much bounty upon us. Pumpkins, cantaloupes, watermelons, gourds. Tomatoes, fresh, canned, and juiced. Salsa and cherry jam. Homemade pumpkin pie made from her grandma’s pumpkins. Peppers both hot and mild. Freshly dug red potatoes. Leeks complete with full stalks, roots, and dirt. We hauled a huge tote bag and a full garbage bag of stuff up the stairs to my kitchen.

Today I had pie for breakfast and set to making leek and potato soup. I make it several times each year, but it’s been awhile since I’ve worked with whole, entire leeks. I sheared off the tops and the hanging roots last night and then mopped the dirt off the counters and floors. Today I pared more from the bottom and tops, rinsed and rinsed and rinsed, and then chopped them up. All the while, I kept thinking of my grandparents’ leek patch back in Arkansas.

I doubt it exists anymore, since grandpa moved out years ago. It was underneath a gumball tree that bordered the back field, and it was somehow very mysterious. I’m not sure why, but when I was small I could never remember what was planted there. Grandma would always look at me funny and say, “You know that’s leeks.” She would haul the huge, filthy things up to the patio for trimming, and then inside for soup. The trimmings always went into the compost piles. The soup did not go into Kristas, even though it was offered every time. “You used to like this,” she said. “We would make it for you and bring it over in a thermos when you were sick. Some days it was the only thing you would eat.” When you were sick meant when you had meningitis. I barely remember anything from the months after I came home from the hospital, but I do remember her coming by often with my great-grandmother. I did not eat leeks after that. I didn’t eat many things I associated with being that ill.

It wasn’t until long after both of them passed on that I was paging through a cookbook looking for something different to make and happened upon a recipe for leek and potato soup. I had forgotten that she made it for me, forgotten what it tasted like, forgotten that I refused it all those years after. I made it and gave some to Mom. It was good. I keep making it, sometimes from different recipes but most often freehand. I refine it, trying to find the essence of the leeks. If I try hard enough, perhaps I’ll also uncover the essence of grandma, a middle-aged woman preparing a cure the best way she knew how, bottling soup and crossing the river to me.

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