The Book Arts Web (via futureofthebook.com)
Confessions of a Bookplate Junkie
Animated da Vinci Illustrations
Ten Things You Didn’t Know About Your Books by Adrian Johns

Not a book: The Antikythera Mechanism, an ancient Greek computer:

Scientists have finally demystified the incredible workings of a 2,000-year-old astronomical calculator built by ancient Greeks. A new analysis of the Antikythera Mechanism, a clock-like machine consisting of more than 30 precise, hand-cut bronze gears, show it to be more advanced than previously thought—so much so that nothing comparable was built for another thousand years.

Posted at 2:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I started watching Woody Allen movies somewhere around Shadows and Fog, and worked my way backwards from there through the classic stuff. I liked some of his mid-90s work (Mighty Aphrodite, Everyone Says I Love You), but have been pretty much indifferent since Celebrity.

So tonight I’m under the weather, sitting around watching Melinda and Melinda, which I never bothered to see and which happened to be on cable. And I realize that up until now, the people in Woody Allen films have always been grown-ups. As in older than me, people I might or might not want to be like someday. (Generally not.) And now, all of a sudden, the people on the screen are my age. Which would appear to indicate that I am, by chronological measure, a grown-up.

This fact has been pointed out to me before, but these repetitive realizations are terrible little moments.

Posted at 7:26 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

The last couple of times we’ve been to Forest Lake Pets, they’ve had a sea horse colony. I’d never seen them face-to-face before, and keep stealing Mister Husband’s cellphone to take photos. They’re much slower than you’d think, and they curl their tails around corals and each other. Sea horses holding tails are unbearably cute.

Posted at 7:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

I submitted the last of the exams this morning. Final stats: 21,419 words on 96 double-spaced pages. 5 of those pages were screencaps and there were probably about 10 pages of bibliographies, so I’d say roughly 80 pages of argument written over the course of 78 hours*. That seems about right for the wordcount. This was totally unexpected, as I’ve considered myself a slow writer for most of my grad school career. I was just hoping to hit the rumored minimums for each set, which were supposedly 2-3 pages for an in-house and 10ish for a take-home. Billie was right when she told me I’d be surprised by what would come out when I actually sat down to do these.

All told, I did learn a lot from the process. The questions pushed me, and I have more and different thoughts about the subjects now than when I started. I think I have bad drafts of three papers. I know more about where some of my weak spots are, and have got some reading mapped out for the three weeks between now and my orals. Some moments of the writing and thinking were fun, but as a whole this was generally not much fun at all.

Bottom line: I'm glad I did it and I'm especially glad this part is over with. Now I just need to pass. And then pass the orals.

*Fewer production hours, actually, since I don’t think I ever wrote for more than 12 hours straight. But I also sleep-wrote, so there were more than 12 hours of thinking time for each take-home.

Update, 11/28: Just got notification that I passed the writtens!

Posted at 8:31 AM | Permalink | Comments (7)

Every year since I was old enough to cook, I’ve instigated a big ol’ traditional Thanksgiving dinner. Not this year, though. Exams have taken too much out of me. Today we’re having the meal I usually make for New Year’s: ham, scalloped potatoes, brussel sprouts, rolls. I tacked on homemade cranberry sauce and a pumpkin pie (frozen crust, homemade filling.)

I’ll make a turkey and stuffing and whatnot for Christmas, I think. And then on New Year’s, if I’m feeling brave, I’ll attempt tamales. If less brave, then perhaps more pozole.

I’m in a strange mood today. My exams are not completed, since I was ill on Tuesday, which is when I was supposed to write the last 24-hour one. I teach MWF at noon this semester, so it couldn’t be done on Wednesday. My class and I had pizza, though, and talked through several videos and spoken word performances, looking for what we could learn about cadence and movement. Then Mister Husband and I took off exploring across the city. Today is devoted to cooking and hanging out. Tomorrow I’ll finish that damned exam.

I’m thankful to be very nearly done with writtens. Thankful for a wonderful family, excellent friends, and supportive colleagues. Health and hope, books and blogs. This world is such an interesting place, and there’s always something amazing around the corner. Yesterday I found myself face to face with three African lungfish (in a fish store, where else?). They looked sleepy, and content not to have to worry about breathing air. We have fifty or so baby corys, all less than three weeks old. I’ve never watched fish hatch and grow up before, so I’m fascinated.

I’m not sure where all that is going, so I’ll end it here. I’ll go be thankful in the living room for awhile.

Update:: I managed to create only one load of dishes in the course of making dinner. I sort of wondered if I could (since I often don’t manage it even in the course of a normal weekday dinner.) And something was up with the oven: the dial was set to 325 (and the thermometer read 350, as per usual), but everything took longer to cook. The potatoes took nearly an hour and 45 minutes, and the rolls took nearly twice as long as usual. The whole thing reminded me of the story about Tori Amos cooking for Trent Reznor in the house the Manson murders occurred in, cooking the chicken that refused to ever be done.

Posted at 1:00 PM | Permalink

I’ve been a fan of Stash Tea’s Double Bergamot Earl Grey for quite awhile, but I trembled a bit when I bought a box of Double Spice Chai the other day. Double cloves, cardamom, and cinnamon sounds like a lot, but it turned out to be just about perfect, especially with a sprinkling of raw sugar. It makes sense that I like it, really, since I’m one of those people for whom too much is just barely enough. If you’re a fan of robust chais and don’t mind bagged tea, give it a try.

Posted at 2:12 PM | Permalink

This little crane was a hand-out in one my student’s How-To presentations. We each worked through the technical process of folding full-size cranes and were all clumsier than we thought possible. I can’t imagine folding one this small.

(Posted to Favorite Things Saturday)

Posted at 2:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Or, exam week comedy of errors:

Sunday, in preparation: Make pot of red beans and rice. Keep adding anaheim pepper, red pepper, black pepper, and white pepper, plus hot sausage, because the damn thing just won’t spice up. Whilst eating after it’s cooked down for four hours, wonder if there’'s any pepper vinegar in the house. Look over and notice that Mister Husband, no stranger to spiciness himself, cannot finish his serving because his lips are on fire. Conclude that he somehow got all the spicy.

Later, upon discovery that I have given myself the worst heartburn of my life (that lasts even into the next day), conclude that my taste buds have somehow gone awry. All week, my better half will have to wrest the pepper flakes from me lest I do further harm to myself.

As an added bonus, get pepper in eye. Flush with saline. Repeat.

Monday, 2-hour exam #1: Get up, stumble into bathroom, peer into contact case in preparation for putting them in. Discover that while I wasn’t looking, the toothpaste tube leaked into contact case and now the contacts are wrinkly like Ruffles Potato Chips and the whole thing smells mentholated. Throw away contacts, put in new pair, rinse rinse rinse case.

Show up on time and write four single-spaced pages.

Tuesday, 24-hour exam #1: Get up, stumble into bathroom, peer into contact case in preparation for putting them in. After doing so, discover that contacts are painfully minty fresh. Throw away contacts and case, flush flush flush with saline, put in another fresh pair. Take time out of busy schedule to go get another case.

Write 14-double spaced pages on the hellenic author and the rhetorical space in which we might find such a creature.

Wednesday, day of relative rest: Get up, successfully install contacts without mentholating own eyeballs. Hold office hours, teach class, lalala.

Go home and discover a notice from landlord that they will be coming to rip the radiator pipes apart tomorrow. Please to move everything away from the wall. Half of the living room (many archives, many books, very large speakers) is located on that wall. Call up landlord, freak out over lack of notice. Am told that really, they only need a very small section of the wall, and they’ll be very quick and quiet. No, the contractor cannot come another day and could not even give the management 24 hours notice. Thankyouhaveaniceday.

Manly cussing. By me. Mister Husband nicely relocates all the stuff. He’s been wonderfully dedicated to being The Calm Half this week.

Thursday, 24-hour exam #2: Write write write. All the while, bangety bangety bang. Buzzer rings, it's the advance crew come to rip the grates away from the wall. Buzzer rings, it’s a tiny Italian plumber. We bond over mutual deafness, and I retreat to my study. Bangety bang-bang from the living room. One of the staff is out in the hall hollering that one person can only take so much, and that they shall quit right now this very instant. Buzzer rings, it’s the UPS guy. Eventually no buzzer, but I look up from page 22 to see that an elfen maintenance staff member is standing in my study, telling me that they’re there to put everything back together again. I jump a foot, scaring her to death. Apparently my concentration and deafness were such that I didn’t notice that there were four people with monkey wrenches in my living room.

Still, write write write. 32 pages, 11 screencaps, 6418 words. I had no idea I could do that. I’m asleep by 9:30.

Friday, 2-hour exam #2: Up at 5. Proofread exam response, and email it to the coordinator. Of course it won’t go, it’s 2 megs. Zip and re-send. Rejected by system. Stuff and re-send. Rejected by system. Pack self up and go to school an hour early so as to meet submission deadline.

Load onto coordinator’s flash drive. Directly after, three variously compressed copies arrive in her inbox. Retreat to office for last minute cramming for Massive Memorization Question.

Begin writing precisely at 8:30. Write write write, with flash drive set to automatically save every 5 minutes. Manually save at other intervals out of pure paranoia. At 9:50, 5 1/2 single-spaced pages in, the power goes off. Screech, much louder than I ever meant to in an office. Power comes back on. Computer boots up. Yay! I don’t know the password! Boo! Go in search of coordinator, and learn she has gone to a meeting. Locate Department Goddess/Future Librarian. We go to hack into computer. 10 zillion password tries later, the machine gets suspicious and locks itself.

But the flashdrive was saving all that time! Let's power down, remove it, and see what’s there. Hmmmm. Only the first paragraph. I completely melt down, and Compatriot G manages to ooze sympathy and mostly hide his laughter as he bears the brunt of my ranting. He’s good that way.

Glancing at wall clock, I see that it’s time to go teach. So I gather up all my stuff, including a gigantic silly fruit bowl full of impromptu speech topics (The Fruitbowl of Doom), and go barreling into my classroom. Which is full of students who are not mine and an instructor who definitely is not me. I am an hour early; the Writing Center wall clock was never reset after the time change. At this point, I’m not even embarrassed. I crack up, and go back to my office.

Once there, I go across the hall to where Librarian Goddess is still working on the machine. It boots up! Word launches AutoRestore! And there is my entire essay, intact. And I have just enough time to finish it before it’s really time to teach. So I do. And it was fine.

I’m gonna sleep a lot this weekend.

Posted at 2:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

Am I writing about wikiality right now in a 24-hour exam question?

Why, yes. Yes, I am.

Posted at 1:40 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

As of tomorrow morning there’s no more prepping, only doing. I doubt I’ll be here much for the next ten days, but I’ll pop in occasionally to moderate comments and zap spam. I’ll probably still post over at Waterlogged, because the cory fry are growing up so quickly.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with this Tenniel illustration and a link to the very first entry on this blog, back when it was named Areté and I was a wee Master’s student:

“I only took the regular educational course,” said the Mock Turtle with a sigh.

“What was that?” inquired Alice.

“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle replied; “and then the different branches of Arithmetic — Ambition, Distraction, Uglification, and Derision.”

“I never heard of ‘Uglification,’” Alice ventured to say. “What is it?”

The Gryphon lifted up both its paws in surprise. “What! Never heard of uglifying!” it exclaimed. “You know what to beautify is, I suppose?”

“Yes,” said Alice doubtfully: “it means - to - make - anything - prettier.”

“Well, then,” the Gryphon went on, “if you don't know what to uglify is, you must be a simpleton.”

There’s more if you click through.

Posted at 9:30 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Back in the spring, John Logie, who’s been chairing the CCCC Intellectual Property Committee, proposed an annual series of briefs on major legal developments that impact the discipline. The briefs that Jim Porter, Martine Courant-Rife, Jessica Reyman, and I wrote this year are now available on the CCCC site as The Major Intellectual Property Developments of 2005 for Scholars of Composition and Communication. Jim and Martine offer an expansion of their WIDE paper on MGM v. Grokster, Jessica examines BMG v. Gonzalez, and I discuss the two major suits against the Google Print project.

Posted at 9:19 AM | Permalink

Rice commented about the concept of exams-as-heuristic. I can’t believe I didn’t mention this before, but lo, I haven’t. Maybe I just wanted to wait and come out the other side and see if I really did learn anything. And maybe I’m just superstitious, and don’t want to jinx myself by talking about the actual questions of the exams yet.

Here at Minnesota, I’ve been heavily encouraged to use the exam process to further my research. The hope is that every answer will be either a draft of a dissertation section or a draft of an article. With the exception of a couple of questions concerning Aristotle, Plato, and Cicero, all of mine skew toward specific things I’m working on. There’s a couple that I really hope I get asked, because they’ll help me start to write about the grant I worked on in the Med School over the summer. The rest skew toward my interest in hellenistic and distributed authorship.

The process of preparing has also been helpful for me. As close readers may recall, I originally found the entire concept of qualifying exams to be very rude. I was bitching about it to L. at lunch one July day, and he flared up right back at me. I should value the process, he said, because it’s the one chance you get in your career to sit relatively still and situate the field and texts in your mind. All this reading was for me. And in the end, it has been. No matter how I come out the other side of this in a month, I have a much better understanding of the larger conversations in the field and of the development of my subfields. I understand what they have to do with my specific interests. I had to pick up a couple of theorists that I didn’t cover in coursework, and I learned that I can read difficult, unfamiliar things primarily on my own* and generally figure them out. I know what other resources to look for and what questions to ask. And I finally figured out how to read in a somewhat intelligent manner — how to skim, how to seriously read a TOC and index. How to drain a book quickly.

So yeah, I buy the whole exam-as-heuristic notion. I hope that’s even more true in a few weeks.

*Glory be to Reading Group, though. That’s another post I need to write.

Posted at 7:09 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

The part of all this that I’ve been dreading the most is the orals, which are scheduled for mid-December. There’s no clear consensus about them when I talk to our ABD folks and recent grads — descriptions range from ‘the most traumatic experience of my life’ to ‘pretty laid back’. So I suppose it depends on the person and the committee, like always, but I can’t help but expect the Spanish Inquisition.

I’m a pessimist by nature, though. (Johndan has a great line about pessimists never being unpleasantly surprised.) Working with a team full of habitual optimists over the summer has made me slightly rethink this position. (Slightly!) And two bloggers recently said things that made me reconsider my dread of oral exams. Derek views them as a chance to apply duct tape to spaces in his writtens. And Billie commented that orals would have given her a chance to clarify some spots in her exams, which were entirely written.

Orals as Shoring Up sounds much better than Orals as Torture. I’ll try to hold on to that.

Posted at 10:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I’ve gotten curious about the exam processes in different departments. It seems like every Rhetoric/Writing/English department handles it differently, even though we all have the same general ideas about the outcome. (Don’t we? I think we do.)

Here, you test in three areas: Rhetorical Theory, Technical Communication Theory, and your subfield. (Mine is Intellectual Property Theory & Law.) I’m responsible for right around 100 works altogether, but my Rhetorical Theory list is longer than some others. You negotiate readings with each examiner, and some of them may also negotiate a question list ahead of time. (Not all of mine have.)

It’s reasonably rare to see someone in the department take more than six months after their coursework to prepare. Most of us who finished in May have either already examined or will before Thanksgiving. Examining quickly is heavily encouraged — not being done by Christmas would be cause for A Meeting With One’s Advisor in most cases. The general sense, I think, is that you should be familiar with the key texts in each area by the end of your coursework, and for the most part that’s true. It’s not uncommon to see someone examine with about ten weeks of prep. Most of us going up now started reading heavily the first week of September.

There are typically (but not always, depending on who you work with) two sets of writtens for each area: a two hour in-house, and a 24 hour take-home. Those of us in my reading group are doing them over about ten days. I’m not sure what’s typical. Then you wait three weeks, per Grad School rules (two for professorial reading, one for the Grad School to process the paperwork.) Then there’s a two hour oral examination with all four of your committee members (three internal, one outside).

And then, assuming you passed, later on there’s the oral defense of your dissertation prospectus.

So that’s what happens here. I know at Syracuse there’s an examination proposal, and at other places exams are entirely written. Fascinating. How does your department do it?

Posted at 3:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

So Mister Husband and I have a co-authored fish blog now. It’s mostly just so we can remember what happened in which tank when. So far, my contribution has been photographing the baby fish (baby fish!) that have appeared in three tanks.

Posted at 9:51 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

BookBurro notices that you’re looking at a particular book and searches the web and local libraries for it. Very handy if, like me, you bounce between amazon, powell’s, abe and half.com before you buy anything.

Zotero pulls in reference data on books, articles, and websites as you view them. It also lets you sort and add tags. The bib info function was the big draw for me, but it also does a number of other things I need to explore. (After exams!)

Posted at 8:26 AM | Permalink

William Styron has passed away. He was one of the first great contemporary Southern writers I read, and I spent a spring consuming Sophie’s Choice, A Tidewater Morning, and The Confessions of Nat Turner. Each of them saturated me, and I had to wait a day or two before picking up something new to read. (I was also reading the Border Trilogy that season — I must have been craving intensity — and he and Cormac McCarthy are somehow intertwined in my mind. Did they like each other in real life? I don't know. Their techniques are so different, yet both so vast.) Later, I read Darkness Visible and thought “Yes, that’s it exactly.” Nobody else has written about depression with the clarity and lyricism that Styron did. I doubt anyone will.

I really liked knowing he was around in the world.

Posted at 7:08 AM | Permalink

Three 24-hour exams means a lot of writing music. (Plus, I somehow managed to set things up so I’m revising a conference paper right now.) Some summer infrastructure revisions resulted in my work music being spread over three iTunes directories on two Macs and a PC, and I’m working on getting it all in one place again.

But anyway, the bleg. Can anyone recommend music, pretty-please? I generally write best to music without words, although there are a few bands that work well for me (Mummydogs, early Concrete Blonde plus Mojave, Talking Heads’ Remain in Light, and Boss Hog’s Whiteout, which probably reveals something about me right there. Not sure exactly what, though.) Here’s what I’ve got so far, which is a combination of my own collection, some stuff I want to download, and some things folks recommended to Madeline when she was preparing:

Dick Dale (various)
Tom Verlaine - Warm and Cool
Frank Zappa - Guitar and Francesco Zappa
Vince Guaraldi (various)
Rachel Portman - the Human Stain soundtrack
Philip Glass
The Crouching Tiger soundtrack, minus the last two tracks
The English Patient soundtrack
Sonny Rollins - Skylark and Someone to Watch Over Me
Coltrane (various)
Thelonious Monk (various)
Ravi Shankar - Bangla Dhun
Bo Diddly - Aztec
The Brandenburg Concertos
Tchaikovsky Concertos conducted by Arthur Rubenstein
Bach Cello Suites by The Casals
Dead Can Dance (various)
Mozart - Symphony 39 and 41

What else do I need?

Posted at 4:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)