i am a sonic death monkey...
...roaming the streets of Oxford, England without a leash.
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June 30, 2005
"studied for action"
Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton. "'Studied for Action': How Gabriel Harvey Read His Livy." Past and Present: 129 (Nov. 1990): 30-78. Available through JSTOR (subscription required):
This essay forms part of a larger, book-length project, which is intended to contribute to the historical understanding of the ways in which humanistically trained readers assimilated and responded to the classical heritage. But it seeks to go beyond the traditional, textual definition of this field to reconstruct the social, professional and personal contexts in which reading took place. Although the present study deals with a topic historians tend to label as "high culture," it will be clear that we also intend it to be in dialogue with a body of recent publications on the history of reading and of the book. That work, although by no means homogeneous, broadly concerns itself with the production and circulation of printed texts, and with setting the activity of reading in its historical and cultural contexts, as well as with some of the social implications that result from a particular locating of reading in history.
Many thanks to Ian for the recommendation.
June 29, 2005
since our last episode...
...I have
- been shopping with Laurie and Jeff on Regent Street in London on Sunday (we ate lunch at a pub called Shakespeare's Head, which features witty Elizabethan sayings on the walls like "Having a hairy chest does not make you a porn star"),
- had dinner and then a pint with Meg on Sunday night,
- spent all day in the BL on Monday, joining Scott, Shelley, and Meg for lunch,
- trained up to Oxford on Tuesday to look at some things in the Bodleian, where the bathroom graffiti announces that "This place is full of scary old men and scary old books" (mad props* to Ian for making my trip to the town and to the library so effortless),
- spent the night at Ian's and Fiona's.
And finally, today I took the train to Manchester, where I am currently posting from an Internet cafe. I have some good pix to post, but wireless access for my laptop is uncertain, so I'm not sure when I'll be able to share them. The plan is to take it easy today, do some grocery shopping, maybe catch a movie, and then hit the ground running tomorrow at the MARC.
*I'm so hip, aren't I?
June 27, 2005
for parents and children the world over
- "Calling My Children Home," by Emmylou Harris
- "One Morning," by Gillian Welch
- "Masters of War," by Scott Amendola & Carla Bozulich
- "Abide with Me," by Perri Alleyne
And this is nicely done, too.
MP3 files are posted for evaluation purposes only. Availability is limited: usually 24 hours. Through this site, I'm trying to share and promote good music with others, who will also hopefully continue to support these artists. Everyone is encouraged to purchase music and concert tickets for the artists you feel merit your hard earned dollars. If you hold copyright to one of these songs and would like the file removed, please let me know.
makes a frappucino taste like a bad slurpee
If we could somehow use these in the "war on terrah," then we will have already won.
June 26, 2005
sleep
Obviously I've been running on some kind of deficit: I was out cold for 15 hours last night.
In other news, within about 20 minutes of each other, I ran into two American bloggers yesterday at the BL: Scott and Meg. Add that to the list of advantages of having a Flickr account and relatively unusual hair.
Sundays are my only days off--the other days you'll find me hunched over a desk in the library, reading at breakneck speed, ruining my back--which means laundry and some sightseeing. Unfortunately for me, Westminster Abbey and Wesley's Chapel are not open for such shenanigans on Sundays. I'd like to see the stained glass window at W.A. commemorating eighteenth-century novelist Frances (Fanny) Burney, but that will have to wait for another trip. Maybe I'll head to the Tate Modern, instead.
I'll meet Meg for a beer later this afternoon.
June 24, 2005
in dreams
technologies old and new
In the foyer of the British Library, they have this very large electronic kiosk for you to flip through some of their collection. I'd estimate that the screen is about 30 inches across and 18 inches high. Displayed on the screen in this photo is "Baybars' Magnificent Qur'an," which you can also view online.
there are archives, and then there are archives
I've been thinking about writing a post on digital archives, commercialization, scholarship, teaching, and access, but Ray Rosenzweig, in "Digital Archives Are a Gift of Wisdom to Be Used Wisely" (Chronicle, sub req'd) has pretty much beaten me to it. Although Rosenzweig's focus is on teaching, he brings up a central concern of mine, namely the cost of commercial offerings of digitized cultural heritage resources: if my university cannot afford to subscribe, then my scholarship and my teaching (i.e. my students' education) are going to suffer.
Rosenzweig notes the number of massive archives that have come online since the mid-'90s and observes that their availability "is about as dramatic a development in access to cultural resources in a single decade as any of us are likely to see in our lifetimes" He expresses concern over the cost of some, however:
It is hard to remember that, but a decade ago, the Web was largely a noncommercial world. It was only in 1995 that dot-com domains came to dominate over dot-edu addresses. Commercialization has had its impact on what we call the History Web, the online repository of digital primary and secondary sources. In fact, some of the most interesting and exciting of those sources are commercial products, often very costly ones, from giant information conglomerates.
A university with 18,000 students can spend more than half a million dollars to acquire the full collection [of Eighteenth-Century Collections Online], depending on discounts it receives and other pricing factors. Another extraordinary digital collection, ProQuest Historical Newspapers, contains the full runs of a number of major newspapers...But a typical university will have to shell out the equivalent of an assistant professor's salary each year to pay for those digital newspapers.
It seems churlish to complain about extraordinary resources that greatly enrich the possibilities for online research and teaching. Surely Thomson, ProQuest, and other businesses are entitled to recoup their multimillion-dollar investments in digitizing the past. But it still needs to be observed that not every college can pay the entry fee to this new digital world. Some may have to decide whether it is more important to have extraordinary digital resources or people to teach about them.
Roy Rosenzweig is a professor of history and new media at George Mason University and director of the university's Center for History and New Media. He is co-author, with Daniel J. Cohen, of Digital History: A Guide to Preserving, Presenting, and Gathering the Past on the Web, scheduled to be published in the fall by the University of Pennsylvania Press.
cranky zombie
Although this post will be about a few things that irritate me while working in the BL, I do want to emphasize that being here is a 99% positive experience. But can't people keep it down?
- To "Mr. Clicky," who keeps pressing the mouse button to move down the long web page he's reading ... click ... click ... click ... click click click click click click clickclickclick ... Dude, notice that thing in the middle of the mouse? It's called a scroll wheel. Look into it.
- To "Mr. Smacky," who randomly smacks his lips while reading his Derrida...*smack*...(long silence)...*smack*...Need a drink of water? The fountains are right over there.
- To the two-fingered typists who apparently feel that they must really! hit! those! keys! as they type--take it easy. Your keyboard will last longer.
- To the chronic coughers, ask Mr. Smacky where the water fountains are or buy some cough drops in the cafe.
- To the woman who has somehow managed to make turning pages a very loud activity...take it easy. The books will last longer.
- To the people whose computers keep announcing their every "save," "open," "restore," and "error" with a different cartoonish sound...it's called a mute button. Look into it.
- And to the 99% of you who do conduct your research quietly...it's a pleasure to be in the room with you.
"Zombie does get cranky sometimes."
June 23, 2005
book production and distribution, 1625-1800
"Book Production and Distribution, 1625-1800," by H. G. Aldis, M.A., Peterhouse, Secretary of the University Library (from The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in 18 Volumes).
adaptation of conditions
D. F. McKenzie. "Printers of the Mind: Some Notes on Bibliographical Theories and Printing-House Practices." Studies in Bibliography 22 (1969).
...if I were to give this paper an epigraph, it might well be that quoted by Sir Karl Popper from Black's Lectures on the Elements of Chemistry published in 1803: 'A nice adaptation of conditions will make almost any hypothesis agree with the phenomena. This will please the imagination, but does not advance our knowledge.' Our ignorance about printing-house conditions in the 17th and 18th centuries has left us disastrously free to devise them according to need; and we have at times compounded our errors by giving a spurious air of 'scientific' definitiveness to our conclusions.
catching you up
Tuesday night we saw Henry IV, Part 2, and while I have no complaints about the production, it's just not as good of a play as 1H4 or Henvy V. Too many scenes drag on with dialogue and exposition; I feel that way when I read the play, and I felt that way watching it. I saw a production in 1995 at the D.C. Shakespeare Theatre where they performed part 1 and part 2 back to back. I wish I remembered enough of that production to compare, but the only thing I can recall is that they cut many of the comic scenes in order to limit the time. Hmm...still and all, I'm glad to have seen these performances. Every good production of Shakespeare is another interpretation worth putting into memory.
Last night William St. Clair lectured on "The Political Economy of Reading," a lecture that was very good and very well attended. St. Clair has written a book (free sample chapter) that is making quite a stir in book history circles, not so much for the conclusions he draws from the evidence he has gathered, but rather for his methodology and for the massive amount of evidence he has gathered. He has modelled an approach that is staggering in its comprehensive survey of the available historical data, and he has also presented his data--in a huge series of appendices--in a way that will be very useful to other book historians. One of the best lines from his introduction is this one:
The history of reading is at the stage of astronomy before telescopes, economics before statistics, heavily reliant on a few commonly repeated traditional narratives and favorite anecdotes, but weak on the spade-work of basic empirical research, quantification, consolidation, and scrutiny of primary information, upon which both narrative history and theory ought to rest.
Something tells me we're going to see that one quoted a good bit in the next few years.
Let me tell you, sometimes it feels like it's a small academic world, as I keep seeing people I know from academic conferences and other venues. I attended last night's lecture with my friend Nancy and Ian Gadd (whom I know from past SHARP conferences), and Ian's friend and collaborator Patrick Wallis. In the audience were probably a half dozen people I recognized from events that have taken place in years past as far away as Lyons, France or Springfield, Missouri. It's really not so hard to believe, I suppose, as
- the British Library (and environs) is one of the most important places to work if you want to do serious archival research, and
- if you were a book or literary historian in London yesterday, St. Clair's lecture was the hot ticket.
There was a nice reception after the lecture (open bar! woo-hoo!), during which I was privy to some interesting talk about how St. Clair's argument was going over, and then the four of us went out for Italian food. I am quite allergic to something here, and I had a sneezing fit during dinner, but I managed to recover. After a night cap at a pub, I made it home to my sweltering room by about 11:30 or so.
Research continues to go well, though no stunning finds are presenting themselves lately. Instead, a more complete picture of the publishing scene is now visible to me. I spent some quality time with the English Short Title Catalogue database yesterday morning, searching on titles I have gathered of late eighteenth-century religious periodicals to find out if they're available at the BL or on microfilm. The database is also useful to seeing when, where, and for how long these publications existed, and who was involved with printing and selling them. I used to live on the ESTC when in grad school at a university that subscribed to it. Oh, precious ESTC! How I have missed you!
I'm about to head in for another day's work, but I want to say that one of the most incredible things about working at the BL is that you can get your hands on just about any book you might possibly need. Provided it's not something incredibly rare, like a Gutenberg Bible, they'll pull it up for you and let you read it. Anything.
Amazing. I am extremely lucky.
June 20, 2005
insomniac's music news roundup
I think my brain can't decide which time zone I'm in.
- Pitchfork Media lets us know the tour dates for the newly reunited original lineup of Dinosaur Jr. No, I won't be living anywhere they're playing. Very inconsiderate of them, if you ask me. If you live in D.C./Atlanta and do not plan on going to see them at the 9:30 Club/Variety Playhouse, then you're a damn fool. Unless you don't like your ears bleeding. Then I understand.
- PFM also reports that the White Stripes are coming to the Starlight Theater in KC on August 23. Two thoughts:
- I will be living somewhere other than Kansas City on August 23.
- The Starlight Theater does not sound like a place I want to go to see a band.
- Oh wait! Ryan Adams and the Cardinals will be playing in Manchester on June 29! ... Sold out?
- Dammit!
- Then again, if I want to see someone get drunk and fall down on stage, there's always Shane MacGowan.
- Hmm, Television on the 23rd of June. Saw them last year, and don't have a burning desire to see them again.
- Holy crap! There's an amazing series called Patti Smith's Meltdown taking place in London this week:
- Patti Smith, Chan Marshall (Cat Power), and Kevin Shields (My Bloody Valentine) performing together this Wednesday right here in London!
- And she's performing with John Cale (Velvet Underground) on Satuday.
- An homage to William Blake in the form of a tribute to Jimi Hendrix...that sounds a little flakey.
- Looks like they're all sold out.
- Dammit!
- Well, there's also a tribute to Bertolt Brecht featuring Marc Almond, The Finn Brothers, Antony & The Johnsons, Martha Wainwright, Dresden Dolls, Sparks, London Sinfonietta, The Tiger Lillies, and Patti Smith. Hmm, could be interesting. Sinfonietta collaborated with Radiohead's Jonny Greenwood recently. I dig the Dresden Dolls. And who doesn't love Soft Cell's Marc Almond? A damn fool. That's who.
Oh, Morpheus. Why must you taunt me so?
ASECS 2006
The 2006 meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies will take place in Montreal. (Or is that, ...will take place in Montreal, eh?) The calls for paper are now online.
June 19, 2005
busy few days
Friday and Saturday were awesome research days at the British Library. I found some really juicy stuff that's going to be very useful. I was there yesterday from 9:30 until closing at 5:00 yesterday, and I was so excited by what I was finding that I didn't want to leave.
My time has not been filled only with work, however. Friday night I saw a very good production of Henry IV Part 1 with Laurie and her friend Jessica at the National Theatre. Tuesday night we'll catch the second part. Jessica totally kicks ass for landing tickets to supposedly sold-out shows.
Last night my friend Nancy and I headed out to the hip joint of the moment, which goes by the name of the Boogaloo. It's supposed to be the place to see and be seen, but it seemed just like any other pub I've been to in London. Well, there was one difference: the beer was about twice as expensive. Still, it was fun to hang out there, and the way the juke box works is pretty cool. The rumor is that Coldplay went there once to take in (or contribute to) the vibe and got angry when no one recognized them.
Today was an eighteenth-century geek's idea of paradise. Nancy and I shared a delicious lunch at a Thai restaurant, then visited Dennis Severs' House (see photo below), which is one part living history site and two parts happening.
Subsequently, we walked up City Road to John Wesley's chapel, built in the 1760s, and to Bunhill Fields, the Nonconformists' cemetery right across the street.
The Museum of London was our next stop, and coincidentally enough, there is a sculpture next to the entrance that marks the site of John Wesley's conversion experience; Wesley described feeling a "strange warming of the heart" while walking along Aldersgate Street. Not exactly the most dramatic of descriptions given that some of Wesley's evangelical peers were passing out and speaking in tongues.
The Museum of London is a well-done presentation of the history of the city, with artifacts from the last several hundred years. We each bought a reproduction of a 1745 London map, and then headed straight for the Restoration and eighteenth-century sections, which has an exhibit on the Great Fire of 1666, and then several other exhibits organized thematically around themes like "printing" or "prison." Perhaps I'm making it sound too dry, but it really is well done. I especially like this "sermon glass".
Next on the agenda: more walking! We ended up at a pub for a couple of pints of John Courage (produced by a brewery founded in 1787), and capped off the day with dinner at an Indian restaurant of my favorite kind.
Now I'm going to bed...
June 18, 2005
serendipity
I'm sitting in a London coffee shop and Internet cafe on Judd Street, waiting for the BL to open, and the radio is playing "Kansas City Here I Come," by Big Joe Turner.
June 17, 2005
just a few life/blogging notes
- Barring unforeseen circumstances, it looks like we've found a place to live in the city to which we will be moving in August. Close to the university, 60% of our current rent, a house in a subdivision. I have never lived in the suburbs before. No, really.
- I've added a list in my sidebar called "This week's 10." It's a list of blogs I intend to visit and comment upon relatively regularly for a week through web browsing (rather than an RSS feed). Someone--I've forgotten who now--suggested doing this in a recent blog entry.
- I'm going to paint myself into a blogging corner with promises of two forthcoming posts:
- A post on working in the archives.
- A post in response to Scott Eric Kaufman's on teaching literature and history.
Off to the library...
June 16, 2005
okay, y'all
What would you like me to blog about? Are my research updates boring you?
this is what i see...
...when I look out the window from my room.
You can just see the top of St. Paul's Cathedral in the upper right-hand corner.
June 15, 2005
patterns emerge
After all that sleep last night, I was much more focused today. I'm beginning to feel more confident about seeing some patterns in the magazine I'm reading. This particular magazine has a confusing publishing history, having appeared in three different sequences, each time starting over with the numbering of volumes: 1766-1773, 1774-1783, 1784. And then in 1784 it merged with another evangelical magazine. Very messy, but also very interesting.
It's increasingly rare that a scholar actually has to travel to examine publications like this. An enormous amount of material is now available online through commercial projects like Early English Books Online, Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, and The Eighteenth Century microfilm collection. These resources are quite expensive, however, and many colleges and universities cannot afford them.
Somehow, what I'm researching has managed to slip beneath the radar of any of these projects, and so here I am, examining the only surviving complete run of this periodical (or perhaps the only surviving complete run that's been catalogued). I hope to be done with this task by Friday or Saturday, and then I'll be researching some other materials.
One small thing I'd like to find: John Wesley refers to a published announcement regarding his intent to begin producing The Arminian Magazine. The last time I checked the ESTC, which was awhile ago, I could not find this announcement. Hopefully I'll track it down. I've done a lot of research on The Arminian Magazine in the past and am now looking at other, competing periodicals of the time.
Side note: I learned today that copies of The Gentleman's Magazine, an extremely successful secular periodical of the eighteenth century, are available in the open stacks* of one of the rooms at the British Library. This means I don't have to actually request it volume by volume but can browse at my leisure. Very nice. Something I'm after are the places where these magazines reference each other through their prefaces and other paratextual materials. How did they see themselves and their rivals? Sometimes there are quite bitter and direct attacks. Sometimes the references are oblique.
So far, my routine has been sleep, eat, research, eat, research, eat, beer, sleep. Not much playtime. However, I've run into some people I know that I knew would be here, and we're making some plans for Friday and Saturday night as well as Sunday. I'll keep you posted, of course.
*Which reminds me that I was planning on writing about what researching in special collections is like. Many of you already know, of course, but many of you do not.
jet lag is a funny thing
Twelve hours of sleep engulfed me last night after a measly five made a brief visit the night before. At 9:00 p.m. the sky is brighter than a boy visiting from Kansas City would expect, and at 3:45 in the morning the first hints of dawn are visible. Yesterday was a better day than the day before, but the time change still makes its presence known. I'm getting a later start today than I'd like, but I'm willing to cut myself some slack in the first couple of days, when my body and brain are still confused as to where in the world I am.
You can reach me in my room, where I'll be in the evenings, via telephone at 020 7837 8888 x2521, but you're on your own when it comes to negotiating the country codes and such. Remember that I'm five hours ahead of the East Coast and six ahead of the Midwest. Those of you in the UK and on the continent don't have much to worry about in that area, of course.
And I'm off to the library.
June 14, 2005
research update
Just a quick note here, dear reader, as I'm grabbing some free WiFi in a dining hall with an etiquette notice forbidding the use of laptops. My flight over was fine, and I managed to put in a brief appearance yesterday at the British Library, even though my lack of sleep made me feel like a real zombie, not just the Internet kind. As fate would have it, I encountered a former student who is now finishing up his PhD in English. I last saw him when he was a freshman in one of my sections of intro to British literature at the University of Maryland. Time flies!
I'm looking at British evangelical periodicals at the BL, and I may have more to say about the fruits of my research in the coming days. Or I may keep it to myself until print publication. What's interesting is that I'm seeing the same names involved in these publishing ventures crop up again and again.
There's also a thread I want to follow involving the controversy surrounding the claim of a publisher that a certain set of printed sermons represent the authentic words of a particular preacher who, conveniently enough for the publisher, happened to be dead at the time of publication. The sermons were purportedly taken down in shorthand by an audience member, then transcribed, then printed. This is one of those threads you don't expect to find, but that you are obliged to follow once you do. You know me: I'm a sucker for the whole "speech-script-print" thing
Oh, and I bought a surprisingly affordable CD-ROM of "the world’s earliest complete survival of a dated printed book."
June 12, 2005
"dark": a not-so-random 10
- "The Dark," by My Morning Jacket, from The Tennessee Fire
- "Dark Center of the Universe," by Modest Mouse, from The Moon and Antartica
- "In My Hour of Darkness," by the Rolling Creekdippers, from Return of the Grievous Angel: A Tribute to Gram Parsons
- "In My Hour of Darkness," by Gram Parsons, from G.P. / Grievous Angel
- Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, Long After Dark
- "Let the Darkness Fall," by Mazzacane, Langille, Burnes, Daniell, Let the Darkness Fall
- "I See a Darkness," by Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, from I See a Darkness
- "I See a Darkness," by Johnny Cash, from American III: Solitary Man
- "A Spindle, A Darkness, A Fever, and a Necklace," by Bright Eyes, from Fever and Mirrors
- "Can Light Be Found in the Darkness?" by Gustavo Santaolalla, from the 21 Grams soundtrack
June 11, 2005
changes to messaging accounts
gearing up
In case I should meet the Queen, I've packed a decent blazer. Hmm, I should probably include a tie.
- Passport? check
- Currency? check
- Tickets? check
- iPod? check
- Camera? check
- Laptop? check
- Comfy clothes for travel? check
- Books to read on flight? check
My first tran-Atlantic flight took place in 1979 when we moved to Belgium. Back then, people dressed up because flying felt like a special occasion. I wore a polyester 3-piece suit. I wish I was kidding. This time it's jeans, a t-shirt, and a hoody. The temperature will hover in the mid-60s in London this week, which sounds pretty nice
I completely overhauled the laptop earlier today and somehow ended up with 15 gigs of free disk space I didn't know I had. Need to make sure I take an ethernet cable and a lock to secure the computer when I'm away from my room.
My itinerary tomorrow takes me first to Houston, which means a 9-hour flight from there to London. Ugh. If the first leg instead took me to Newark, I'd be in the UK much sooner. Well, at least I might have a chance to snap a shot of that weird statue of Bush the Elder they have in the Houston airport. If I do, you'll be the first to know, dear reader.
June 10, 2005
travel
If you can hear a piano fall, you can here me comin' down the hall.
Monday morning I wake up in London. I'm nowhere near as nervous as I was two years ago.
June 9, 2005
L and me
Together 13 years today. Woo-hoo!
We had a celebratory day of morning massages, lunchtime seafood and chocolate, afternoon clothes and music shopping, a trip to a local art exhibit that was cut short by a trip to the doctor's office for treatment of a mysterious bout of vertigo (love will do that to you), and then Asian fusion cuisine for dinner. Whew! Here's lookin' at you, kid.
what kind of irony?
Can someone clarify for me the type of irony involved in an actor having to apologize for his real-life violent behavior while on a press tour to promote a movie celebrating a man's redemption through beating the crap out of people?
print cultur(e/al) studies
Three emails caught my eye on SHARP-L this morning. I'm not awake enough yet to say anything clever about them.
- A conference entitled Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade, will be held in late November at the Society of Antiquaries in London:
Leading book historians will discuss the presence of the book trade in the streets and public spaces of Britain and continental Europe. From the Frankfurt book fair in the 16th century to the Farringdon Road barrows in the 20th, speakers will range across geographical as well as chronological frontiers to follow the movement of books and people.
- This year's Print Networks conference on the History of the British Book Trade will take place at the University of Birmingham in late July (after I'm back in the U.S., unfortunately). The keynote speaker is John Feather.
- Routledge will publish An Introduction to Book History, by David Finkelstein and Alistair McCleery, later this summer as a companion to The Book History Reader that Finkelstein and McCleery edited. The table of contents for the Intro is as follows:
Chapter 1: Theorising the History of the Book
Chapter 2: Orality to Literacy
Chapter 3: The Coming of Print
Chapter 4: Authors, Authorship and Authority
Chapter 5: Printers, Booksellers, Publishers, Agents
Chapter 6: Readers and Reading
Chapter 7: The Future of the Book
June 8, 2005
tornadic
From the OED:
Of, pertaining to, or of the nature of a tornado.1884 Amer. Meteorol. Jrnl. I. 7 Four series of storms of tornadic character have passed over the states east of the Mississippi River since the beginning of the year. 1890 Columbus (Ohio) Dispatch 13 June, These are tornadic conditions. 1898 H. W. LUCY in Daily News 18 Feb. 2/2 Mr. Orchardson's portrait..presenting the ex-Speaker in one of his not unfamiliar tornadic moods.
"Tornadic" is not a word I was familar with before moving to the American Midwest. Now I hear it fairly frequently. Tonight the local television stations pre-empted quite a bit of prime-time programming to keep us up to date on the weather. Talking heads and brightly colord maps do not make for exciting watching, let me tell you. A dramatic storm with golf-ball-sized hailstones passed over us about an hour ago. No tornados, though.
Has a tornado ever hit a big city downtown? Hmm.
my body
There's more of me around than there used to be. For someone who has never been particularly athletic or health conscious, I've been lucky enough to avoid any problems with this mortal coil. No allergies. Resistant to cold and flu. Fairly resistant to hangovers. Blood work always looks good. I do have a small problem with one of my heart valves, but it's pretty minor.
Now, however, I'm concerned about my weight, which has reached a level that is still healthy but has done so at a rate that is too fast for comfort. When I was thirteen, I weighted one hundred and fifty pounds. I grew a foot taller over the next decade and ended up weighing the same. I gradually went up about ten pounds over the next few years. Weight gain has accelerated here in my thirties.
I am now twenty pounds heavier than I was a year and a half ago. My weight is still within the healthy range, but I had always been a pretty thin person. Now I weigh more than I've ever weighed in my life. I'm six feet and two inches tall, one hundred and eighty two pounds. No one in their right mind would say that I'm fat (and I don't have a problem with fat people), but my body feels different to me now. There's more there than there used to be. My recently purchsed jeans are an inch more around the waist than my older jeans. These are not twenty pounds of muscle.
It's not traumatic. Just different.
I was at my most fit while finishing my PhD. The University of Maryland had just built a beautiful cathedral of a gym, open early and open late, with lots of big windows and free flowing air. It did not smell like the inside of a damp sneaker, the way many gyms of my youth did. I went there every single day for cardio and weights. I felt great.
I let that regimen slip as I started my job here about three years ago. Okay, it's more accurate to say I left that regimen behind in Maryland. I began to lead a more sedentary life, reading, writing, grading. (My doctor pronounces it "se-DEN-tar-ee.") I feel sluggish more often than I'd like.
Well, now I'm going to work out regularly again, and I'm altering my diet. It's not that I am obsessed with what my midsection looks like (okay, maybe a little). Rather, I want to feel better. I want to have more energy. I want my brain to feel more excited about things.
So it's back to the cardio and the weights, and back to paying better attention to what I eat. I'll keep you informed about how it goes (because my life is so interesting that I know you'll want to know).
June 6, 2005
get your link on
- Timothy Burke on markets and the public sphere.
- PowerProf and the Little Professor on academic summers.
- Jon Pareles slags Coldplay. (NYT)
- "Dr. [John Q. ] Walker is developing technology that enables him to break down the sounds of an old recording, digitize them and reproduce them on a Disklavier, an up-to-the-minute player piano that can record and replay performances by means of a CD in a slot above the keyboard." (NYT)
- Rockin' the Torah (via NYT).
- Deborah Friedell on concordances. (NYT)
even shakespeare needs starbucks
Last summer. On the left, a Starbucks. On the right, the Globe Theatre.
I know it's not the original location of the Globe (apparently a brewery stands on that site today), but I was struck by how many Starbucks were in London, and this picture seemed the perfect embodiment of that fact.
June 5, 2005
Samuel Johnson's Cat
Heidi very generously gifted me with one of the free Pro Flickr accounts she had. Yay! I've uploaded a bunch of my London photos from last summer.
This one is a shot of a statue commemorating Hodge, Samuel Johnson's cat. Hodge is sitting on top of Johnson's Dictionary, demonstrating that in the eighteenth century, cats were just as likely to sit on your work as they are in the twenty-first century.
June 4, 2005
world of whiskeys
I've uploaded a bunch of my pix from last year's trip to England and France. I think I'm going to go ahead and get a pro Flickr account ($24.95/year) because I've already exceeded my month's allotment of free bandwidth, and I'm inclined to take a lot more pictures if there's an easy way to share them online with others.
I bought a bottle of 18-year-old single malt Scotch in this shop at one of the London airports (Gatwick, I think, although I also used Heathrow).
I am still in love with Flickr, by the way.
June 2, 2005
broken heart, revisited
A The The song just played in a Dockers commercial. When will it stop? Never, I know.
we got links!
Why spend any time outside today when you can keep your skin pasty white by remaining hunched over your computer indoors for hours at a time? Here, let me help:
- "Around 1452 the first operational printing press was created, followed in 1799 by lithographic printing. Now, these inventions are reflected in the world's first bacterial printing press." (New Scientist, via Slashdot).
- Fashion reporter Stephanie Rosenbloom addresses "the plight of the Google-ee." Oh, the hearbreak! (NY Times).
- "80 Years of The New Yorker to Be Offered in Disc Form" for $100 (NY Times). Of interest to local readers: "In early 2004, two staff members drove two copies of each issue of the magazine to Kansas City in a rented truck to have them digitally scanned."
- "A filmmaker who has been collecting digital artifacts for 25 years is amassing the world's largest collection of podcasts" (Wired).
- Liz finds Dance Dance Revolution to be an excellent way to get fit.
- I have no idea what's going on in cartoonist Carol Lay's latest arc (click "next" starting with this one), but it's kind of compelling.
- Professional indie rock f'ups, the Brian Jonestown Massacre, will go on tour this summer, hitting London a few days after I arrive, conveniently enough. You can legally download a ton of their music for free from their website and relive the band's multi-year implosion by renting the documentary DiG!.
- Sharon Howard kicks the ass of all previous History Carnivals. (Cliopatria)
- Map your Flickr photos (FlickrBlog).
- Download "This American Life" installments instead of streaming them.