Summit, evening the first.

I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia at the summit on digital tools for the humanities. It’s almost 10:30pm, I’ve got to catch a 7:30am bus to campus for breakfast and a day of intense work, and I’m jazzed to the point of spinning in the elevator.

The flights were fun, and even flying out of Providence at the ungodly hour of 6am was rewarded by one of those perfectly cloudless full-rainbow-spectrum sunrises. I read and read materials for the summit, and am happy to report that I completed the reading before getting to the hotel. The hotel gave me a warm chocolate-chip cookie upon check-in.

Today was a reception and dinner, followed by the usual greetings and a keynote by Brian Cantwell Smith, a computer scientist from U of Toronto. The man knows how to talk. He gesticlated wildly, looking at times as if he was about to leap towards us from behind the podium. He talked quickly and intensely, and yet managed to keep most of the audience.

Here are some points he brought up, rephrased by me; any brilliance is his, flat language would be mine. I haven’t entirely digested all of this, so present it mostly without commentary. Your thoughts, though, would be much appreciated.

Digital is a trendy word, he said, second only to like on college campuses.

Descartes was a smart guy. He separated the work, or process, of understanding the world from the world thereby understood.

Controversial revelation of this talk: computers don’t actually exist. There do exist many devices, but what are they?

Around the turn of the 20th century, we discovered that we could fuse meaning and mechanism. An example of this would be us. This idea eventually gave birth to computers.

Computers aren’t anything special, and computer scientists aren’t studying anything special. Or maybe anything in particular. This is liberating: instead of a restricted domain, they have a sort of monopoly on the universe.

We (computing humanists) shouldn’t be party to propagating the dualism between the ostensible “abstract” and the concrete. A server going down loses not the representation of mail, but actual mail.

Descartes said that we should have clear and distinct ideas. But this isn’t the way the world actually works.

Maybe the tools we build are digital at the level of the bits, but what matters about them is humanistic.

Computers are a historical moment (a long one, which started in the mid-1800s and is still going) in which we are getting past Descartes.

Matter is both a noun and a verb. Material comes from matter.

Computing is allowing us to get past the temporary, 300-year divorse between matter-noun and matter-verb.

Our commitment to what it means to be human shouldn’t be ideological (”if it’s human, it’s good”).

People can be special as in worthy of study and careful consideration, not special as in this is where inquiry stops because there’s nothing more to say.

…

That’s it for now. If you’re interested in one or more elements of this, comment and we’ll talk (in comments). I’m too tired to attempt an actual argument. Tomorrow is another day, with more photography and some serious hyperte… I mean, blogging.

anniversaries.

Last week, on the autumn equinox, was our first-first wedding anniversary. (We got married in the fall, and again on the spring equinox of this year.) We went camping, journeyed through the woods, gathered large sticks and cooked hobo stew wrapped in aluminum foil, drank prosecco out of the bottle and watched the fire crackle its way through the dark dark evening. Everything was alive, down to the myriad of spiders everywhere. I stayed away from the spiders and clung to my love, thankful and still amazed at the fortune of meeting him.

Today is my grandmother’s 90th birthday. Was, technically, as she was born in Baku (but is Jewish, not Azerbaijani) and it’s well past midnight there. I talked with her on the phone, and am pretty sure she didn’t really know who I was. She’s in that stage of Alzheimer’s where she sounds both lucid and calm, but that’s because she’s gotten used to the denial of going with the flow of whatever we say. Something to the effect of, You’re my granddaughter? Oh, that’s nice, dear. How nice of you to call.

Talking to her these days is creepy and sad. There’s no point in talking often: I’m a bad granddaughter, haven’t felt particularly close to her since my early teens and was terrible at writing letters from America when she was still living in Kishinev with my grandfather. He passed away in 1997, and she moved here in… 2000? 1999? something like that.

But they did help raise me, and I have many memories of their apartment with its dusty books and knick-knacks and tiny well-loved kitchen and grape vines overgrowing the windows and pigeons nesting in the vines. My grandmother read many newspapers and cooked tasty cheese wafers.

She had stunning black hair and a great sense of style. She flirted with my grandfather by leaning out the window, so that her shoulder-length mane would fall to the side like Rapunzel’s.

She waited for her husband to come back from world war 2 while caring for their three children with one other woman’s help. She watched one of her two sons slowly waste away when he, a chemist, was stricken by chemical poisoning and his workplace didn’t even acknowledge that this was possible, and didn’t support him at all.

She taught, first in schools (history) and then at the university (history of the Party). Her long-ago university students came to visit her up until she left the country. She played bridge with grampa and her friends. She would sit there and watch me eat, smiling with delight. She didn’t really drink, but smoked a pack a day until, I think, grampa died and she moved out of their place to a friend of the family’s, waiting for her emigration documents. They’d lived in that apartment since 1953.

She’s had a dignified, full life. Every once in a while the blind injustice of her chronic brain disease washes over me in a wave of dread.

Isn’t she beautiful?

Good Monday morning, you lazy parental types.

While looking around Inside Higher Ed, I came across an old article about Princeton’s new policy of automatically granting a one-year leave from tenure track when a faculty member becomes a parent. I’d been delighted to read this back in August: one thing I don’t like at all about academe in the U.S. is the default assumption that people who make teaching and research their life’s work aren’t entitled to a life outside of the university.

Many more comments have been posted since I last read the article, and I boggle. Some of the people who choose to be “child-free” actually dare to imply that having children makes for lazy academics. That having children means you aren’t dedicated to education and research. I’d like to see them be responsible for a baby and hold down an exhausting full-time job at the same time, for just a month or so. I wonder if they’d change their mind then.

And spare me the “we have too many people on this planet” argument. Fertility is well below replacement rate (2.1 is said to keep a population stable) in a large portion of the world, including most of Europe and North America. The places with particularly high fertility rate (Niger tops the CIA World Factbook chart, with 7.55 children born per woman on the average) also have a huge infant mortality rate.

Amodio on orality and hypertext.

Mark C. Amodio, in Writing the Oral Tradition: Oral Poetics and Literate Culture in Medieval England(Notre Dame, IN: UND Press, 2004), writes (with footnote):

The reader in a literate society plays an important, active role in “writing” the “text” he or she reads* and thus plays a role in creating the “text” in just the way listening audiences in oral cultures are co-creators of the text they receive aurally, but the text produced within literate culture has an attendant physicality, and hence fixity, that oral texts lack. (8)

*A hypertext novel, and hypertext in general, can be seen as a logical extension of the subjective perspective in that readers must literally navigate their way through a “text” that has no fixed or absolutely determined path. In this way, hypertext authors are rather like modern versions of traditional poets in that they create texts with fluid narrative paths that are not easily (if at all) traceable. See further Foley, How to Read, 219-25. On hypertext’s relation to orality, see Joyce, “No One Tells You This.”

I’ll need to follow up on the references he makes, but reading this raised several reactionary thoughts. This is the first time Amodio, who doesn’t seem to be very much into electronic literature, mentions hypertext in the book (which is, by the way, a nice read so far). His treatment of e-lit as something with “no fixed or absolutely determined path” seems to imply an absence of any path at all, which of course isn’t true: hypertext authors often steer the reader in a particular direction by carefully choosing link placement. Plus, it’s certainly possible to have one or more series of single-path nodes within an otherwise link-rich text.

Another debatable implicit opinion in the above the quotation marks surrounding the word text either. What, is it not text? Kind of text? In a book dedicated to orality and literacy I’d expect a more careful consideration of the word. But perhaps he explains this further into the book.

Finally, the co-creation bit. I’ve compared for years reading interlinked bits of related stories in Roland^HT with listening to an oral performance of a piece about Roland, composed by a poet on the spot using archetypes from received cultural memory. But Amodio extends the process of reception to a co-creation. Tempting, in that it (again implicitly) empowers the reader and elevates the interpretive process; but how is this co-creation distinct from forming any memory at all?

FMI, Amodio’s two footnote references are:

Foley, John Miles. How to Read an Oral Poem. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002.

Joyce, Michael. “No One Tells You This: Secondary Orality and Hypertextuality.” Oral Tradition 17 (2002): 325-45.

note to self: knowledge acquisition is a big topic.

It sounds obvious, but in my Roland-related research I’ve been returning again and again to the question of how knowledge has been historically passed down. This needs to be narrowed down: specifically, how and why have people learned and taught stories? A related question is: what role did art (theater, poetry, music, visual arts) play in the lives of the people who have told Roland stories? In the lives of their audiences? (Who were their audiences at any given stage?)

If anyone knows of good literature or other sources of information on the subject, I’d love to know. We’re talking any time period between, say, 750 A.D. and now, anywhere in Europe, Middle East or the Americas.

tuesday morning.

I’ve been up since 5: E. and I are trying to get into this habit, so that he can make it to his 8am (twice a week) and 9am (thrice a week) classes. It’s beautiful: circumstances encourage me to get up, get dressed and washed and maybe even breakfasted early in the morning so that I can take my love to the bus. Then, the day slowly opens up with light and noises, and I can drink another cup of oversteeped tea with milk.

I’m finally caught up on work-related email. Today is a day of planning: what conference calls-for-papers would be good to respond to, what reading I’d like to do, what my technical involvement might be. This semester is the platonic ideal of the entire two-year job gig: we’re far enough along that the technical infrastructure is baaaasically there, and the kickass encoder of yore is back for another semester of fellowship that will allow him to (hopefully) finish encoding our longest text. This leaves me with a lot of time to think, and the privilege isn’t lost on me.

further

It’s unknown whether Hruodlandus, the captain of the Breton March who died in 778 according to Einhard, was Charlemagne’s nephew.

Based on my observations of people over the last couple of decades, it’s easy to imagine a scenario in which they were unrelated, but the story of Roland was made more compelling by the claim of royal familial connection. In other words, it’s possible that their blood relationship is a fabricated meme that has served to hook the reader (listener) in for over a thousand years.

morality and historicity in Roland

History is one big soap opera. How’s this for a tangle:

In The Carolingians: A Family Who Forged Europe, Pierre Riché writes about Carloman and Pippin III, the Short, two sons of Charles Martel, to both of whom he left the Frankish kingdom when he died. Carloman was Charlemagne’s grandfather. Page 51 provides quite the family tree. I’ll break down the paragraph and highlight the important bits, primarily because that makes the confusing passage easier to digest:

[Upon the death of Charles Martel] Carloman and Pippin found their first adversaries within the family.

– Their half-brother Grifo, the son of the Bavarian Sunnichild, reckoned on playing the part of an equal heir, as witnessed by a letter to him from [missionary, archbishop of Mainz] Boniface. He wanted to take possession of his due, but neither Pippin nor Carloman accepted this, and they imprisoned him in the bastion at Chèvremont, near Liège, while his mother was consigned to the guard of the nuns of Chelles.

– In another quarter, Chiltrude, the elder sister of the mayors of the palace, had secretly fled the kingdom with the help of friends and married Odilo, duke of Bavaria. This new relative of the Carolingian family hoped to play some political role; he enjoyed papal support and had also lately concluded a pact with Duke Hunald of Aquitaine. Upon the death of Charles Martel, Hunald had of course revolted against the heirs.

– Finally, Theutbald of Allemania, the brother of the Lantfrid subdued by Charles Martel, made a new grab for autonomy and a restored duchy.

Carloman and Pippin would thus be occupied for several years to the south and east of the kingdom.

OK, so: Charlemagne is linked to his grandfather Carloman by virtue of having more or less the same name. Charlemagne’s grandfather’s sister, from the royal standpoint, betrayed Charlemagne’s grandfather by marrying his adversary-by-proxy. This is presumably a source of shame for the family. [If I put this in my dissertation, is the evidence for that last sentence common knowledge? Do I have to explicitly present it?]

In the Song of Roland (France, 1095-1099), Roland is Charlemagne’s nephew.

In the Karlamagnús Saga (Norway, 13th century), Roland is both Charlemagne’s nephew and his son by his sister named Gilem. When Karlamagnus finds out Gilem is pregnant, he “[gives] his sister to Milon, and [makes] him duke of Brettania. The boy [is] born seven months later.”

Italians make yet another case. From Italo Calvino’s preface to Orlando Furioso di Ludovico Ariosto raccontato da Italo Calvino (Milano: Mondadori 1995, sadly only available in Italian, it’s a brilliant book):

Di Roland la tradizione francese non dice se non l’ultima battaglia e la morte. Tutto il resto della sua vita, nascita, albero genealogico, infanzia giovinezza avventure prima di Roncisvalle, egli le troverà, sotto il nome di Orlando, in Italia. Viene così stabilito che suo padre è Milone di Clermont (o Chiaromonte) alfiere di re Carlo, e sua madre è Berta, la sorella del sovrano. Avendo Milone sedotto la fanciulla, per sfuggire alle ire del regale cognato, la rapisce e fugge in Italia. Secondo alcune fonti Orlando nasce in Romagna, a Imola, secondo altre a Sutri, nel Lazio: che sia italiano non c’è dubbio. (11-12)

(The only things that the French tradition tells about Roland are his last battle and his death. The rest of his life, birth, family tree, childhood youth adventures before Roncesvalles, the character acquires under the name Orlando, in Italy. Thus, his father is established as Milon of Clermont (or Chiaromonte), Charlemagne’s standard bearer, and his mother is Berta, the king’s sister. Having seduced the girl, in order to escape his sovereign brother-in-law’s wrath, Milon kidnaps her and flees to Italy. According to some sources Orlando is born in Romagna, in the town of Imola; according to others, in Sutri, Lazio: of his Italian origin there is no doubt.)

OK, so:

1. Historian Riché claims, presumably based on good evidence, that the Carolingians had a shameful episode a couple of generations previous to Charlemagne’s. This was during the 700s, A.D.

2. The French write down The Song of Roland at the end of the 11th century. Roland is established as Charlemagne’s nephew; there is no further discussion about the dynasty. There is no historical evidence for or against kinship between Charlemagne and the Count Hruodlandus mentioned by Einhard’s account of a battle with the Basques, the only historical mention of a Roland.

3. I would speculate that plenty of gossip about the Carolingian propagated amongst their subjects: it seems to be just the way people react to celebrities, no? Or do I need to substantiate this?

4. The Norse give their tale an incestuous twist: Roland’s father is Charlemagne, and his mother Charlemagne’s sister Berta. The cover-up husband, married into the incest, is named Milon. It would be important, however, to know whether they combined the two stories about Charlemagne’s family, fabricated juicy gossip about Charlemagne, or uncovered yet another shameful secret.

5. The Italians keep Berta, but buy the story: Roland’s mother is Berta and his father is Milon. If there was incest involved in real life, then the Italians become complicit in covering it up; but then, they may have done so in ignorance of the real events.

It just seems to me that there’s a possibility that the Frankish storytellers (who were, in some cases, the king’s unofficial biographers) deliberately covered up for their sovereign, that Norwegians ran a gossip column exposing the secret, but that the Italians never got the memo encoded into the Norse saga and bought the lie, but were vain enough to appropriate the credit for Roland’s survival.

I’m not sure this is provable, though. But one thing that thinking about this has already taught me is: reading relevant histories is not merely “an OK expenditure of dissertation-researching time for my general education.” It may prove to be an absolutely necessary tool that points me more precisely about why stories were told in these particular ways, at these particular historical points.

what conferences are really about.

Impulsively, I’d love to go to this conference on sci-fi and pop culture.

It struck me just now that the reason I want to go is that there’s likely to be excellent storytelling there.

dream fragment. [geek]

I dreamt that I was working with a computer, one that was presumably mine, and a PowerBook too (that’s the one I have in the waking world). Only the one in my dream had a [C|DV]D-ROM drive – the boxy affair with an open/close button right on it – on the front. Confused checking of the laptop’s side revealed a normal (for this type of computer) drive as well.

I wear the geek tag with an odd sort of pride, a self-identification. Same with “humanist,” really, and “computing humanist.” Not sure how I feel about that.

current mood: rainy

advantages of falling asleep early.

Woke up a few times in the night (our own fault, starving the poor kitty of both food and attention for hours!), then definitively at 5am – which was fine, since I’d fallen asleep before 9pm.

Had a beautiful, lazy morning in bed with my love.

Drank coffee, also in bed.

Took a shower.

Took him to the bus that goes down to Kingston, RI where the main URI campus is.

Came back, had breakfast. Cottage cheese is a superb carrier for nutritional yeast, if you’re into savory breakfasts.

And now it’s 8:15 and I’m about to sit down working. It’s quiet and light. Bliss!

Re-reading my previous long post about Burning Man is strange. I feel like I’ve lost my facility with language, especially as compared to a couple of years ago when I took that nonfiction writing workshop. Time to find a writing voice again.

As part of getting back into Roland, I’m reading about Pierre Riché’s The Carolingians (Michael Idomir Allen, trans.). Very well written, one of those academic books that read more novelistic. And oh, this is why his name was familiar! He also wrote Daily Life in the World of Charlemagne, translated by Jo Ann McNamara, which I came to own by a fluke (probably the booksellers at the Kalamazoo Medieval Congress) and loved as well.

a burning in the soul.

It’s getting cooler in Providence, where we returned from a three-week road trip this past Friday. The ostensible reason for the journey out west was Burning Man; a couple of family visits all over the country (Saint Louis and somewhere near Grass Valley, California) and a visit to friends in Santa Rosa were in order as well, so renting a car made sense. It turned out to be convenient and fun; Ethan and I both enjoyed our second road trip as a couple, counting the honeymoon a few months ago.

Burning Man was… well, most of all it was satisfying. Even though I didn’t get to see nearly as much of the city as I’d wanted, nor participate in as many events: all of the good intentions of starting each day with yoga somewhere on the playa kind of went to hell. But being part of Foodlab, a camp that made a hot sunset meal for about 130 people every day for the week, was solidly rewarding as a community-building exercise.

At least, it was rewarding until the end, when only 8 or so of the 37 people in the camp ended up breaking it down, a long and often tedious and unpleasant process rife with snarky comments from exhausted burners feeling a bit bitter at having been left all alone to deal with the final mess. Still, given the kind of camp we were (much trash to truck out, many supplies to account for), we only left about 4 hours later than intended. It could’ve been worse, and I’m glad we stayed and thankful for the work and ultimate mutual support of the breakdown crew.

It’s been a little unsettling to get anonymous and not-so-anonymous snide comments about what went wrong in Foodlab this year. My impression remains that Foodlab had a good year, and this is corroborated by the glowing thanks we’ve received from several people who ate with us but weren’t privy to the inner workings. *shrugs* I just hope that discussion of what to do better next time doesn’t occlude the warmth and laughter we gathered and fed every evening.

When we weren’t busy at Foodlab or hanging out with friends, Ethan and I carved out a few times to be together. The first of those was on Thursday, as we attended our friends Bucky and Emily’s colorful wedding at the clockworks. The afternoon was filled with gorgeous clothes, scorching sun and not one but four ice cream cakes, rock-hard from the flash freezing and being stored in dry ice! Talk about a treat, in the desert.

We puttered about the city a couple of times, returning to the Center Camp Café on Tuesday to revisit the morningtime conversations and coffee that kept us in thrall of each other at the 2003 Burning Man, where we met. On Sunday, we went to the temple burn together, intending to make a late night of it; but a convoluted set of events left us looking for my bike in a nascent dust storm, in which I ended up losing Ethan and never finding the bike. A couple of solid hours of wandering the playa left me exhausted and so covered in pale-brown alkali dust that my campmates didn’t recognize me when I walked into camp looking for my husband who of course wasn’t there. We finally reunited, fell into a deep sleep and broke down the camp the following morning. An anticlimactic ending to our burn, perhaps, but an adventure that now provokes more smiles than rue.

And so, after all the busy-ness and bonding time with Ethan, after the freedom of merely existing in Black Rock City, I kind of felt that I hadn’t emotionally connected with anyone new, not deeply or satisfyingly. There’d been a few meaningful conversations, a couple of great first meetings, one entire night spent talking with some campmates, but in all of that was this insidious distance. By the end of the week my haptic interface was twitching all through my muscles – I hadn’t had prolonged tactile contact with anyone besides Ethan in many days, and in an intensely emotionally open environment at that. This made for an unsettled and thoughtful state, which wasn’t unpleasant but was a bit isolating, [because it|and] took up many thought cycles.

So it was surprising and very cool to find myself having revelatory conversations with N., a longtime friend of Ethan’s from back in Colorado, who has been studying Tibetan Buddhism for several years now and was on his way to New York. I haven’t processed all of what we talked about yet, but the introspectiveness triggered by Burning Man and the desire to once again hermit myself and do a few things well this coming year were kindled by the talks, which took place at all hours (we did the trip straight through, with two stops for sleep and a few more for rest and breakfast and what not).

Ethan and I dropped N. off on Friday morning and headed to Providence, physically tired but agian deep in conversation. Somewhat unexpectedly, we turned to topics that ended up solidifying and concretizing our relationship, even more so than it had been already – a sort of culmination of the two years during which we’ve come to know each other and see a future together.

So the unsettled feeling that I had previously been baffled by, the one that felt like loneliness in the midst of a full life happily building a family, probably wasn’t loneliness after all. It now feels like a restlessness, a desire to move forward and again to deepen my relationship to my love and to my world. Suddenly we’ve seen the path we both want to take in developing our selves together. If the past two years are any indication, the next few will be distilled eye-opening joy.
Tomorrow I go to work. Can’t wait, actually. There’s a lot to do, and I finally feel rested enough to do it well. Welcome home.