Question for Seattleites.

I’m going to this conference in June. Thanks to the grant, travel is reimbursable, but only to a point; and it seems much less expensive to fly into Seattle and take the clipper ferry than to fly all the way to Victoria. However, the scheduling exigencies of flying to Seattle mean that I’d probably have to stay there overnight on 6/14 (Tuesday, and I’d be taking the 7:30am ferry on Wednesday) and 6/18 (a Saturday). At this point I don’t know how late things will run on Saturday the 18th, as the full program hasn’t been posted yet; I may have to stay in Victoria and go straight home on 6/19.

So, hypothetically: if I do this, would any of y’all reading this and residing in the Seattle area have crash space? Reward possibilities for hosting me include chocolate, a homecooked meal (you’d have to allow me the run of your kitchen for that), a low-maintenance guest of sunny disposition, my undying gratitude, and/or negotiable.

Working out some more

I’ve slacked some days, but so far I’ve stuck to biking at least 5 times a week. Given my track record with sticking to workout routines, this is pretty satisfying.

More satisfying, though, are the results I’m seeing. Weight loss, yeah, a bit; but also increased endurance. I can bike for a longer distance now, 7 miles as opposed to the 5 I’ve started with. Haven’t been pushing myself to increase the distance until I really felt like it, because that was a way to ensure I’d actually keep working out. The seven miles are getting much easier, today I felt that I could’ve biked for quite a bit longer. But there was work to do.

I want to be Grafton when I grow up.

Anthony Grafton, author of The Footnote: A Curious History, has also written Defenders of the Text: The Traditions of Scholarship in an Age of Science, 1450-1800. I’m reading the latter as part of some research into the history of knowledge.

As an aside: there is no article on the history of knowledge in the Britannica, nor is it a Library of Congress category. Wild! The LoC has “Learning and Scholarship — History of,” but that’s different somehow. I can’t put my finger on how, though. Anyone?

Back to Grafton. Here’s the beginning paragraph of one of the chapters in Defenders:

Joseph Scaliger encountered two supernatural beings in the course of his long and well-spent life. He saw one of them, a black man on a horse, as he rode by a marsh with some friends. He only read about the other, a monster named Oannes with the body of a fish and the voice of a man. Yet as so often happened in the Renaissance, the encounter with Art had far more lasting consequences than that with Life. The black man tried to lure Scaliger into the marsh, failed, and disappeared, leaving him confirmed in his contempt for the devil and all his works: “My father didn’t fear the Devil, neither do I. I’m worse than the devil.” Oannes, in the book that Scaliger read, climbed out of the ocean and taught humanity the arts and sciences. Devil Tempts Man was no headline to excite the Renaissance public; but Amphibian Creates Culture was out of the ordinary even in the sixteenth century.

Well, that’s a good way to get the reader’s attention. Grafton writes so engagingly! You almost forget that he’s a rigorous scholar.

So, arts + sciences = culture, huh? That’s an interesting implicit assertion.

Edit: Holy s**t! Okay, I was too excited about that paragraph above to read any further, otherwise this beginning of the second paragraph would’ve struck me as well: “The fish who gave us civilization appeared at the beginning of the account of Babylonian mythology and history written by Berosus, a priest of Bel, early in the third century B.C.” Oh, so now arts + sciences = civilization! I wonder if Grafton is just being cavalier, or subtly making an actual claim. Given that he’s brilliant, I’d have a hard time believing that this wording was unintentional.

[meta]

I keep feeling I should be blogging more, but you know, when it comes to impact on the outside world, blogging is just about the least useful activity I pursue regularly these days. It’s been important lately to feel useful.

Too bad that this feeling seems to be inseparable from a need to be appreciated. Luckily, I do not lack positive feedback. But I’m not crazy about the necessity of expending energy on my self-esteem. Shouldn’t that be all set, at my age?

(rhetorical question.)

Seattle.

You know, this article makes me a bit sad. If what it describes is true, I’d be miserable in Seattle.

The only time I visited it, I fell in love with the city. I even decided, right away, that it would be great to live there for a while. This was unusual enough to be surprising; the feeling of “this could be home” is generally reserved for non-North-American cities. Seattle’s been calling me back ever since that first visit.

And I still want to go back… to visit. But it would be frightening to move to a city where people actively rebuff attempts at meaningful communication often enough to warrant a Seattle Times article.

We are Zogg.

Too damn funny not to pass along. Entirely work-safe. No sound needed, it’s just pictures and text.

Okay, all right, I get it!

Dear body:

Thanks for the reminder, although you could’ve been gentler about it. Lessons learned (I hope):

- stopping exercising for three days makes me more randomly hungry, not less, and also unhappy;
- when feeling like the world is crashing down for no particular reason, eat protein; preferably in the form of red meat, fish or soybeans;
- in the past stress stemming from procrastination followed by being overwhelmed with work was a good motivator to do said work. That is no longer a viable option, as it is Not Worth It;
- maybe new moon does affect me negatively after all… or maybe this is a coincidence;
- I’ve got to find coping mechanisms to deal with guilt. It is the single most unproductive feeling I experience on a regular basis: it gets nothing accomplished and absolutely drains me of energy.

Now can I have my serotonin back please?

Sincerely,
-V.

(This isn’t intentionally cryptic, Reader. The suck of yesterday and today may have been caused by a combination of individually insignificant factors, but the problems I talk about above are quite generally applicable to my life. At least, to the unhappy moments in it. Which, now that I think on it, don’t occur often at all. But man, when they do, it’s bad…)

bursts

It just hit me: a large part of the reason I love [living with] Ethan is that, most any time I get into one of those nostalgic-open-expressive-personal-revealing-vulnerable moods and need to talk, he’s there and even interested.

Most any time. Now it’s quiet for several more hours, and I am alone and afire, reading. Sentences come with difficulty, more fragmented outbursts. Maybe they’ll coalesce into another blog entry, or maybe not.

There’s nothing, nothing like conversation.

Why I love what I do, reason 479.

Am reading the newly-published A Companion to Digital Humanities, edited by Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth and published by Blackwell. Whipping through more than reading, really: I’d recalled it from the library and it got recalled right back, so I only have until Monday and it’s almost 700 pages long. There’s tons of interesting stuff in there. Most of it is nothing new for me – the book reads like a primer – but the writing is excellent and there are some new ideas, and when I teach an intro to humanities computing class, this will likely be the main textbook. Um, if they come out with a version that doesn’t cost $165.

Speaking of excellent writing, here’s a bit from Carole L. Palmer’s “Thematic Research Collections”:

[T]he creators of scholarly collections will need to be a new kind of scholar, or team, with a distinct mix of expertise in at least three areas – the specific subject matter and associated critical and analytical techniques, technical computing processes, and principles of content selection and organization.

Both my job with the VHL and [especially] my dissertation for a PhD in humanities computing (!!) challenge me to develop along all of these lines. There are low points, to be sure, but the occasional bird’s-eye-view inspires and recharges me. This field is so… fun. How many people can boast an adventurous academic life? Unbelievable luck, right here.

President publicly ignorant again.

George W. Bush has told reporters he’s unfamiliar with the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

*head meets desk* four… more… gah.

Grrrr NYPD

Okay, so the latest on the New York police randomly harrassing and arresting people, not to mention confiscating their bicycles despite a federal judge ruling that illegal, got me annoyed enough that I actually called the NYPD switchboard and asked where I can lodge a complaint against them. The lady referred me to the Civilian Complaint Review Board. I called them, spoke to an investigator doing intake today, gave him a bunch of information.

We’ll see if this goes anywhere. I do appreciate the difficulty of a policeman’s job, but in New York of all places there has got to be actual work to do.

Well done remix commercial

Don’t know whether it’s real or another fake one, but this Golf commercial is pretty impressive!