Random paragraphs of Paris

Staying in an apartment by myself after having spent three weeks in Too Little Space with Too Many People = great relief paired with a sudden onslaught of loneliness and therefore, I suspect, much more frequent blog posting. Mark your calendars accordingly.

It's such a weird mix of feelings - it is so very cool to be here, and so hard to be away from LWI and his family. I have a whole bedroom to myself! and a whole bathroom to myself! and a whole kitchen to myself, apartment gods be praised! but then again, I'm alone. Bleah. But this apartment is so unbelievably cool; it's little teensy tiny, but it's an attic of a 17th century building, with big old wooden beams and slanty ceilings and skylights everywhere. If I stretch a little I can see the cathedral of Notre Dame out the living room window.

My two favorite moments of the past three weeks:

the first time I visited MIL in the hospital, after she'd been in the ICU for a week - she saw me come in and her face just lit up. That look on her face is going to make me happy for weeks.

yesterday the LWI was updating his calendar, and he asked what date we were flying back to the City Where We Live But For Which I Have Not Yet Chosen An Appropriate Nickname. I told him the date, and he entered the phrase "Flight back home." Normal enough, but keep in mind, he grew up and lived in the same house in Madrid until he was in his 30s, and then I came along and lured him away to the U.S. where we've been now for eight years, only the last five of them in Our City (not that I wouldn't have loved to live in Spain, but academic jobs are easier to get in the U.S., if you can believe it.) So I looked at him and said "Do you mean that? Is Our City really home for you now?" and he replied that of course it was. That just means the world to me... I've always felt bad that he's so far from his family and the place where he grew up, but he really does feel at home with me. Awww.

weird advertising

I've been talking with sales folks from several hotels lately, working on plans for an upcoming conference we'll be hosting here. One hotel gave me a nice folder full of advertising goodies that I just now had time to look through. It included the usual information about the hotel itself, local activities, and their proposal for me. There was also a small, slightly thick white envelope with a little gold ribbon around it, some mysterious little gift. Perplexed, I opened it up, and found a cream-colored... thing... about 3 inches by 4, with a little seal, and a paragraph description of an Important Historical Event (though not a very happy one) that happened in the hotel many years ago. Well, as an important event, I can see how they'd want to include information about it, but what the heck was this thing? A slim note pad? No, there were no pages... A coaster? Then I noticed it had a long crack, and in fact it was a little bit soft. It couldn't be... I sniffed, and nibbled a corner of it, and in fact it was white chocolate.

Now, I'm all for chocolate in all its forms, but a little chocolate slab (that otherwise doesn't look remotely like anything edible) to advertise an unhappy but significant event that took place at your hotel? It just struck me as odd.

(Although now that I'm writing about it, it strikes me as tempting. I think I'll go eat it, and meditate on the vagaries of history and the wonderful meeting areas and banquet facilities of the hotel in question.)

Actually, this leads me to a question about conferences. Several of you have been through the spring conference routine, and to the extent that that's fresh on your mind, I'd like to ask what things you like best and what you would have changed. (My conference will be about 100 people, to give you a sense of scale.) Things like: if we have the reception & banquet & meetings all in the same hotel, is that good because it's convenient, or bad because it's claustrophobic? (The hotel at least is in a very attractive downtown area with lots of great restaurants and bars within walking distance, so people will be able to go out and have fun.) To fit in all the panels, would you rather have panels that run from 8:30 am to 6:30 pm all day Friday and Saturday with Sunday free, or panels that run more from 9-5 and then one session on Sunday morning? (This location is reasonably accessible, so people shouldn't have a hard time scheduling afternoon flights, though I don't know if they'll want to.)

Any other things you would recommend to do or avoid? I'd love your suggestions!

Short term, long term

The conference was excellent! (And yeah, I've been back for over a week, but have spent most of that time in Grading Jail, as Philosophy Factory would say. Even now I've only momentarily escaped, and they'll be dragging me back any minute now.) It was a huge ego trip, really. I'm accustomed to being fairly invisible and not knowing many people, but I've finally hit some sort of critical mass in terms of the number of folks I know (especially in this fairly narrow field) and now that my book is out, even more people came up to introduce themselves to me. A graduate student e-mailed me a few days before the conference and asked if we could meet, because she admired my work, and we had a lovely lunch together. Boy, do I wish I'd had the guts to do that more often; from the student perspective it's terribly intimidating, but from the other side, it's wonderful to know that someone enjoyed your work, and to talk with them about their own ideas (which in this student's case are far superior to anything I ever did with that particular topic - if anyone should have been intimidated, it was me).

My panel was well-attended, and all the papers fit together remarkably well. An Awesome Senior Historian attended, and gave me some very supportive comments afterwards. (In spite of my recent experience with the graduate student, I still couldn't get over feeling completely outclassed and tongue-tied with him.) A book review editor from a well-respected journal approached me to say that someone had just asked him to review my book, and if I'd arrange to send him a copy. I met several people from my Ph.D. institution, and had a lovely time chatting with them, feeling much more like a colleague instead of a former student.

So all in all, an excellent and encouraging experience! It's odd that I'm into my second year as a tenured professor, but I'm just now starting to feel like a grown-up in the academic world. (A junior-league grown-up, but a grown-up nonetheless.)

While I'm enjoying the sensation, however, I'm uncertain about the future. As several others have written recently, there's a moment after you get tenure when the future stretches out in front of you in this long flat featureless ribbon, and you realize that there are no more hoops to jump through. Everything during my academic career has been relatively short-term tasks and rewards: take exams and get a grade; complete an undergraduate program and get a degree; complete a thesis and get an M.A.; complete a dissertation and get a Ph.D.; go through the interview cycle and get a job; publish a book and get tenure. There's always an immediate, measureable goal, and a prize when you get there.

But now what? I am not without goals, but as of now they're entirely of my own devising. Which, when I put it that way, sounds like it ought to be more rewarding. But when you've been trained to jump through clearly defined hoops for twenty years, it's hard to adapt to setting up your own, especially when the prizes aren't as definite, and there's no punishment for failing. For as lovely as the academic life is, it really does rely on a great deal of self-motivation to keep productive. My pride and sense of basic decency will keep me going for a while yet, I imagine, but it's hard when there are other faculty in my department who make a practice of being so incompetent that no one will give them any jobs to do, and they coast along making a nice salary for virtually no work. Once you get tenure, there are no carrots and no sticks.

What got me thinking about this (again) is the ceremony I attended on campus the other day to recognize people who have been at this institution for recognizably important numbers of years. The five-year folks (including me) got little pins, as did the ten-year folks; the 20- and 30-year survivors got nicer gifts and little speeches about their accomplishments. This is what got me, because after a few dozen names the speeches started to sound more and more alike, except for the few individuals who had clearly made a recognizable impact; of the rest, all the men had a "can-do attitude," and all the women were "unfailingly cheerful." I thought it would be a little depressing to dedicate thirty years of your professional life to an institution, especially when that dedication comes mostly from your own internal motivation, only to be rewarded with your life described in three sentences about how cheerful you are.

So my question is: how do I want to be described when I've completed thirty years here (or wherever)? That's a very scary question, but I like it as a way to figure out what to aim for. The conference experience has me all warm and happy right now, but "she impressed a few people at a conference once" is not going to hold up for a description of my career. I have no answers yet, but I'll share the question: what do you want your three sentences to say?

Isolation

One of the things people criticize about Modern Society is our lack of community. People move far away from their families; they live in suburbs where they never get to know their neighbors; they lose the tight interconnected circles that used to bind us all together. That loss can also be perceived as freedom, and I’ve never personally minded it much… except when people die.

It’s so hard to know how to grieve when you lose someone who lived far away.

A week or so ago, a friend of mine in Midwestern City was struck by a car as she crossed the street. Badly injured, she fell into a coma, and last night she was taken off life support and died within minutes.

Usually in human communities we gather together at the time of a death; we bring food and drink and tell stories. We comfort each other, and we chip in to do whatever tasks need to be done. But here I am a thousand miles away from the people who knew my friend. Nobody in this city ever met her; there’s no one here to share memories with. It’s been a few years since I’ve seen her (I’m startled to realize how many; it didn’t feel like long), so that even if I were there, I wouldn’t know most of the friends she has now; the circle of friends we shared several years ago has itself divided and moved on.

I’ll call her Dancing Woman, because my favorite memory of her is from a goofy little Irish bar in Midwestern City. My brother was performing that night, and I joined him on stage to sing a few duets. We loved to do unbearably cheesy Everly Brothers kinds of songs (I sing a mean Everly Brother) and that night when we sang “Dream” (I can make you mine, taste your lips of wine, anytime night or day), I saw her dancing, eyes closed, huge silly smile on her face, swaying her hips in happy abandon to the music. It made me so happy, to see her enjoyment and to have inspired it.

Dancing Woman was one of the most beautiful women I’ve ever met; she could charm your socks off, but she was also tough as nails and took no shit from nobody. She was street smart more than book smart, though the streets weren’t always easy, and she struggled to make ends meet as a single mother. But she was always fierce and determined and strong, and she could always make you smile, and she was always ready to dance.

These are the kinds of things I wish I could share with her friends, in the kind of laughing-crying-drinking-singing wake she would have loved. But I’m here, and drinking and crying alone just isn’t as satisfying. All I could do last night was to walk out into the thunderstorm raging over our neighborhood, admire the turbulent sky, pour some wine into the rain as a libation, and silently wish her well.

Colorful language

Squadratomagico asked about the synesthesia (#15 of the previous post) a while ago, and I thought that would be fun to write about, now that people seem to have heard of it enough to think I’m not totally psycho. For those of you who haven’t, it’s a neurological condition that makes some of your senses overlap; in my case, I have “grapheme-color synesthesia,” which means that letters and numbers have distinct colors. I think I suspected for a long time that not everybody saw the world this way; once in a while I’d mention how somebody’s name clashed or how nice it was that their address was the same color as their house, and I’d get weird looks. So I just quit saying things like that, and didn’t think about it much.

I’ve known what to call it since a couple of years ago when I read an article in Smithsonian about it, and thought – OH! – you mean not everybody sees words in color? Cool. I think it happens in about 2% of the population, and different people have it in different forms – for some people, sounds have a distinct color, or colors are associated with smells and even distances, or whatever other combination you can come up with. Those all sound pretty bizarre to me, except of course for my version - of course words have color! How could they not?

I didn’t really talk this out with anyone until a few months ago, when I mentioned it to my talented artistic (and very color-oriented) sister, who did indeed think I was nuts. She asked me a bunch of really interesting questions about it, though, which helped me be more aware of the “rules” of how it worked. For example, each letter and number has a particular color; the color of a word is determined most by the word’s first letter, though vowels tend to make it lighter or darker: an ‘a’ will add a reddish-orange glow; ‘i’ adds a reflective whitish/silver tint; an ‘e’ tends to thin the dominant color, like adding water to paint, and so on. It’s the letter itself and not the pronunciation that matters, so a ‘c’ is sand-colored whether it’s hard or soft.

Wow – I’ve just looked this up for the first time on wikipedia, and people seem to know a lot more about it now than they did a few years ago. (Must be the brain weirdness of choice these days.) One cool thing the entry says is that while individual grapheme-color synesthetes don’t always agree on the same colors, there are some common patterns, such as A being likely to be red. What’s surprising is when I read other people’s accounts and they differ – A is indeed red, but another person reports that S is red, C is yellow, and J is yellow-green. Is this person crazy? That to me is like insisting that the sun is blue. How can S be red? S is beige, and thinking of it as red is just… really disturbingly wrong.

One interesting thing ArtSister asked was whether I thought this would work with other alphabets. And that question was the first thing that really made me understand what this looks like to other people. If I imagine Greek or Russian or Japanese, why, they’re just lines and shapes on paper! How the heck could anybody associate color with that? …Oh. So I guess it’s just the Roman alphabet with me, though I wonder if I really learned another alphabet, whether it would carry over. And it works with the Roman alphabet across different languages, whether or not I understand the word.

Aren’t brains interesting things? I guess if I’m going to have wires crossed in mine, this is a good way to do it; it certainly doesn’t do any damage. The only thing is that I get confused with centuries… for me it’s weird to say that a certain event happened in the 1500s but also in the 16th century, because I remember dates by color, and “1500s” is orangey, while “16” is a dark matte blue. I’ll learn that the Battle of Lepanto happened in an orange time, but when I try to remember it later, that doesn’t tell me if it was the 1500s or the 15th century.

And none of this means I’m artistic or any good at all with color; I can listen to my sister talk about color wheels and values and saturation (and see all of these things in her work), and I don’t begin to comprehend any of it; that’s a whole different language. All I can tell you is what color the word “color” is.

Random paragraphs of crap

Topic the first: I just got an email from my sister, with an update on the still-fascinating chicken question. She writes:

I brought up the chicken question to some friends for cheap conversation, and they immediately reminded me of the scene in Rocky 1 where Rocky was supposed to get in shape by chasing a chicken. When he could catch it, he was ready to go into the ring. So either the chicken thief was preparing to start a life as a lady boxer, or I need new friends.

I think we should definitely incorporate the boxing idea into our analysis. And there must be a good title in there somewhere as well: "Rocky XVIII: The Chicken Thief."

Topic the second: I've posted on this before, but it happens every semester, and it never ceases to amaze me. I'm the faculty adviser to an honors society, and every semester I look over the transcripts of interested students to see if they're eligible. And I have to ask you this: if you were a student in your second year of college, and you weren't doing very well (Ds in some fairly easy classes, and a rather grim GPA overall), and - most importantly - if you were taking your FIRST EVER basketweaving class, why, why, would you indicate your interest in an honors organization for which you are only eligible if you have twelve hours of basketweaving credit and a 3.1 GPA? Are you mad?

Topic the third: I had something else funny to share here, but I got so fussed up again over that previous one that I forgot what it was. Sheesh.

Watch out for them dogs

In the category of "this must be shared with the blogosphere":

I'm doing some reading on the origins of physiognomy, the practice of interpreting people's faces to understand their character. (You know how it goes - a strong jaw indicates courage, little beady eyes mean you're greedy, and so forth.) Apparently there are physiognomical treatises in Hebrew, Sanskrit, and Chinese traditions going back thousands of years... but the oldest evidence comes from cuneiform tablets in ancient Mesopotamia, which include the following gem:

"If a man with a contorted face has a prominent right eye, far from his home dogs will eat him."

Dang, that's pretty specific.

Calling all chicken thieves

Get ready, guys, here comes a serious academic post. (Can you believe I originally meant this to be an academic blog? I did, but then everybody started getting in trouble or fired for their blogs, and I chickened out.)

Ha! What a great segue! Speaking of chickens, that's my question. A student of mine (we'll call her Clever Shy Girl) is working on a great project related to gender and crime in the 18th century, and among other things she has a list of cases of people stealing animals (horses, sheep, pheasants, rabbits, you name it). Mostly just one animal is stolen, or a few easily herdable animals, like sheep. But in a few cases, a single person is accused of having stolen chickens - lots of chickens, in one case a few dozen chickens.

Initially CSG just plugged this information into the database with everything else and worked on figuring out the patterns of who was stealing what from whom... but then as we talked about people's reasons for stealing animals (to sell? to eat?) we started to do more imagining about how those thefts would actually have worked, and we began to wonder: how does one person steal a whole bunch of chickens? These were live chickens, and I can imagine one person carrying two chickens, or maybe four or five in a sack, but twenty or thirty chickens? How do you do that? You'd have to at least have crates, and then some sort of small cart, and even then it seems like a pretty messy and complicated endeavor.

CSG and I are both city girls, with little experience in the ways of chickens, so I called my sister. Art Sister doesn't have chickens, but she lives in a small town and works part-time for the county extension office, so I figured she must know somebody who knows about chickens. She confirmed that it's virtually impossible to carry more than one chicken at a time, but didn't know more than that. I asked her: "Surely you know someone who raises chickens?" and she said "Well, yes, I do, but I am NOT going to call them up and tell them that my sister wants to know how to steal chickens."

My sister does not have the proper adventurous spirit necessary for academic pursuits.

So I turn to you: some of you are historians, and some of you are rural, and all of you are good creative adventurous thinkers. Give me a brainstorm on this one: if you were suddenly taken with the desire to go out and steal say twenty or thirty chickens, given the ordinary tools and resources available to a relatively poor person in the 18th century, how would you go about it?

Cats on a bus*

I had a series of the weirdest dreams last night. All of them began with a setup perfect for the typical anxiety dream: explaining something to a roomful of students and having all the equipment backfire; needing to get to a meeting and not being able to find the room... but in each case, somehow the problem turned around into a situation that worked. They were like anti-anxiety dreams.

The weirdest by far was the dream in which LWI and I got on a New York City bus... with our two cats. What could be better for an anxiety dream than taking your high-strung cats on a city bus full of people? I remember all the possibilities flashing through my mind - people complaining about the cats, OneCat freaking out and biting someone, or bolting out the door at any given stop, or TwoCat wandering off to sleep inside someone's bag and getting unknowingly carted away. (Of course they weren't even in carriers; they were just walking along with us.) Not only that, but at some point the dream came to include a third cat (who fortunately bore a much closer resemblance to mellow TwoCat than hyper OneCat). This complicated things in that two people might have a chance at carrying around two cats, but not three; not only that, but for half the dream I couldn't quite remember ThreeCat's name, which introduced an odd element of guilt. (When I did remember, it was Laurel, which was just as odd.) At one point I had the clear idea that the bus went in a big loop and would come back home in about an hour, so all we had to do was try desperately to keep them under control for an hour and everything would be okay. (Famous last words, right? and besides, what the hell were we doing going on a one-hour circular joyride on a bus with cats?) Some part of my brain was conscious enough to foresee this becoming serious trouble.

But. All we had to do was to store TwoCat on the luggage rack over our heads, where he curled up in a comfortable ball and napped, and put OneCat in a window seat, where he happily watched the world go by. Magically, we found we'd remembered to bring food and water for them, so they snacked along the way. The bus took us to a cool little park outside the city, where we all got out and played for a while (both cats comporting themselves like well-behaved children, not wandering too far off), and then the dream ended when we decided to go back home before it got dark, knowing that the bus ride wouldn't be any problem.

Throughout the whole dream there was this little frisson of anxiety about all the things that could (and rightfully should have) gone wrong, but it all turned out beautifully well. WTF? Dreams don't usually work like that. What does it mean when instead of chaos, I dream that things are more under control than they could ever possibly be?

*(sort of my odd subconscious equivalent of Snakes on a Plane, I suppose...)

Random bits of my day

I was chopping up mushrooms and peppers and garlic for a lasagne this afternoon, and one thing a dear friend of mine taught me is that the key to lasagne (or any other tomato-pasta combination, for that matter) is a little squish of anchovy paste. (Mmmmmmm... anchovies.) I'm sure we had an unopened tube of anchovy paste somewhere, because I kept running into it in the pantry when I was looking for other things. Let's see... not behind the black beans, not behind the miso soup... aha! There it is.

I wonder how long it's been there? We went through a phase of using the stuff all the time, but then we kind of forgot about it and it's been a while. Does anchovy paste expire? How would one know?

The box had no expiration date, and when I took out the tube inside, it didn't either. Hmm. Well, it can't have been there all that long; let's see how it smells. So I took off the cap and punctured the little foil seal across the mouth of the tube...

...and oh-so-very-expired foul brown anchovy paste sprayed several feet across the room. Fortunately none of it landed in the lasagne. So much for no expiration dates.

On the other hand. There's a conference coming up this spring that I'm excited about, and it's being held in a rather more posh hotel than this organization usually books, so I'd definitely like to share a room. Previously I've either stayed by myself or the LWI has come along, so I don't have a regular conference roommate among this particular group.

There's one person I was thinking of asking, because I know her husband hates these things and doesn't tag along, so she might be scouting for a roomie. But she's a Big Name Academic and probably has plenty of her own friends and would be merely amused by my pathetic offer, right?

Just a few minutes ago, she emailed me asking if I'd be interested in sharing a room. I am positively giddy in a Sally Field they-really-like-me! sort of way. I know, it's just a conference hotel, we're not going to be Best Friends Forever or exchange little woven bracelets or anything. But I'm still pleased to be hanging out with the cool kids. Beats cleaning anchovy paste off the cabinets.