(via Feministe)

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Bobbi posted this poem a couple of days ago. It’s one of the best explanations of a particular aspect of introversion that I’ve come across. There are other reasons for being an introvert, of course, but part of mine does have to do with living the life I want as much as I can. That translates to consciously choosing social occasions whenever possible, rather than going to everything regardless of how much it does or doesn’t matter.

As Much As You Can
Constantine P. Cavafy

Even if you can’t shape your life the way you want,
at least try as much as you can
not to degrade it
by too much contact with the world,
by too much activity and talk.
Do not degrade it by dragging it along,
taking it around and exposing it so often
to the daily silliness
of social relations and parties,
until it comes to seem a boring hanger-on.

Posted at 10:22 AM | Permalink

I found this little 2-inch garden gnome while walking the Kingfield neighborhood with Compatriot G. It was in a wee, freshly-planted cactus garden, which you don't see so many of around here. I’m thinking that a Minnesota cactus garden must be quite the experiment in ephemerality.

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Clearing out stored links:

Good Copy, Bad Copy, which got boingboinged awhile back. I’ll be using it the next time I teach IP.

Dylan Hears a Who. When a musician recorded "Green Eggs and Ham" in the voice of vintage Bob Dylan and posted it online, the Grinch estate promptly replied: One fish, two fish, cease and desist.

London Review of Books piece on Disney's artistic limitations and personal practices of originality. Disney was not just an attention-hog but always irritable about the limitations of his own fakery: ‘Disney was continually, if mildly, irked because he could not draw Mickey or Donald or Pluto . . . Even more embarrassingly, he could not accurately duplicate the familiar “Walt Disney” signature that appeared as a trademark on all his products. As Mister Husband pointed out to me when he sent it, not only did the man sign everyone else’s hard work, he was signing with a signature he had asked a studio employee to redesign.

Remember that interview on women and blogs that I did a year ago and then forgot about? I was doing some vanity googling, and found the article in the Hindu Business Online and Domains Magazine. The latter wins for most misogynist title. Since when does representing half of anything count as ‘hogging’? Only when women do it, apparently.

The new journal Writing Technologies looks promising.

The Encyclopedia of Life aims to provide a free, public electronic page for each species of organism on Earth. There's some things to be said here about why this project should or shouldn't be rolled into other major digital encyclopedic projects like Wikipedia. Personally, I think a unified project has the most value.

QB discusses Doing Time, Doing Vipassana

Aaand a note-to-self to retrieve "Law Booksellers and Printers As Agents of Unchange" (2007) Cambridge Law Journal, vol 66, issue 2, p 389. Also Katharina de la Durantaye, "Origins of the Protection of Literary Authorship in Ancient Rome". Columbia Public Law Research Paper No. 07-139. Boston University International Law Journal, Spring 2007.

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ETA: I don’t really know enough about Cuban cuisine to evaluate Victor’s at length, but I’ll tell you this: by a fluke, I went there for dinner one night with E. and then to breakfast the next morning there with G. Whenever I’m with either of them, we yap on unceasingly about whatever comes to mind. But at both meals, when the food came and we began to eat, we were struck silent for a few minutes. I would go to Victor’s again in a hot second.

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I’d be veeeerrry interested in the University of Edinburgh’s postgraduate program in Material Cultures and the History of the Book, which starts this fall. It sounds like a pretty hardcore one-year program: a central course in Cultures of the Book, plus another in either Book History, Media Theory, and Communications or Working with Collections. Then two electives chosen from a rather fascinating list, although I’d really want something along the lines of British Print Culture and the Enlightenment. Then a 15,000 word diss that's due in August.

Sounds like a helluva sabbatical year, eh?

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I’m not busily reading the new Harry Potter. I didn’t even pre-order. I don’t care.

I started out well enough with all this years ago, when I bought the first three together at once for an old boyfriend and then stole them back before he even had a chance to get started. I read them back-to-back over the course of a week and then waited six months for The Goblet of Fire to come out. We bought dual copies of it and read them together over a weekend. By the time The Order of the Phoenix came out, we had long broken up and I was spending the summer with Mister Husband and his mother in eastern Oklahoma. I read it in a few days of couch surfing and road trips.

I pre-ordered The Half-Blood Prince in Minnesota out of habit. And never made it more than 100 pages in. One would think I’d have finished it at some point in the past two years, but no. Not interested in the slightest. Nor am I all that interested in the movies. An old girlfriend insisted that we see the first one on opening night, in the rain, after waiting for a replacement for a reel that snapped. The rest I’ve seen on cable. I asked C if she wanted to go see this one, more because it seemed like a fun summer flick than because it was HP. She wasn’t really up for it either.

I suppose at some point I’ll pick up a used copy of The Deathly Hallows and then read it and THBP back-to-back, just to be a completist. I’ll keep watching SHARP-L argue over whether or not Harry Potter has saved the publishing universe or just made it infinitely more stupid until we finally come up with something else to talk about. (Although it is fun to see what serials everyone read as a child, since the list is quite international.) But this weekend I’m watching documentaries and Bond movies and reading more encyclopedia history, and pondering ice cream. As in, should I make it or should I buy it? And either way, what kind?

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A rather long set that starts at a sushi joint in Apple Valley, goes to Mall of America, and then drives home along part of the Grand Rounds. There was quite a lot going on at MOA yesterday — a SPAM castle, the B&N Harry Potter party setup, and a human frog, among the usual carnivalry.

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We have baby firemouths all of a sudden. The parents are very cute and all about the parenting skills.

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Since I started the Ph.D. three years ago, I’ve had this quote tacked to the bulletin board above the desk in my study. It’s from a 8/2/92 interview that Susan Sontag did with the New York Times:

SS: And compared to the standards I was setting myself, I didn’t think I was so smart. I thought that I cared more than other people. If they cared as much, they could do what I was doing. I didn’t think I was a genius. ...

The essays were a tremendous struggle. Each of the large ones took nine months to a year. I’ve had thousands of pages for a 30 page essay — 30 or 40 drafts of every page. “On Photography,” which is six essays, took five years. And I mean working every single day.

NYT: When you say working, are you looking things up, checking references?

SS: No, no, I don’t look anything up until after I’ve finished and I’m checking. No, it’s just writing. I’d get started, and then I’d run into a ditch, and then I would start again — and again.

Then, today, Debbie Hawhee posted a quote from Malcolm Cowley’s 2/28/52 letter to Kenneth Burke. It’s joined the Sontag on my bulletin board. Debbie’s nicely summarized the background over there, so look at it first before you read this:

Also there’s something I’ve told you before and am telling you again and this time you had better listen while the hand is laid gently on your shoulder and before the hand takes you by the collar. Set finite and measurable limits now to the “on Human Relations” and stick to those limits and finish the book. Otherwise you will have so projected yourself into the book that it becomes your life and can’t be finished for fear of ending your life. And furthermore it won’t be as good a book as if you held it at a little distance and worked on it as an object or organism outside of yourself, because large parts of it will be too subjective and obsessional. It’s not you after all, but only something that you’re making, and the you has other sides that also have a right to be made clear.

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Years ago, my old work-friend Melissa taught me to make potato salad sandwiches. I don’t make them very often, or even every year, but yesterday the refrigerator happened to contain homemade potato salad, CSA greens mix, pumpernickel bread, and some coarse-ground mustard. It was a sign unto me that a sandwich was imminent. It was good, and very summertime.

Posted at 10:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

It hasn’t been all big balls of twine and water lilies and orchestra performances* around here lately, although it would be easy to get that impression. I’ve been teaching two nights per week, rummaging around in the diss research in the mornings, and I was at SHARP last week to talk about my new research on Chambers. I’m glad to have gone, since it gave me chance to discuss one of the central arguments of my dissertation: that the Encyclopedic Author is a distinct construct from the more typically-discussed Poetic Author. Generally, when we talk about authorship studies we’re talking about the Author who writes novels or poems. We spend quite a bit of time thinking about sources of inspiration for these genres, whether they’re the Hellenic notion of external, spiritual sources, or the Romantic idea of inspiration from internal, personal genius. When we talk about what an author is and if they’re dead, we usually mean this sort of author.

My argument is that the Encyclopedic Author deserves consideration because of his function as a textual curator. What does it mean when your central mode of composition is to collect a bunch of other texts, determine their quality, splice the best information from them together with the latest data, and transform it into a new text? What does this say about authorial agency and authority? Where does it leave inspiration? Additionally, we have to deal with the question of whether or not human knowledge is beyond ownership and the idea of the encyclopedist as someone who both draws from and contributes to an intellectual commons.

I was more nervous than usual beforehand, since my audience was primarily 18c lit specialists and I’m not one of those. It was a little odd to be back among the conventions of Lit culture — everyone was dressed more formally than folks would be at a Rhetoric conference, and everyone was introduced as Dr. or Prof. rather than by their first names. They were a good time, though: pleasant and supportive, particularly during the Q&A session. I got a tentative offer of publication for the piece, which has me rather excited. And it means that I can’t slack off on writing for the rest of the summer, which is helpful because I’m a girl who needs an impetus. Finishing is a good one, of course, but an article seems so much more immediate.

*I never got around to writing about that last one, but the short version is this: if you ever get a chance to see Tan Dun’s Elegy: Snow in June performed live, don’t turn it down. It’s one incredibly eerie cello surrounded by four percussionists, each playing at least six instruments. I counted two xylophones, a full set of chimes, gongs, bells, a full timpani array, bongos, snares, and athletic whistles. And paper to be torn, and other things I’m forgetting. It sounds all messy and pomo, but it’s actually very measured and beautiful.

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Well, I had two weeks of vacation time coming
After working all year down at Big Roy's Heating And Plumbing
So one night when my family the I were gathered 'round the dinner table
I said, "Kids, if you could go anywhere in this great big world, now
Where'd you like to go ta"
They said, "Dad, we wanna see the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota"
They picked the biggest ball of twine in Minnesota.
— Weird Al, The Biggest Ball of Twine in Minnesota

The museum is one of those wonderful small-town museums that is about 20% on-topic and 80% Contents of the Town’s Attics. The evidence is in the flickr sets.

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I picked up this poster at the Arbus exhibit at the Walker last July, and promised myself that I'd get it framed after I passed my exams. An albino, female sword-swallower seemed like an appropriate image for that sort of a milestone. Since my other, informal doctorate is in procrastination, it took me six months after exams to haul it to the framers and then another month to get it back. I think it’s going to reside in my campus office for the time being, unless it freaks out the students too badly.

On a related note: right after I passed, Clancy said she'd be curious to see how I felt about the exams process a year after the fact. It hasn’t been that long, of course, but right now, I remember the whole thing as fun. I find that extremely odd. Last summer and fall I actively hated the preparation process, but now I remember the luxury of it being my job to read. And I remember twice-weekly study group meetings, which were always reassuring. I loved the intensity of writtens, and my orals were a total smack-down hoot. Despite all that,there’s no way around the fact that exams, from start to finish, were long and tedious and grueling and immensely stressful. If I was married to a less understanding, less all-around-awesome man, I probably wouldn’t still be married. I suspect that I’m still seeing some health repercussions from them. Still, I’ve somehow come to remember them very fondly.

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I think I could live here, given my fascination with tiny houses. I'm not sure that I could live in Dassel, Minnesota though. That's where I found this when we passed through yesterday.

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I’m usually barefoot as much as possible in the summer, but today was chilly enough that I put on some socks. I hadn’t seen these since I bought them and filed them in the sock drawer. They have Mighty Mouse on the top, and this on the bottom. The copyright notice is actually bigger than the artwork.

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The modern is yet wild and unascertained.
(Chambers, 1728 Preface, xxvii)

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The gigantic green pumpkin weather-vane sculpture thingie at the St. Paul Farmer's Market.

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Xtin wrote a few weeks ago about metaphors for grad school, most particularly the Penguin of Death. For me, it’s been Scrat and the Acorn of Graduate School:

The acorn, obviously, symbolizes Finishing. I became so invested in this metaphor that I asked my parents for an acorn necklace for my birthday last year, and they obliged:

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I think universities should also have water gardens up to the windows. I'd be happy to look over from grading and see something like this.

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At the end of his Preface, Chambers describes the purpose of his project:

Such a Variety of Views, Principles, and Manners of thinking, is a sure Remedy against being too violently attached to any one ; and is the best way of preventing the making of Pedants, Bigots, &c. of any kind. It may be said, that every Art tends to give the Mind a particular Turn ; and that the only way of maintaining it in its natural Rectitude, is by calling in other opposite ones, by way of Counter-balance. Thus we find nothing more perverse and unsufferable than a mere Mathematician, mere Critic, Grammarian, Chemist, Poet, Herald, or the like ; and the proper Disposition is only to be had from a just Temperament or Mixture of them all. (XXX)

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Where I’m from, fried chicken is a staple of any summer holiday. Ideally, one makes it oneself from a hallowed, historical recipe that involves soaking in buttermilk and secret spices and particular methods of breading. Every aspect of the methodology is hotly contested. And let’s not get started on the frying. An inch of oil so as to brown each side individually, or a gallon so as to totally submerge the pieces? Peanut oil or sunflower oil or just plain Wesson? Lard? Lid on or lid off? Is the proper oil temperature smoking or just below the smoke point? All methods theoretically lead to a gloriously seasoned, crispy piece of bird that is not the least bit oily. It is equally delicious served piping hot, at room temperature, or as refrigerated left-overs. Appropriate side-dishes include but are not limited to potato salad, three-bean salad, deviled eggs, pickles, and quartered tomatoes sprinkled with salt.

The slackers and other sad, small individuals go to KFC or the local grocery store, where they stand in a line that stretches out to the street and hope that the place doesn’t run out of inferior, mass-produced, greasy fried chicken before it’s their turn. This is the stuff you have to eat hot, because when it cools there’s going to be a film of grease all over it.

You can probably imagine what happened yesterday. I thought about conducting some sort of kitchen hoo-ha for a bit and then proceeded to spend the day alternately holed up in my study with the Chambers and in the living room whining at Mister Husband about the fact that I'd become One of Those People Who Works on Holidays. He scanned negatives all day. When late afternoon rolled around, we were surprised and mildly upset not to have any festive food around. I had thawed out a couple of chicken breasts with the thought of grilling them, but we both decided that did not count a bit. But fried chicken would! No time to marinate the breasts, though, and fried chicken really demands some variety in the chicken parts.

So we contemplated ... Kentucky Fried Chicken. Would there be a line? Would there be any chicken left? What if they ran out of chicken? It was Independence Day, after all. Mister Husband decided to risk it and set off.

He was back in 15 minutes with a full bucket. There had been no line whatsoever. The place was practically deserted. And then it finally dawned on us that of course nobody would have been at KFC. This is Minnesota, with its high ratio of Germans and Swedes and Norwegians. They were all out grilling bratwursts. If I went across the street to the grocery store, I’d bet there wouldn’t be a brat or hot dog to be found.

It never occurs to me to make brats. They exist down South, and I had one every few years or so, but there’s no emphasis on them. It’s not like you go to a cook-out expecting them to be served or anything. If they were, it’d be a novelty: “Oh hey, a bratwurst!” Maybe I should think about them, though, and serve brats and fried chicken.

An aside: It’s been years since I’ve really celebrated the 4th. (10, maybe? ) I went to bed last night before the fireworks, even, and I usually love fireworks. My rationalization is that I’ll see them every night for a week when the state fair is on near my house in September. I haven’t always been this way, though. When I was a kid, my parents hosted a massive 4th of July party every year, with at least 75-100 guests. When they eventually stopped, I quit observing the holiday. It’s compartmentalized in my mind, I guess — that was something we did then, and this is now. Or put another way: If I can’t have 100 people dancing and setting off bottle rockets in my yard, then I don’t want anything.

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About a third of the way through the Preface, Chambers argues that there are two kinds of poets: “The first, those on whom the Inspiration falls, as it were, from Heaven ; without any thought or seeking, or least by means of Prayer or Invocation. The second, those in whom it is procured by the Fumes of Wine.“ After a lengthy consideration of the first sort, he turns his attention to the others.

As to the second Kind of Poets, in whom the Inspiration is promoted or excited by means of Wine ; Casaubon is perfectly frighted at it ; judging it the highest strain of Impeity, to suppose a Man may be divinely inspired by the Fumes of Liquor.----And yet I don’t know whether his Fright be not founded on a Misapprehension. ... I do not see what Religion has to do here, more than in any other Enthusiasm. The use of such a means, is no ways derogatory to the Power of Goodness of God ; who still remains the Author of this, as of any other Inspiration ; whether it be by Visions, by Voices, Dreams, or the like. What matters it whether the Sound of a Cymbal, or the Sight of an Image, or the Effluvia of a Liquor be the Occasion [for inspiration]? So long as he is the Cause, what matters it what Instrument he makes use of? And of all the Blessings this Juice is made the Occasion of to us, why should it be precluded from that, which none of God’s Creatures, not even the vilest, but occasional ministers? The Ancients did not think so meanly of it ; they set up a God on purpose to preside over it ; and it even had the largest Share in their most solemn Ceremonies of Religion. (XIII)

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My first memory is of being carried on my mother's hip to a public 4th of July fireworks display. I remember her purse, which was made of brown leather in a structured saddlebag style, with an embossed design on it. I remember humidity and dark and people and, finally, the noise and fire and colors. It confused me.

I’ve told mom about this off and on over the years, and she says that it’s a completely impossible memory because I would have been four months old at the time. But she also says the details are correct, especially that purse.

I did love her purse, by the way. So much so that I had a miniature version of it as a child and later bought a more unstructured, undecorated version of it as one of my First Adult Purses.

(hat tip to Collin)

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Miss Frizzy says I’m a thinking blogger, which is nice because I wonder about this space sometimes. The thinking has drifted over the years, from more academic to more personal. Lately it’s drifted from words to pictures, and I end up having middle of the night conversations with Mister Husband about photography as a way of knowing.

It’s funny, this, because when Jenny sent out a Facebook question the other day for blog recomendations, I mentioned frizzyLogic. I so enjoy seeing where Rachel’s mind wanders and lights, and the ways she’s documented her various transformations. She’s taught me about Africa and London and photography and nameless cats, and now she’s seen Lou Reed perform Berlin live and I haven't and am quite upset about that. Plus, she’s funny and nice and writes wonderful emails.

If anybody except Jenny had asked that question, I would have also mentioned 12 frogs, but you can’t very well recommend someone’s own blog to them. Actually, you’re better off reading her Jaiku, so you get the full force of her web presence — especially her work on flickr. Her Project 365 is one of the wittiest I’ve seen, and it’s part of what inspired me to get out and about with my camera more this year.

I don’t know the proprietor of Osmium at all. I do know that Josh is an electrochemistry PhD student and runner. He’s another Southern expat (Tennessee to NYC and points beyond.) And he writes such odd, smart posts that I had to go back and read all of them from the start.

I discovered Xtinpore last week after she (?) linked me. That’s not much time to develop an affection, but this post on academics and their workspaces was so well-written and soulful that I was blog-smitten in that way that tells me I’ll be reading for some time to come.

Needless to say, the guy at This Public Address has made me think for years. We might not have gotten together if not for his blog. It’s drifted from personal to more academic over the years — an inverse of mine, perhaps. But he’s writing out his memories lately, and I find myself waking up every morning and going straight to the computer to see what he wrote last night while I was sleeping.

(You’ll notice I’ve not mentioned any Rhet/Comp/Internets bloggers here. That’s because they’re all over in their own Thinking Bloggers section in the sidebar.)

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A couple of weeks ago, we went to a lecture by Arlene Gottfried at the Minnesota Center for Photography. They’re currently showing her series entitled Midnight*, a 25-year portrait series of a close friend with schizophrenia. As she worked her way through the slides, she told us a little about the drifting nature of their friendship, about the sudden phone calls from the middle of nowhere after he'd suddenly taken a bus 2,000 miles west. The times she had to commit him to various institutions, find him work, find him aid. And the fact that he'd last disappeared six months ago. 25 years of this.

Soon after that, Mister Husband began to sift through his long friendship with Slim. Slim was an artist and a punk to the core, and every bit as wonderful and difficult as those words might imply. There was more distance between them in last decade, since they lived halfway across the country from each other and pursued very different lives, but a series of small communications showed they were never very far from each other’s thoughts.

This has made me think about the fact that I don’t really keep friends. Not even normally difficult people, much less brilliantly, dramatically fucked-up ones. There are some rare exceptions, of course. D and I met when I was 19 and he was 35, and we still keep in touch 12 years later. G. and I met in the fall of 2000 and are still very close. I feel fiercely loyal to both of them, and I know I could also ask them for anything. But neither of them is particularly difficult, or even inconvenient. They probably put up with a lot more out of me than I ever do out of them. G has friends from her old Polish neighborhood that she’s known her whole life. Husband and M. have been close for 30 years now. There’s nobody that I’ve known since I was wee, or even in high school. I branched off so differently that I can’t imagine what I’d say to the people I knew then, and I always avoid reunions.

I spent some time wondering if this makes me a bad person. In the end, I don’t think so. Part of it is that I’m an only child who is also by nature an introvert. It’s fair to say that I have rather low social needs. I’m the sort of person who prefers to have two or (maybe) three close friends rather than a flock of more general friends and acquaintances. Deafness is also a factor: I much prefer to go to lunch or dinner with one or two people, simply because I can’t follow the conversation in a larger crowd. You have to have a certain level of interest and commonality and just plain like to devote consistent hours to conversation like that. This sort of close involvement is a lot of work to maintain, and I’m not willing to do it for many people. I also don’t expect that many people to be able to do it for me.

*Be sure to check out "Mommie" and "The Eternal Light" also. Very strong stuff.

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