Awesome!

I've forgotten how I got here. I was wandering around the Internet one night, and some link to someone I don't usually read got me to a mention of this book, which I loved as a child and had completely forgotten about. At least, it may have crossed my mind from time to time, but in shreds utterly devoid of useful information like author or title, as so often happens with books I read in my youth, although if you put me back in my grade school library (as it was then, not as it is now) I could go straight to them. I sort information spatially, and remember how to get to things even if I can't tell anyone else how to do it.

Anyway! My uni library has a great section of juvenile books, because it took over some elementary/junior high libraries at some point, and keeps adding to them. So I went and checked out Jade after I left my office yesterday, started reading it at dinner, and stayed up past midnight to finish it. It was even better than I remembered it. In brief, a girl in 1719 Virginia refuses to be groomed as a belle, is sent away to live with relatives, releases a cargo of slaves from the ship she's on and is flogged for it, then rescued by pirate queen Anne Bonney. It ends hopefully if not wholly happily (clearly Jade is going to come to a bad if glorious end sooner rather than later, but she'll go down fighting slavers; Anne Bonney marries a nice doctor and seems to succumb to pregnancy hormones . . . maybe she'll get feisty again once the children are in school).

I checked out only the one book, because I . . . really . . . must . . . grade . . . must . . . but I am looking forward to reading not only the other Watson books I remember but also ones my elementary school library didn't have. Highly recommend, people! If you don't have to grade, or you need fun procrastination material, check out Sally Watson.

Another one bites the dust

Women of a certain age (and other scholars) have been leaving us right and left lately: Liz Taylor, Geraldine Ferraro, and now Sara Ruddick. I am not a philosopher; in fact, if phrenology were a science, there would be a large hole in my head wherever the bump for philosophy ought to be. The only work of Ruddick's I ever read was the essay collection Working it Out. But that book was so important to me that it is still on my shelves, though I can't remember the last time I handled it. It's at the office, not at home, so I am working from memory today.

I acquired a copy while I was still in college in the 1980s. Not for a class; it must have come from a used book store, of which there were many in town. The essays by women, many of them academics, who had struggled to claim lives that included work and the rest of what they wanted, whether or not that included children, travel, a partner of either sex, inspired me as I was trying to work out what I wanted in my life and how to get it. That book said to me, There are options. It said, You can do things if you figure out how. It said, Yes, there will be challenges because you are a woman, but your sex doesn't define your relationship to work.

Without having the book to hand, I can't remember many specifics about its contents. I think I recall a scientist's essay about her lab work, and I know I had the sensation, reading it, that I could try on various lives: what would it be like to be a writer, an artist, a scientist, a mother who was devoted to something other than child-rearing, Girl Scouts, and the PTA? At the beginning of each essay was a picture of its writer, usually in some characteristic place or pose, and I remember poring over those for clues to what the adult life I wanted might look like. Reading it was the same sort of pleasure that reading blogs is, now: the chance to discover other possibilities, and that others face similar obstacles, and can advise on how to overcome them.

The essay that over many years meant the most to me, the one that I do remember by author, is by Virginia Valian, about solving a work problem, that is, getting oneself to start working (writing) when one has not been working. The author lived with a man who suggested starting by working for three hours. Three hours! The very thought triggered an anxiety attack. Two hours! The very thought . . . . But she could cope with 15 minutes, so she set a timer for 15 minutes, and when she was comfortable with that, added another 15-minute session, and so on. (I found that there is a PDF of this article available, at maxweber.hunter.cuny.edu/psych/faculty/.../1977workingItOut.pdf; there's also a table of contents, so now I'm thinking, "Wow, how did I forget that Alice Walker was in here? And Tillie Olsen?" But anyway . . . )

Now we're all familiar with such techniques, but this (in the 1980s, remember) was the first time I had seen anybody address both the specifics of what you needed to do and the larger context of anxiety and expectations that make it so difficult to tackle some projects. What do you do when you know you "have it in you" but can't figure out where to start? Valian had always thought of herself as someone who would become Someone, but getting down to brass tacks was harder. She wanted to get away from the fantasies of what could happen, and focus on the enjoyability of work for its own sake.

I'm going to re-read the essay now that I've found it, but I treasure my memories of it, as well, however vague or imprecise they may be. It was useful in college, in grad school, pre-tenure. The whole book was a treasure, at least to my college self, and I want to pay tribute to the woman who co-edited it and thereby showed a lot of women what might be.

Balladry

One of my forthcoming pieces is about a set of verses I have spent five years tracking through various manuscript collections, including some very tattered assemblages of loose sheets with odd notations. Among them I discovered some tantalizing stanzas. Though I have not found anything quite like them elsewhere, I am tempted to try my hand at finishing the ballad they appear to belong to:

The dame called her scriveyn near,
and said the gome vntil,
"Use yr best yr fairest hand
to write my lord this bille."

He wroot it with the quill of goose,
he wroot with quill of swanne;
ever the lady shook her head
& said sche wd haue nane.

He wroot it in the light of moon,
he wroot in light of sunne;
ever the lady shook her head
& said again he mun.

He took in hand a quill of doue,
and wroot in lettres fine;
again the lady shook her head
& [indecipherable] line.

At last he laid his ink aside,
& dropped his weary head.
& then there came a little man
dressed in green and red.

"What will ye gie me, Thomas True,
what will ye gie for mine,
if I write this bille for you
in letters true and fine?"

Illumination

I always try to organize classes so that the grading is staggered. And every semester, some slippage occurs, and I wind up with multiple classes handing in work to be graded in the same week, sometimes on the same day.

So, wouldn't it make sense to just go ahead and plan that everything should be turned in on the same day? Then, when the inevitable slippage takes place, the grading will be distributed across multiple weeks, after all.

Looking down

http://www.feministe.us/blog/archives/2011/03/26/diana-wynne-jones-1934-2011/

Nooooooo.

Even with two more books to appear . . . noooooo.

Looking up

That revise-and-resubmit that hung on for so long, last fall, into this spring, remember that?

It's accepted.

I feel like I'm wading through a swamp as I work on the Next Thing (quite an attractive swamp, this one, with tropical birds and lilies and flowering vines, but still wading through mud that tries to suck my hip boots off at every step, not to mention the mosquitos), so it's useful to be reminded that One Step At A Time results in publication.

Spring Break Scorecard

The not-so-good:
Severe insomnia.
I didn't go anywhere, not even to one of the day-excursions Sir John and I have discussed.
Unusually painful root canal (I've had several; they aren't usually this bad).
Newspapers full of distressing but compelling news (no doubt contributing to insomnia).

The better:
Not having to teach while insomniac.
Having time to watch the DVR'd Paris-Nice race.
I went to the gym every day, and got my swimming up to 5/6 of a mile in one session; I only skipped doing yoga twice.
I also got a massage.
There were four sunny days.
I had lunch with a friend.
I read three pieces of brain candy (Freda Warrington is doing good Faerie stuff).

And that list of things to do during spring break? I have just barely scraped a C (70.2% of the items are crossed off).

Funny how I managed to put off the thing that looks like grading. I guess I know what I'm doing tomorrow morning.

Whatever it takes

Somewhere in the popular press recently I saw an article about what helps celebrities cope with their fame, keep producing the songs or whatever that made them famous, and the differences between "successful" celebrities and the one-album wonders. A key factor (it was claimed) was the belief that God wanted them to be famous.

It seems like a corollary would be that atheists either can't be famous or can't stay famous, but whatever. I thought to myself, "Suppose I believed in a goddess of academic success, and believed that she wanted me to be successful?"

"No, come on, self, stop laughing; just play around with the idea for a few minutes. Just for fun. She looks like Maggie Smith? Okay, I can go with that. What does it feel like to believe (just for a minute) that the goddess of academic success wants me to be successful?"

. . . . . . . . .

Well, look, I tried. I think I'm too cynical for some affirmations. Also, Benjamin Franklin got mixed up in there somehow, because the way it wound up being phrased was, "The goddess of academic success loves me and wants me to be happy."*

In other words, Maggie Smith is urging me to have another beer.

*"Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy." I don't have a citation; it's attributed to him on t-shirts and stuff. Check with an Americanist on whether Franklin really said it.

National Archives commercial

Medievalists may already be well-acquainted with these resources, but in case (like me) you weren't, allow me to point them out. I have spent a fair amount of time combing the online records and catalogs at the National Archives site (http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/), but hadn't bothered with their teaching resources.

Well, there's a lot of good stuff there. Under Resources for Students: Study Skills, for example, there's a list of questions to ask about primary documents. There's a whole set of lessons about various historical periods, including medieval as well as later periods. There are also tutorials in paleography and Latin.

Now I have to figure out how many courses I can work this material into. It's no good just putting up links; students never follow them. There have to be assignments with consequences (grades if you do them, loss of points if you don't). And maybe I'm just doing an "oooh, shiny!" sort of thing. But this is giving me ideas.

Lists

Over the past couple of weeks, my lists have been growing, both in the sense of adding items and in the sense of having multiple lists in different places: in the calendar, on post-its, jotted on the edge of a hand-out, in hopes that I'd remember at some point that I needed to do this or that. My first task this morning was to consolidate these lists.

The result is very long, which in itself is a bit daunting, even though most of the individual items shouldn't take very long. (Exceptions: taxes; perhaps revising a syllabus that needs serious intervention.) But, happily, I recalled Dr. Crazy's 60% rule: when she finishes 60% of the items on a list, she thinks she's done well.

At least, I think that's the figure she uses. At any rate, I'm adopting it. Sixty per cent is a D, by many grading schemes (and can I just say that the standard American scheme is pretty funky, in my opinion, and not applicable to many situations---but that's another post). I think I can manage to pull off a D in list-completion, this week.