Plum pudding and the Percy folio

No, definitely not both at once.

I'm here to work on a project I stumbled across a few years ago---not my usual line of country, but people have been interested in it and it got my institution to cough up funds for travel and transcription this summer. (If I finish early and spend some time looking at manuscripts related to my Real Work, well, that's just efficient use of my time and the university's money.)

So I have actually got through almost all the likely suspects here, with the exception of one manuscript that someone else has been using all week, and one other I thought I'd have to see in microfilm. And so I asked about microfilm of the Percy Folio. (PER-cy FOL-io!) Well, there isn't one. No facsimile, either. But I am already cleared to see select manuscripts, so, great, I just put in the request slip and went off to lunch.

I was feeling so delighted about getting to see the Percy Folio, which is a two-fer (current project AND Real Work) that I decided I'd have dessert, especially because one of the offerings was plum pudding. I'd never had it before, yet it seems like one of those iconic British desserts, I mean puddings, that you have to have sometime. It was very nice, not too sweet.

But the manuscript had not been delivered. The PERcy FOLio is on exhibition. So I had to fill out the form requesting that it be pulled just for petite moi next week, that is, at least 3 working days from now (when I had been wondering about going up to Oxford to get my paws on some more MSS related to the current project).

All this for something I'd be perfectly happy to look at in facsimile or microfilm. I mean, wouldn't you have thought that something in an exhibition would have been microfilmed or digitized?

Magic helmet. At least I enjoyed my plum pudding.

Random bullets of the British Library

• Archbishop Cranmer's lion heads have nice smiley faces.
• In one manuscript from today, I found a pasted-in slip explaining the comments in "modern ink" on a particular folio as the work of a reader who was later convicted of malicious damage to the MS and sentenced at the Old Bailey to two months imprisonment, in 1891. You have been warned, I thought.
• There sure are a lot of useful reference works I never knew existed. Indices to this, that and the other.
• I had lunch with a medievalist I met at Kalamazoo . . . some year or other. I splurged on a big meal at the BL's restaurant, and it did make it easier to keep going the rest of the day.
• The lunchtime medievalist has a room in a flat in East London. While it would be nice to be able to cook, I so do not want to spend time and money on the Tube. I hate crowds, and I love being five minutes from the BL.
• There are many things I love about the density of London (excellent public transportation, for starters, even if I avoid it in peak hours) but being kept awake by young carousers outside is not one of them, nor is being awakened by yobbeaux (I think the offenders are French) thumping up the staircase and slamming doors late at night. (OK, that has nothing to do with either density or the BL. Work on topic sentences, Dame.) I keep telling myself that the nature of hotels is that their inhabitants are transient; thaes overeode, thisse swa maeg.
• When I left tonight, I was walking near an elderly man who looked just like an ex-colonel out of Agatha Christie, except for the earphones. I don't know what he was listening to, but as he walked, he was declaiming in something that sounded rather like Old English. It certainly wasn't any of the modern European languages I know or recognize. I suppose it could have been something else entirely . . . but the stresses sounded so familiar . . . and yet, you know, it's simply TOO BL a sort of thing to happen. I probably hallucinated it. Not enough sleep lately.

Before I left

Given this post, you would think my life before I left for London was quite complicated enough, with enough things to do. But no . . . I had to go and add a new kitten to the mix.

Sir John has wanted a new baby (or two) for awhile, and I have said no no no we have enough cats! So we did not go to the shelter and deliberately pick out a kitten (or two). No. I went to the library. Or rather, I was going to go to the library, but first I stopped at DD to get coffee for the drive. As I parked, I noticed an elegant young woman in a black dress, with heels, and thought how nice she looked. Then I realized she was accessorized with a small black kitten clinging to one shoulder while she worked her cell phone. Of course I stopped to admire the kitten. I am never able to coordinate my animals and my clothes so successfully.

She asked if I knew of any animal shelters in the area. She had just found this kitten on a very busy street corner, and wanted to find somewhere to take it; she had dogs that she thought would not be kind to it.

I know my duty to catdom when it stares at me out of a tiny kitten face. I said I'd take the kitten home.

Before I left, I spent as much time with him as I could. He is tolerably healthy, but is being treated for roundworms and a bacterial infection in his tum (not that either has slowed him down any; he's a hellion, and getting very bored in quarantine from our other cats). He is very social and good with people, so he wasn't feral before the elegant young woman found him. But he wasn't chipped, and I didn't see any signs posted about a lost kitten. So he's ours now.

He's named, more or less, for the research project I was trying to get to the library to work on.

Suitcases

When I travel, I often don't bother to unpack. Most of my clothes aren't wrinkleable, or else they're meant to be wrinkled, and I don't mind rooting through my bag for them.

But I'm going to be in my current location for 16 more nights.

I filled up all the (few) drawers in my tiny room.

The BL was great again. Today's celebrity sighting: Bill Jordan. Since we're academics, should that be "celebrity citing"? I'll see if I can work him into my next conference paper . . . .

. . . gone tomorrow

Actually, I'm already gone. I just don't believe it yet. But I have been in London for almost 12 hours now, of which 4 were in the BL, and now I'm in my tiny hotel room, on the top floor, staring out into the sea of green leaves stirring in the wind outside. My favorite place to write is staring out into treetops . . . and my favorite place to live is a city (some more than others, but city rather than countryside of whatever variety). It can be difficult to combine these preferences, but right now I am very happy.

People I know kept saying, "London! How exciting! You'll have such a great time!" and I would smile and say Yes, I will.

But I bet most of them were thinking, "Theater! Sight-seeing! Shopping! Night life! Historical atmosphere!" whereas my thought bubble read, "Get up early and go for a run! The reading rooms open at 10:00! Lunch at 1:00, then more manuscripts! Tea when they close up at 5:00, come back and work on other projects until 8:00! After closing, get a snack, call Sir John or do e-mail, fall in to bed, repeat until Sunday! What a wonderful life!"

Later than I think

This turned into the semester that would not die, with incompletes and administrative tasks hanging on for some time. But at last I wrapped it up, and started thinking about settling into a summer routine, setting a pattern for sabbatical work that I can continue in the fall: half an hour of Greek study in the morning, then writing, some library time; should I go to the gym first thing, or use exercise as a break in the middle of the day? Of course, all this will be interrupted by summer travel plans, but it would be great to get into a groove.

Summer travel plans.

Summer travel plans! Today is . . . Tuesday . . . the tenth of June. In a week I will be on a plane to England. Hell's bells. So much for getting into a groove. I have to finish a conference paper, and make various arrangements for being away. I know I have time management problems, but I'm not usually this bad. Really. But it was a very turbulent semester, and it just started seeming like summer here, and I can't believe I'm about to be gone for over a month.

So. Who's going to be in London during the period mid-June to late July? Leave me a comment or e-mail me if you'd like to meet up.

It's all about the shoes

I went to graduation this morning. I scored a seat in the front row, perfect for getting up to congratulate students I recognized as they came off the stage, and also giving an unobstructed view of the footgear. My students this term told me they knew it was important to wear interesting shoes to graduation, to keep the faculty entertained. So let's see what shoes stuck in my mind. (I did not take notes; this is purely what was memorable.)

There were many tasteful pairs of black high heels, some shiny, some open-toed, some serious spikes, some platforms. I also saw a lot of red patent leather, a few flats, some spikes, one dark red lizard print. High-heeled gladiator sandals were also popular, and there were several pairs of metallic gold pumps, as well as a glitzy silver-sequinned set.

Of my current students, the only one whose shoes I recall was a young man who always came to class in loafers and a leather blazer, but today was wearing olive drab canvas sneakers and a headwrap under his mortarboard (he does not have the kind of hair that needs to be wrapped to make it smooth). I don't know what that was about. Oh, and the double major (Art and English) wore her usual red ballet flats with jeans; it's her signature look, sort of Audrey Hepburn-esque.

A student from last fall had a lovely pair of sapphire blue suede heels, with a chunky heel. I added to my congratulations, "Nice shoes!" and she said, "Thank you! I wanted something special, and you know, there are so many people wearing shoes that just don't say 'Graduation.'" I had to agree. I don't care how many crystals and gewgaws you add, or how good your pedicure is; flip-flops just don't seem right for an occasion like graduation, in the opinion of this old fogey. In fact, I prefer closed-toe shoes rather than sandals for such an event, though I would accept a nice pair of peep-toe slingbacks. Someone wore such a pair, in a black-and-white spectator style.

Another black-and-white pair I liked were flats, a floral print. I noted a pair of sporty yet fashionable athletic-style shoes, in tan, on the feet of a woman probably in her fifties getting her bachelor's degree, and I thought, "There is someone who knows the value of comfortable feet, but she did get new shoes for this, all the same."

There were two pairs of high-heeled, pointy-toed shoes that stood out for color: one bright pink, one neon orange. I admired a pair of wedges where the top was brown and the wedge was a sort of houndstooth print in brown and cream. One young lady matched her golden yellow honors stole to golden yellow high-heeled sandals, with toenail polish a few shades lighter: that was impressive. And a doctoral student had very high-heeled leopard-print shoes, which stood out because usually the Ph.D.s wear much tamer (and often more comfortable) shoes: these students are older, busier, concerned more with substance than style.

Men usually don't have memorable shoes. One wore very pointy-toed shoes with a black-and-white chessboard effect; that got our attention. And I find I do not care either for tassels on men's shoes, or for patent-leather tipping on a plain leather men's shoe. If you must have patent leather, let it be the entire shoe.

My prize-winning most memorable: pink wedges, where the top was hot pink and the wedge was pink with white polka-dots.

Congratulations, graduates!

Bait and switch

I feel like I should blog about the Zoo. I want to blog about the Zoo. But I am still working my way through a stack of graduate papers, unable to figure out why they are going s-o s-l-o-w-l-y. Apparently when I planned assignments so the undergraduate grading wouldn't be too bad at the end, I missed something on the grad side.

It's probably partly fatigue. The weekend before Kalamazoo, I was at another conference. Different papers. Neither one wanted to lie down and behave itself. I think I'm looking at my second book in this snarl, actually. That really makes me feel like powering through the first one this year, so I can get on with the next project. But anyway, all the traveling and thinking was tiring. And aside from the grading, I have one more significant administrative project to complete before I can really feel my sabbatical has started. It landed in my lap this week. Well, it really is my job, I understand that, but everyone had forgotten about it.

And I want to be done.

And I want to be able to think about some of the great papers I heard at the Zoo and about some of the stuff that happened before it all fades in the noise of grading and admin.

Maybe a random-bullets-of-Kalamazoo post. Not now. Either when the grad papers are done or when the deadline is past so I'm doing manual change-of-grade forms anyway.

Analysis 6: conclusion

I don’t feel I gave up much. I would like a little more time for hobbies, but my interests outside of work are not passions, not things I need to have central in my life. I don’t want to give the impression that I work all the time, because I don’t—I aim at 40 hours a week, on average—but work is what shapes my life.

Perhaps the work/job distinction should be explored. I certainly count research as work, not as something I’d do anyway—I mean, it is, but since it’s an expected part of my job, research is work in the daily sense. But then there’s The Work, what to some extent I chose over The Life, because I felt the need for work that was a vocation, work that helped make life meaningful. At one point when I was in graduate school, some of my non-academic friends, and their academic mother, were reading Mary Catherine Bateson’s Composing a Life; they found the idea that women were likely to put together a series of lives consoling. It was what the mother had done, and my friends, unsure of what they wanted to do, hoped form would emerge out of patchwork for them. I saw myself with a more traditionally masculine trajectory, and that is (so far) what has happened. I didn’t seem to have the experience of being broken down and re-formed in grad school that some of you report, perhaps because I wasn’t firmly formed when I started. I got to grow into the identity I had long desired, rather than losing pieces of myself.

And though I chose The Work, I have A Life. I have a really good job. Most of my colleagues are sane, most of my students are nice, smart people who work hard, the library is decent, the location is acceptable. My house, which I can afford and which is in a good neighborhood, is filled with books and cats and sunlight. I am very happily married. I have access to the cultural amenities of a big city and to the intellectual life of my campus, both of which get some of my time. I have friends, and some of them aren’t even academics.

I don’t have everything I want. But if, when I was 20, a fairy godmother had said, "Look, you can have work and love but you’ll have to live your life in exile; or else you can live in a place you love and take your chances on the rest," I would have thought that was a no-brainer. In fact, I’d make the same choice now.

A tiled patio over whose white walls tumble jasmine and bougainvillea, shaded by a pepper tree, whispers the fairy godmother. Geraniums that grow into hedges, lantana that grows tree-sized. Plumeria. Wisteria. Mountains. La la la not listening, I say. La la la love my work.

It’s hard to know what matters to you till you lose it. And if you lost something else, that might be the thing you truly can’t live without. The path not taken doesn’t exist. The only path is the one you’re on.

What I have is what I wanted most.

Analysis 5: Health

Again, it depends on where you stop telling the story. I find I’m reluctant even to start this one. I seem to be fine now. Around the time I got tenure, though, I had a series of injuries and stress-related ailments that took years to resolve. Much time spent seeing different doctors and physical therapists. Much research time lost. Much wondering whether I would remain impaired for the rest of my life.

It started with a broken rib, sustained when I fell onto a trailer hitch while trying to get a good picture of a pageant wagon in York (see, work-related). I was reasonably active up till then, as time allowed, but exercising with a broken rib is painful. Recovery was slow. I had to become more assiduous about exercising than I had been.

When I thought I’d made a comeback, I injured my shoulder, which provoked symptoms that were misdiagnosed as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, despite my insistence to doctors that it all started with this shoulder thing . . . . This one’s harder to call, because the diagnosis was work-related, but the shoulder injury may or may not have been related to work ergonomics. At any rate, it’s hard to recover from an injury that’s being treated as a different kind of injury entirely.

On top of the years of pre-tenure stress (and job-market stress, and relationship stress previously recounted, and other grad school stresses my readers no doubt can easily imagine), the physical stresses and pain—I believe—contributed to various other problems. I don’t want to recount them here. Like I said, I’m fine. But a couple of bloggers I keep up with have reported, this spring, on health anxieties that were very familiar to me from personal experience. I know what procedures you’d go through for diagnosis, and how it feels while you wait for results, and how you research stuff on the web, thinking about what might happen and how much time or physical ability you might have in various scenarios and what you’d do with it.

So, as with the long-term relationships, if we stop the story now, it ends well. Of course, in the long term, we’re all dead. And maybe you consider that even a few years of injuries, pain, ailments, and doctors means that I did, in fact, give up my health for my job. Now I work at staying healthy, as I did not pre-tenure, because I know that the expense of time and energy on exercising and getting good food at regular intervals is far, far less than the expense of not getting exercise or eating right. And that sounds like a sermon, which I didn’t mean to give.