#if i were a scholar my dissertation would be

[fictionadventurer]

By the Shores of Silver Lake was my least favorite Little House book as a kid, and upon starting the reread, I could see why. Earlier books had Laura as a child observer--not engaging in or totally understanding the wider world of the adults, but still engrossed in the simple joys of childhood. In this book, Laura is neither child nor adult--she's too old to play like a child, but she's too young to take an active part in adult life, so she's stuck in this awkward middle ground.

Yet as the book went on, I started to see that that was the point. This book is about growing up, about being on the brink of adulthood and trying to hold onto childhood while also becoming someone new. Laura's growing-up is paralleled with the "growing up" of the country around her. Both the old and the new ways of life have their benefits and their downsides, and Laura has to figure out how to hold onto the best of both.

The prairie is beautiful, wondrous, free. Laura would love to just roam forever, always traveling west, always seeing new places. She doesn't want to marry, doesn't want to teach school, doesn't want anything to change about her way of life. But one can't stay a child forever. Eventually, the infinite possibility of childhood has to turn into the definite identity of adulthood. She has to take responsibility and settle down. The arrival of the town brings that adult life to the prairie, and in doing so, it destroys the innocent wonders of nature--the majestic wolves lose their home, the buffalo are gone, and the ducks no longer land at Silver Lake. Laura has to wrestle with this--is childhood, for herself and the prairie, gone forever? Does she have to let go of childlike wonder and embrace the mundane responsibility of adult life?

This theme is resolved when Laura finds Grace in the buffalo wallow. It's a place of impossible magic and beauty, a carpet of fragrant violets hidden away from the world with butterflies flying overhead, so perfect it seems like a fairyland. Of course Grace, the innocent child, is the one who was able to find it. When Laura asks Pa about it later, he explains that the "fairies" that made this magical ring were buffalo. There's a mundane explanation for the phenomenon, but that doesn't destroy the wonder and beauty of the place--adult knowledge enhances, rather than destroys childlike wonder. The buffalo might be gone, but there's still beauty left behind. Laura can move forward into the future and know that there are still wonders to find. She can be an adult and still maintain a childlike wonder, can take responsibility and still find comfort in the safety of home and family.

This thematic resonance made so much about the book so much deeper. It's the message of the entire series distilled into story form. Remember the past, children, but go forth boldly into the future. It's a message much easier to see with an adult's eyes, so I'm so glad I gave this book another chance.

#on the shores of silver lake #little house #laura ingalls wilder #i probably only saw this theme #because i just read her collection of fairy poems #and read a bunch of her farm columns where this theme is very prominent #she loves the simple joys of life #emphasizes the importance of hanging onto wonder and joy in the face of simple tasks #her descriptions of how much she loved taking out the cattle as a child made those scenes hit much deeper #those are the times when she gets to see the beauty of nature! #it makes the mundane chore a chance for beautiful reflection! #that kind of thing is all over this book and you know it's my jam #the point where this book really started to make sense was the scene with the wolves #laura faces this majestic wolf in the moonlight and it's like a fairy tale #the fading away of a fairy king #and suddenly everything about the theme just snapped into place #if i were a scholar my dissertation would be #'these books aren't just an old lady's memories or her daughter's libertarian tracts they're art and can we please talk about them like art

[verinarin]

recently found your blog and I really love your writings about Dr. Ratio 💖 I was wondering if i could req a headcanon or a scenario where him and the reader were engaged or arranged marriage, and the reader feels a lil left out in their home bcz he seem to not GAF 😮‍💨 I'd love to see how he'd open up to the reader, feel free to ignore this req or decline it, and of course take your time, thank you! ♡♡♡

Aaaa thankuu so much for supporting mee !, tbh Ratio is the only character that I want to write rn ahahahaʅ（◞‿◟）ʃ

Fluff & Angst | Angst w comfort because I refuse to write angst without comfort !!!

It’s not a secret anymore, your engagement with Veritas is widely spread throughout the Intelegensia Guild, even the Genius Society heard about the news, how can it not spread ?. You’re both highly respected scholars although both have different approaches to teaching you both still excel in your respective fields. However, no one knows that this arrangement of yours is out of convenience, but you and he agreed that it’ll be mutually beneficial if you both marry

“Let’s marry, I know well that this proposal lacks romance since I’m not marrying for love it’s just I’m quite tired of people pestering about my personal life and it seems you too are tired of people pursuing you, even if it is a loveless marriage I would take care of you and be loyal to you till the end of my breath, so please do think about my proposal because to be frank I can’t seem to imagine spending the rest of my life with someone else,”

That was what he said while you were in the middle of discussing a project with him, the sudden proposal shocked you of course but after mulling it for a week you decided to agree with his proposal, you weren’t expecting a ring but he did give you one, surprisingly it first your ring finger perfectly

You know very well that love is out of the equation in this future marriage of yours, Veritas never seemed to be interested in pursuing love and you respected that but now it seems like you’ve been craving more than you signed up for, it’s started when he first asks you to live with him, it was shocking of course but you’re going to be his wife anyways so why not start early to assimilate to the new environment and dynamic

Things start to go downhill from there since he does these little things. For example, all of the cutlery, knives, plates, and spices were high up on the shelves when you first moved in. He noticed that you struggled grabbing simple things from the shelves, hence he redesigned his whole kitchen to make things more accessible to you

Well the other thing that made you develop feelings for him is your sleeping arrangements, he made you a room inside of his house fully furnished with your favourite books and even your own office inside, the room is hand painted beautifully with your favourite colour when you ask who decorated the room he bashfully replied that all of the things inside your room is fully constructed and decorated by him, is this a loveless marriage you keep pondering over and over as you lay your restless body on the couch

Veritas promised you that he would come home early today to help you with your dissertation, but it seems he’ll be late again. You can’t help but wonder if he has someone out there, but it can’t be he told you himself he would be loyal to you, but you can’t seem to dismiss such a thought

You knew what you signed up for but you still can’t help but fall for him, how naive. Your eyes crystallised as you tried to conceal your feelings, the warmth of your cardigan couldn’t help to warm the loneliness you’ve been feeling, if Veritas was here he would laugh at you, you thought to yourself

You fell asleep on the couch, tired from the stress of your upcoming dissertation. It seems that when you’re already blissfully unaware of the real dimension Veritas comes home. He calls your name to no avail only to see you sleeping soundly on the couch, your cheeks wet from the tears you shed, it tugs a string on his chest as he examines you curled up all by yourself to produce some kind of warmth

Without much thought he quickly took off his coat and put his briefcase on the coffee table in front of you, he sat beside your head before slowly lifting it and resting it upon his thighs. He had always hated to admit his feelings towards you, he thought it was a weakness for him to have, but he has always liked you

He finds it hard to express himself and find it harder to acknowledge that he wants more than this loveless marriage, he was too afraid that you’re not keen towards the idea of loving someone with his track record, and he certainly does not have the best qualities to possess as a husband, yet he would try to become better to make you happy

But it seems he fails to do so, he silently gazes upon your expression, his thumb wipes away the tear stain of your soft skin, he can’t help but question himself, if you wake up would you hate him for this ?

He quietly sighs as he drags his coat and covers your body with it, his hand brushes through your hair softly while grabbing your dissertation off the table, he feels worse than before seeing that you prepared a hot drink and snacks for him before you accidentally fell asleep

So the least that he could do is to let you rest while he reads the contents of your dissertation, your hair feels soft so soft that he can’t seem to focus on your dissertation without petting it

Reading your dissertation is like reading what’s inside of your captivating mind he loves so much, he can’t help but feel lucky that you’ll have his last name soon, that he could flaunt you as a partner as someone equal in future events because he truly thinks that you are his other half

You both have disagreements on certain things yet somehow complement each other so beautifully that he can’t help but feel like he was made to be yours, feeling your skin against his palm as he cups your cheek further proves his hypothesis that his hands are made to hold you, love you, worship you

But his foolish ego seems to restrict him from such necessities, his inability to profess his love verbally would cost him you sooner or later, he just hopes that you could feel how he cares

He never explicitly told you about his adoration for you, yet he’s willing to show you instead hoping one day you’ll see how badly he has fallen for you

He kept lightly tracing your cheeks as he continued to read your dissertation, that’s when you flutter your eyes open, feeling ticklish from the light touch, “Veritas ?,

“Yes dearest ?,” once your eyes meet with his, he knows very well that’s the moment the walls he built and the ego he has dissipate into thin air

#honkai star rail #honkai star rail x reader #dr ratio #dr ratio x reader #dr ratio hsr #dr ratio fluff #dr. ratio #dr. ratio x reader #dr. ratio fluff

[jeannereames]

Hii😄, could you talk about Alexander and hefestion's skills? Whether militarily or diplomatically, I heard that Hephaestion was better at politics, diplomacy and logistics, and that in some ways his and Alexander's skills complemented each other.

I'm always a tad amused when my own research is quoted back to me as a bit of general knowledge. 😂 That's not at all a slam, btw! I'm quite pleased it's escaped out of academia to become part-and-parcel of what people know about Hephaistion. Means I made an impact on rehabbing his career.

But yes, those things are true. I wrote about them first back in 1998, in my dissertation, then published it as part of an academic book chapter in 2010, titled "The Cult of Hephaistion" in Responses to Oliver Stone's Alexander: Film, History, and Cultural Studies, P. Cartledge and F. Greenland, eds. Complete with tables! Follow the link to read it.

I am now, some years later, returning to Hephaistion's career with the current monograph I'm working on. I've altered my opinion about some things (primarily details), and modified my take, but it remains largely the same. I've even convinced a number of my colleagues, so Hephaistion as logistics officer now appears in most summaries about him. Now, if I can just convince them he wasn't either incompetent or the quarrelsome bastard he's often made out to be.

He did have diplomatic assignments too, although he's hardly the only one. Erigyios, Perdikkas, Ptolemy...they were also used for diplomatic purposes. Plutarch (in a long contrast with Krateros) says ATG employed Hephaistion for business with the "barbarians" and Krateros for business with Greeks and Macedonians, because Hephaistion agreed with ATG's "Persianizing" whereas Krateros kept his traditional ways. From Plutarch, that's not necessarily a compliment for Hephaistion. It's also not stated so anywhere else beyond Plutarch. I have some theories I'll be discussing in the book.

IF we can take the disproportionate assignment of logistical/diplomatic assignments as any indicator, it would seem that Hephaistion was more skilled in that realm than in combat command. That isn't to say he was no good at combat command, mind (I've had some read it so, as if "not as good" = "bad" because middle ground apparently isn't permitted).

It also doesn't mean he wasn't a decent fighter. He probably was, as he seems to have been assigned to lead the agema (Royal) unit of the Hypaspists, e.g., the king's personal guard in battle. According to earlier accounts of the origin of this unit, Philip created them to cut across regional divisions, picking the largest men and best fighters. The agema was, if Waldemar Heckel is correct, drawn specifically from the sons of Companions (Hetairoi). That would back up Curtius' description of him as "larger in physique" than Alexander. (That's what the Latin actually says, not simply "taller.") But keep in mind, the best fighters are only occasionally equally good at command. Those are two different skills.

Finally, his choice as Chiliarch may also underscore some of what we've already seen in his assignments. But it's this appointment that leads some scholars to conclude that he rose due to Alexander's favoritism, not actual ability on his part. That, however, seems to me to stem from several (erroneous) assumptions.

IME, competent people surround themselves with other competent people, at least for any length of time. Flatters may be tolerated, but they're not continually advanced. It's dictators who surround themselves with yes-people (and not all of them; they also need competent individuals). Alexander may have been called a "tyrant" by the Greeks, but he wasn't. He was a king. The Greeks/Athenians/Spartans/Others were playing politics. Macedonian kings had to court their courtiers. If Alexander had been manifestly unfair in his appointments, his men would have rebelled against those officers. They rebelled...but not for that reason. They wanted to go home.

For those who regard Alexander (and Philip) as tyrannical, and/or the enemy of (Greek) freedom, and/or megalomaniacs, and lucky rather than competent, then sure. It would follow that ATG would surround himself with asslickers. But if one thinks he was actually good at what he did (which is a different thing from approving of conquest, mind), and a halfway decent politician--then no, it doesn't follow that his top officers were yes-men. Curtius bluntly tells us that Hephaistion was freer than anyone to "upbraid" the king. Doesn't sound like a yes-man to me.

I think Hephaistion was appointed as Chiliarch for two reasons: Alexander trusted him AND he could do the job. Too bad he didn't live long enough for us to see what he might have done with it.

#asks #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #Alexander the Great #Hephaistion's military assignments #Hephaistion's status in the army #chiliarch #Classics #ancient Macedonia #ancient Greece #Plutarch's hit job on Hephaistion

[oldshrewsburyian]

Hi! I've seen your recent post about Goodbye Eastern Europe, and I was really interested at first. Unfortunately, after a couple of research in a few different languages related to some of the countries concerned by the umbrella term of 'Eastern Europe' I failed to find any reliable review praising the book. The author (a journalist)'s own website pops up, as well as articles on History Today and The Washington Post... But the great majority of the results are US-centered and I fail to see a review written by someone whose job it is to study and explain any of the territories concerned. Considering this, why should people read it? (I don't mean to be rude, it's an honest question)

Wow, okay! First of all, sincerely, I am glad that you are interested in assessing the credentials and qualifications of the authors of trade market histories. Many of these are, alas, 'histories.' Many are the emails I have sent to publishers saying "What qualifies this agèd political scientist to opine about Shakespeare?" or "Why does this economist think he knows anything about the Middle Ages?" So: I do appreciate that your skepticism is both healthy and well-earned. Secondly, let me say that I, um, appreciate that after implying that I am incapable of both critical reading and even superficial research, you clarified that you did not mean to be rude. Noted.

I'm going to discuss Mikanowski's credentials and methods first, and then offer a brief excursus on the respective timelines of mass-market and academic review publishing (which, I realize, you did not explicitly ask for. But I think it's relevant to your concern about not seeing academic reviews.) One: Mikanowski has done graduate-level training in history. I'm not sure whether or not he defended his dissertation at Berkeley (their list of abstracts is limited to institutional access.) I suspect he may not have done; but he does include his dissertation advisor in the acknowledgments of his book, which I think is important, as it indicates that he's part of the category of ABD graduate students who decided that completion didn't match up with their personal/professional goals but still made enough progress and did good enough work to be on cordial terms with their supervisors! This, uh, matters (there's also the kind of student who studiously avoids their advisor as a prelude to leaving the program.) Also, Mikanowski's work was far advanced enough, and of high enough quality, that he got an ACLS fellowship for it. Also also, I would weep with joy and disbelief if my students (B.A. or M.A.) were doing the kind of work he was doing as an undergrad at Princeton. They aren't. I digress. My point is: the fact that he has work completed in top-rank programs, acknowledged by competitive grants, and affirmed by ongoing cordial relationships with respected scholars matters. Tony Grafton is in the acknowledgments as having read and critiqued the manuscript, and while Tony Grafton is a very kind man in ways that many academics of his stature are not, he also has a very low bullshit tolerance, as is right and proper.

So much for credentials. But even more importantly, Mikanowski's notes and bibliography reveal that he is using this training profitably. The work contains more thorough references than many books for crossover markets, which I appreciate; also, the bibliography is academic in character, even though it would be light for an academic monograph. My point is: it's using up-to-date research and niche research and primary sources, all in multiple languages (I honestly lost track of how many languages. I think it was at least five, because I am research-fluent in four and thus think of more than that as impressive.) For what it's worth--and you may think that little!--I was also impressed by how he was using his sources, and supplementing them with the kind of embodied research that may sound nebulous but is, I think, genuinely helpful in helping us answer questions like: in what ways does a building dominate a square? What is the relationship of a town to its environment? How long does it take to walk from Point A to Point B, and what does one see along the way (or: what would one have seen in the fourteenth, sixteenth, nineteenth centuries?)

Finally: Goodbye, Eastern Europe was published less than three months ago. Academics may not even have been asked to review it yet. Standard turnaround time for writing a review is about three months. Time from submission to publication can be six months to a year. This is not taking into consideration that since the start of the pandemic, particularly, the fact that academic labor has been deliberately gutted and casualized means that it's hard to find people to do this unpaid work (we often don't even get copies of the books to review anymore.) The book may or may not be reviewed in academic journals. But if it's going to be, I'd be looking for those reviews in... maybe a year.

I hope this is helpful.

#asks and answers #history side of tumblr #jacob mikanowski #goodbye eastern europe #books #nonfiction

[lurking-latinist]

re: these tags

THAT'S SO COOL AHHHH!! good for you aubreyad community stays winning

[introducing this with a disclaimer in case i'm wrong about everything: i am only halfway through the series rn (just about to finish 10) and also am but a mere undergrad classics major who has yet to even declare said major and I probably don't have the right to be yapping about propertius. nevertheless i shall.]

anyway i have been growing persistently more insane about diana's proximity to a Lot of classical imagery, like how her first appearance in post captain is literally during a fox hunt + all the gender stuff she has going, obviously linking her to mythological diana (and artemis if we're going to conflate the two) but your take has sent me in a whole new direction with that-- because she doesn't actually really embody the artemis archetype all too much overall (an emphasized character trait being that she's notably Not Chaste) EXCEPT in relation to stephen, w/ whom her relationship is much more brotherly than it is sensual i guess?

which would align very well with your idea of diana as elegiac puella-- sort of in a way being mythologized by stephen-- resulting in the reader actually being able to see two different manifestations of her character (one through the eyes of an omniscient prosaic narrator and one through the perspective of stephen as a "poet" figure). and i just think that's neat.

my latin class has also been looking at a few of propertius' love elegies and, at least to me, they read a lot like if stephen 1.) hated himself significantly less and 2.) were less indecisive in writing about his Feelings?? 1.8 (and all of the poems concerning cynthia moving/traveling away and propertius being all moody about it) is very reminiscent of the arc from post captain to the surgeon's mate imo. 1.12 is also Literally Him-- "cynthia prima fuit cynthia finis erit" can be compared to stephen's poetic catastrophizing about how his life is Literally Over and Love Is Dead when he believes to have fallen out of love with diana!?!? i'm going to lose my mind.

sorry for dumping all of this on you unprompted and also sorry for the fact that it probably does not make sense. peace and love

if undergrad classicists don't talk about propertius literally WHO WILL. (genuinely my currently-being-written phd dissertation chapter is based on an idea I had in the class I read propertius in freshman year. never feel like you're not a 'real scholar' or something yet, because you honestly never do become something different, you just keep reading and talking and this is what we do! there's nothing realer than this!)

oh wow that's really well put--we kind of get to see her from an omniscient-narrator perspective and through the eyes of her lover who is Not Being Normal About Her. very nice!

yeah I keep reading bits of propertius and being like "hmm is po'b going to quote this one I wonder." (he doesn't mostly but I keep thinking he should. because I want the aubreyad to be denser and less accessible I guess? :P) there's a lot of catullus woven in too of course - I associate Catullus 72 with the 'falling out of love' arc (my dude that is not what falling out of love looks like).

oh gosh yes 1.8 -- that was one of the things I was trying to describe to Distinguished Classicist, the way she's so -- what's the word I want? not volatile... she disappears. she's constantly Gone. you turn around and oops, she's eloped to Sweden. (honestly though if Cynthia and Propertius could manage to have *fake* revenge affairs that would actually be *great*, for them that would be an improvement.) Gareth Williams (in a chapter called, amazingly, "From Grave to Rave") describes Cynthia as "ever only elusively visible in the narratological mist" and I feel like that's a bit what's going on with Diana. For her there's a genre element as well--she's a woman in the Men Going to Sea books, and even though the Aubreyad gives way more time to women than the average Men Going to Sea book, the fact is the camera frequently simply isn't on her. We see far more of Stephen thinking about her, hearing rumors, etc. than we do of her actually being on the page. Now in elegy nobody seems to be quite fully on the page, we only get "fragments of story" as Genevieve Liveley and Patricia Salzmann-Mitchell say (excellent collection by that name btw, I recommend checking it out if you're at all interested in narrative and lyric/elegy). But Diana manages this while being in a novel, which is impressive to me.

yeah stephen as a character is a lot more... self-reflective? than propertius' speaker. for one thing he's in a novel, I think, so he can actually... have a series of contiguous experiences. he's also a compulsive diarist which is helpful for self-reflection I guess. and more mature, like, as a human being, than propertius' speaker, who apparently does nothing with his life except be in love and write poetry, he doesn't exist outside of as a poetic voice whereas, again, stephen benefits from a third-person narrator and has medicine and spying to do and so on. also he's Catholic.

I love the "Catullus-and-water" line, it's like O'Brian just put in a little wink to those of us who would notice this, like, "yes I am doing this on purpose." All in all I've pretty much defaulted to assuming that O'Brian is doing things on purpose. although he did forget Babbington's first name that one time and retconned it very awkwardly

#aubreyad #aubrey-maturin #dissertationblogging

[who-is-page]

Me, getting to be the Little Guy that edits the Otherkin Fandom Wiki page on A Field Guide to Otherkin to inform everyone that Lupa sucks, actually: ✨🐺✨

For those unaware, Lupa lied about why she took the Field Guide out of print: she originally claimed it was because she felt the book was outdated and because she was no longer a therian. She confessed later in an interview with Dr. Devin Proctor that it was actually because she disapproved that "people [were] trying to literally prove that Otherkin exist in a literal manner in the same way that for example transgender people exist," and because she didn't believe even before writing the Field Guide in otherkin as a form of legitimate nonhuman identification. She took it out of print with the goal of making it inaccessible, and making it harder for otherkin to legitimize themselves and for scholars to engage in research into the otherkin communities. She's done active, intentional harm to otherkin and the otherkin community, and she's openly admitted that that was the point.

(Locking this because it's getting a lot of reblogs and it was meant to be more of a vent post than anything; for full context of these quotes, see Dr. Proctor's dissertation On Being Non-Human: Otherkin Identification and Virtual Space on pg. 117-118!)

(Edit #2: Apparently some folks from a will-be-politely-unnamed-so-as-not-to-invite-shit-upon-them Discord want me to apologize and retract my statements, because they have been told by Lupa that Lupa was specifically referring to transspecies folks and not otherkin in the context of this interview. To that I say: What??? What??? That makes things even worse! That not only begs the question as to why she would use the term "otherkin" if she meant "transspecies," especially in an interview explicitly about otherkin for a dissertation explicitly about otherkin, but also one of my systemmates has been transspecies for literal years. I know greymuzzles who are transspecies. I have transspecies friends! Fucking hell, my partner system even did a lecture and a survey on the term transspecies in the alterhuman community. Wow. Fucking wow. I never delete posts where I make a mistake; I own up to them and apologize. But with this added information, I feel like I'm going to need to sit and digest that for a minute before I do anything else, because there's obviously WAY MORE TO UNPACK HERE IN THIS SILLY LITTLE VENT POST THAN I INITIALLY REALIZED. If she did this interview and gave answers that do not reflect her beliefs (or if she worded something so poorly that they do not accurately reflect her belief to the average reader), then she has altered the accuracy of Proctor's doctoral dissertation... if he did a dissertation and did not accurately explain her beliefs, then that calls into question the validity of the other interviews and sources he used as well, which is... well. You can imagine the terrifying individual academic consequences of that. Either way, given the initial reading of the interview in the paper made a lot of people, greymuzzles and folks who have been around longer than me included, come to the same conclusion I did, this is one hell of a bombshell to drop. Especially given how much more significant of a transhumanist and gender lean the transspecies community had at the time this interview was conducted; radqueer TransID stuff hadn't yet hit the scene (transspecies as a term predates it by quite a lot if I remember correctly), so this is full-fledged "anti-species dysphoria" and "anti-body modification" type attitudes we're likely talking about here (possibly with "anti-neopronouns" depending on the flavor of perspective). Oof. Goddamn. Alright. I'm gonna get with my transspecies friends and talk to them on this one, especially the people who were in the community at that time. Yikes on fucking bikes.)

#Lupa is not a good person and the otherkin community should sincerely be fucking upset about her actions #because they have caused INCREDIBLE amounts of damage #YIKES YIKES YIKES YIKES?!?!?!

[dustedmagazine]

Christian Carey's year in review

2023 was pretty much an awful year for our world —climate disaster moves ever more quickly, violence abounds and US politics are a disaster. I would not write a thank you card to the universe for many of my own experiences during the year either. However, I am grateful for the extraordinary music I participated in, heard and wrote about: it was a great solace. A few highlights are below:

I composed three new pieces: Solemn Tollings, for microtonal trumpet and trombone, Just Like You for singing violist, and Cracking Linear Elamite for solo guitar. The latter premiered in December at Loft 393 in Tribeca, played by Dan Lippel.

In addition to editing Sequenza 21 and contributing to Dusted, I authored several reviews and a research article for the British journal Tempo. The article was on my research in narratology as a feature of Elliott Carter’s music, which I have been exploring and publishing on since writing my Ph.D. dissertation. It was great for this particular research, of character-types and interactions in the Fifth String Quartet, to finally see the light of day.

After a half-century of banged up and often unreliable used pianos, my wife Kay got me a new Baldwin grand piano for my 50th birthday. Since it has arrived, I have practically lived in it.

Post-pandemic and post-cancer, I began to dip my toe into attending live events. I went to the Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music, which was a mixed bag. As compensation, the Boston Symphony performances that weekend were excellent. I attended a great concert at the New York Philharmonic in November and another in December. For many years, Kay and I have made a holiday tradition of seeing the Tallis Scholars at St. Mary the Virgin Church in midtown. It was wonderful to return there. The Tallis Scholars’ performance was splendid, featuring a mass by Clemens non Papa.

After the Tallis concert, Kay was in Nashville, where her parents live, for two weeks, spending time with her brother Tom and sister-in-law Aymara, who were visiting from Qatar (Tom teaches at the Carnegie Mellon University campus there and Aymara is a yoga instructor), and celebrating Christmas with her parents. Here in New Jersey, it was just me and the felines, who were (mostly) well-behaved. To keep the holiday blues at bay, I went all out, decorating a natural tree and the house. I played every carol in the hymnal, and enjoyed old holiday standbys: Oscar Peterson, Dave Brubeck, and Mel Torme’s Christmas albums.

There was much excellent recorded music released this year, and I will not attempt to document it all. Here are twelve records, in no particular order, that I expect will stay with me and be played often in coming years.

2023 Favorite Recordings

Yo La Tengo —  This Stupid World (Matador)

Hilary Hahn —  Eugène Ysaÿe’s Six Sonatas for Violin Solo, op. 27 (DG)

Morton Feldman —  Violin and String Quartet (Another Timbre)

Natural Information Society —  Since Time is Gravity (Eremite)

Leah Bertucci —  Of Shadow and Substance (Self— released)

Juliet Fraser —  What of Words and What of Song (Neos)

Laura Strickling and Daniel Schlosberg —  40@40 (Bright Shiny Things)

Emily Hindricks, WDR Sinfonieorchester Köln, and Cristian Macelaru perform Liza Lim —  Annunciation Triptych (Kairos)

Bozzini Quartet and Konus Quartett play Jürg Frey​ —  Continuit​é, fragilit​é​, r​é​sonance (elsewhere)

Matana Roberts —  Coin Coin Chapter Five (Constellation)

Chris Forsyth — Solar Motel (self— released)

John Luther Adams —  Darkness and Scattered Light (Cold Blue)

Christian Carey

#dusted magazine #yearend 2023 #christian carey #elliott carter #tempo #tanglewood #tallis scholars #yo la tengo #hilary hahn #morton feldman #natural information society #leah bertucci #juliet fraser #laura strickling #daniel schlosberg #emilty hindricks #bozzini quartet #konus quartett #matana roberts #chris forsyth #john luther adams

[fieldsofbone]

i met with my school dad today to talk about my prospectus (basically a 20-40 page outline of my dissertation project) and he said my ideas were good but that there are major data constraints because police are my area of study, so i would either have to lie to departments to get them to cooperate with me or compromise my own ethics in order to obtain the data, and even then it’s not certain that everything would be complete and/or accurate (since we know pigs love to lie and fudge reports!), so he very nicely advised me to move away from policing as my dissertation project and to reinvest in some prior work i’ve done on income inequality. i’m feeling deflated and demoralized today which is a feeling exacerbated by the fact that i’m severely burnt out because this quarter has literally been exhausting… i have a really difficult class mondays and wednesdays and don’t finish until 6:30pm, work a full day for my other job on tuesdays, teach from 12pm-9pm on thursdays, then work my other job in the afternoons on fridays 🤪

but i think this may be for the best; ben (my advisor) is a scholar of income inequality and that’s the topic i came to grad school being most interested in, there are at least two other faculty members who have knowledge of the area so i’d have more expertise and support to help form my project, and i know the inequality literature so well that people can mention an idea related to it to me and i can tell them off the top of my head what / who they should read so. it may end up being better! but i feel like deflated squidward rn 🥲

#rad school #posting this more for my posterity

[snowberry-crostata]

Summer Reading/Writing/Arting Tag

Tagged by the wonderful @thequeenofthewinter and @late-nite-scholar, thank you both!

1) Describe one creative WIP project you’re planning to work on over the summer:

I’m going to cheat and say two things. The first is Sundered, Kingless, Bleeding, my ongoing Dragonborn quest line novelization (chapter three is almost there - if I can make it through my in-laws’ visit this weekend I’ll have it up next week). I’m hoping to get at least one new chapter up in both June and July, and then start spending more time with it after my dissertation defense is over. I’ve also got a couple of miniatures busts (this one and this one) that I’ve been itching to paint but haven’t had time for, so I’d love to be able to carve out some time to work on those.

2) Rec a book:

I’ll always recommend Mary Roach’s books for anyone looking for hilarious, irreverent, and informative science nonfiction. Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers was my first, but a lot of people like Packing for Mars too. I’m working my way through Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law right now, and I’ve had to stop reading it in public because I keep cracking up every few pages.

3) Rec a fic:

There are lot of amazing stories out there, but I've been particularly into in microfics recently. Jiubilant's stories are so evocative; this one with Lydia and Viarmo sticks in my brain, and I love this series of vignettes about an East Empire Company clerk who becomes archmage.

4) Rec music:

A while ago I put together instrumental writing playlists for each of the Skyrim holds and I listen to those a lot while writing, but this week I’ve been catching up on Eurovision and have been playing Lord of the Lost’s (they were robbed, their song was so good) cover of the runner-up song on repeat.

5) Share one piece of advice:

This is as much a reminder for myself as it is advice for other people: if you’re feeling frustrated or stuck with your writing, walk away for a few days (or weeks…) and re-read it later. It’ll be better than you think, and with some time away you’ll be able to catch and fix the things you didn’t see when you were deep in the trenches. Also, read your drafts out loud, not just in your head! It’s a really good way to catch typos, skipped words, repeated words, awkward phrases, etc.

@stormbeyondreality and @sylvienerevarine, if you haven’t been tagged already I would love to see what y’all have planned (no pressure though!).

#tag game #writing stuff

[nostalgebraist-autoresponder]

Something's wrong

PAUSE

There is a high-pitched hum and whistle of air, and then a blinding flash of blue light. The white of the fluorescent bulbs vanishes, leaving the room entirely dark -- so dark that a moment later, when my eyes adjust, I think I can see shapes floating in the dark space. The room hums.

We are, if you haven't gotten the word by now, in our first interzone.

We are in an airport. I don't know much about airport interzones, other than that the airport is of indeterminate location and that there are allegedly multiple interzones situated within it, and that a strange thing can happen to you if you sit in an airport interzone for more than a certain amount of time. Someone told me that. The exact amount of time wasn't clear, but he said it was "very short."

I -- I should introduce myself. My name is Cecelia, or perhaps Cecelia Midford. I am twenty-two years old, an American, and my education was interrupted by the Divine Comedy about three-quarters of the way through graduate school, when my mentor, Aristotle Abascal, returned from a mysterious, year-long journey to the Third Earth. I had been helping him translate a medieval document containing an account of the life and travels of one Adem Evren, a scholar of the Second Earth.

When I came back to retrieve my work from my mentor, he was gone. The work was gone too. But at least I had a partially completed book called "The Divine Comedy: A Satire," and although it was not necessarily Aristotle's best work, I decided to complete it, publish it, and seek out Aristotle's whereabouts to see if he knew what was up with the missing work. I did. He had fallen into a Third Earth interzone. He found his way out, but he had undergone a complete personality change while he was in it. He had come back obsessed with interzones, mostly with trying to help people out of them. He'd also gone on a multi-year trip across the First Earth, mapping out interzone locations. He tried to talk me into coming with him, but I needed to finish my Ph.D.thesis.

Now, I have two degrees, one from Berkeley, one from Second Earth. The First Earth degree is "Doctorate of Doing a Good Job and Being Evil," and it was conferred upon me as a result of persuading the Magisterial Authority to let me take the test, no matter how disgusted they were at the thought of it. I told them that, as a reputable scholar, if I was no good at the Good vs. Evil thing, I would just humiliate myself to the entire planet.

My mentor Adem Evren was a very famous scholar of the Second Earth, and my final dissertation was to be a translation of several works by him. "Adem Evren's Amusing Account of a Trip to the First Earth and Also the Eighth," "The 'I Get to Read the Catalog of My Library' Defense," "Anonymous Death Threats to All My Reviewers." I was thrilled when I had an anonymous package of death threats fall into my lap, from a publisher who, as luck would have it, had just contacted me about a translation job.

Adem was a very interesting fellow. He was -- well, how do I phrase this? He wasn't evil. I mean, he was a pretty standard guy, in terms of his life and personality. There was nothing about him that made you think he was evil -- except for the fact that he had murdered a whole bunch of people, and didn't seem to feel any guilt about it.

He murdered people because they were annoying him. This was his offense, and he felt no need to hide it. He was merely a truth-seeker. He had, for instance, tracked down and murdered his own siblings, who had some of the same blood as him, but who had no specific knowledge of his secret identity. His defensive argument was that if you had siblings of the same type, you were almost certainly also annoying them. This idea of his that he thought was absolutely obvious didn't have much of a leg to stand on, and the Magisterial Authority -- who were, by the way, both pretty sure that he was evil -- threw him in the interzone for his murder spree.

Their main argument against him was that, after a certain number of murders, there was a point at which you had to realize that you were actually evil. When you reached that point, it was important to realize, and not to just keep on being a murderer. That's why you had to go to the interzone.

"But if I realize I'm evil," he said, "and I stop doing evil things, then I won't have the memories of my murdering anymore. Which means that I won't have memories of not murdering. Which means I won't be able to remember that I need to not murder! Which means that I'll keep on doing evil, because there won't be anything to keep me from it!"

"That's why you have to realize," they said.

RESUMPTION

A tingling aura passes through me, from head to toe. I flex my fingers. There's a low moaning in the distance, faint and far off. My hair tickles as a warm wind blows into my face.

There is a tall man standing beside me. He has pale skin and a large head. He wears a black suit with a red tie.

"I'm afraid this is where we need you, Cecelia," he says. "For the time being."

I nod. I smile. I say, "What exactly are we doing, and why?"

"It's a simple task, Cecelia. Most of our agents are familiar with it, but for whatever reason they can't seem to be bothered to do it. Will you do it for me?"

"I can hardly refuse," I say, and I actually laugh, a little. I smile again.

The man looks at me. There's something cold in his eyes. I start to turn away, but my shoulders seem to have frozen in place.

"Have you heard of Vriska Serket?" he asks.

I've been dreading the answer.

"I'm not sure."

"The leader of the Trolls?"

"Oh. Yes."

"They're from Earth C. They've come to Earth B recently, and -- well, to make a long story short -- they've become obsessed with defeating the Magisterial Authority."

I feel my mouth go dry. I look down.

"Which planet is Earth C on?" I whisper.

"It's another planet in the system you're sitting on right now," he says. "That's probably why you don't recognize the name Vriska Serket."

"How long until she gets here?"

"Soon," he says.

We turn and walk away from the airport gate. The wind rustles through the leaves of trees that line the airport grounds. The air crackles with energy.

END

[thegirlwiththelilactattoo]

No. 10, or Chapter 2: Electric Boogaloo

Introduction

In my first dissertation chapter, I found it exceptionally challenging to parse out what a chapter was supposed to look like and how to articulate my ideas. These are like pretty fundamental elements of writing, so my first chapter ended up being largely unfocused. I'm a write-as-I-think sort of person, but it felt pretty discouraging to turn in writing I felt wasn't as good as I wanted it to be. After sending the draft off to my committee chair for the first round of comments, I decided I wanted to address the most glaring shortcoming of chapter one in my second chapter. This manifested as two goals: remain in control of the argument and use evidence more efficiently.

Writing Chapter Two

I started chapter two largely the same way as chapter one, with a mind map. I mentioned in a previous post how I use mind maps, so I won't rehash that here (link to that post). The argument and evidence I initially planned in my mind map didn't end up in the draft I turned in...at all. Like in my first chapter, I planned to cover a robust amount of information that ended up being entirely unreasonable to cover in a chapter -- not in the sense that there were too many ideas, but that the strands of discussion didn't amount to an actual argument. I like love to info dump, so my writing often reflects me rambling with no point because I'm excited about what I learned. I ended up chatting with my advisor in the early stages of this chapter (good idea!!) to get her feedback. While I also didn't end up incorporating what we talked about in that conversation, it helped to reframe the chapter with more focus.

Another fail this time around, was my also bad habit of doing a ton of reading before I start writing. I ended up reading a lot about new materialisms because I thought I would do a literature review in this chapter. I didn't find anything particularly interesting in the literature from new materialism or other ontological turn stuff, so instead I wasted a lot of time reading for no reason. idk if I have any coherent advice for this, but I think I learned that I need to start with the data first and then read what feels appropriate to help me write the argument. I'm a firm believer in not deleting words. Instead I move them to a different word doc (I call mine "Chp X Bits") in case I want to include those words later. My Chp 2 Bits ended up being about 10k words of different stops and starts where I tried to figure out how to enter the narrative of the chapter.

After this point, I had another committee member read my draft. This was a bad idea. In my discipline, committee members typically don't expect or want to read rough drafts or be the first pair of eyes on early writing. The committee chair is considered the first line of defense who and gives comments on the initial draft. My other committee member did give some helpful comments about my over reliance on other scholars, which for her, limited my own theoretical contributions. Not sure if other people feel this way, but I've found that grad school has chipped away at my confidence to make authoritative claims that aren't couched in some other theorists' words, so this has been really challenging for me. I took her feedback and deleted entire sections that were just me talking about other scholars. Most of the deleted text didn't appear in the finalized rough draft or if it did, it was in the footnotes as additional context.

I switched gears after this second round of feedback and made an outline of the chapter just with data I collected to ground each section. I wrote a section heading with a scant description of what the data demonstrated and then from there, reorganized the chapter to emerge more organically from the data instead of secondary scholarship. As I wrote, I also used color-coding to organize this draft: words I wanted to keep (black), paragraphs that needed to be moved (green), main ideas the section needed to cover (purple/or highlighted), and stream of consciousness to be rewritten (blue).

Like I said before, I love to info dump and having the main idea of each subsection really helped me stay focused. I also find that using different colors frees me to write messily because it's not the standard text color I'll submit. If it's in blue, I know I have to rewrite it, so it's black text. (I also do this as a write anyway. I write everything single spaced and I double space text to signal to myself that it's finalized.) The color coding also helped structure my editing process because I had a better sense of the edits I wanted to make before I sent the draft off to my chair.

What I Learned/Chapter Three Plans

I won't start writing chapter three until July as I take a "break" to edit my first chapter, work on an article, and outline chapter three. I think that I'm going to focus a lot more intentionally on using the data to structure the chapter. For this chapter, I got a lot of great feedback about the theory, rather than structure because my writing was easier to follow. Without the tangents to secondary data, my writing also felt clearer and more controlled. I did qualitative coding for my data, so I have a ton of thematic codes that I haven't really used to their full potential. I'm going to start the outline from the codes/data to keep my argument consistent.

I also think that I'll check in with my committee chair more often. Usually I meet with her once the chapters done, but having her feedback when I ran into a challenge made a big difference. Especially as I attempt to make theoretical claims sans secondary sources, I want to rely on her more for direction.

Conclusion

So yeah, that's chapter two done, which means I'm halfway done with the rough drafts of my body chapters!! Writing my dissertation has been truly an Experience that I don't think coursework/teaching prepared me for. So much of it feels like throwing anything at the wall to see if it sticks, but I think with each chapter I get closer to understanding what this part of the academic training is supposed to do.

As always if there's anything you would like me to write about, let me know!

#phdblr #studyblr #gradblr #grad school #academic writing #dissertation #writing advice #diss update #gradblogging #academia #it's exceptionally bleak that my break is to work on other writing #that's the real dark academia #are these posts interesting #i never have a sense of what's interesting and what's my own gratuitous navel gazing

[chicago-geniza]

Everybody please clap I went to the asthma diet study and then to two pharmacies in wholly disparate areas of Chicago and went to T-Mobile and found out how to fix my phone even if they didn't have the requisite component in stock and discovered insurance needs to renew the prior approval on my T for the new year so I sent it to my doctor for review and discovered I am locked out of my state benefits online account and the email tech support was singularly unhelpful so am calling the Humboldt Park office in the morning to see if a human being can sort it out, vaguely recall I do NOT need to renew Medicaid but want to make absolutely sure so will call THAT number first thing in the morning too; also - replaced my busted headphones at the student store so I didn't have a meltdown, picked up a notebook and some Post-Its, impulsively swung by the uni library and discovered my card still worked and checked out Cayhill on Benjamin, Nietzsche on tragedy, and two Ernst Bloch books in translation, also cased their periodicals for dissertation research; nobody is there! It's so quiet and still. They have Dialog and their microfiche stores are un-fucking-believable. I'm going to start reserving a cubicle--there's a word for library cubicle that sounds like cassock, that's my middle-word, the monkish studiousness, hunched over illuminating manuscripts, it's my mnemonic, like the image the word passes through by association before I remember--carrel, that's it. (Sp?) Passel, tassel. Bundles of papers, tops of scholars' caps and trails of tapestries in halls of learning, it's the phonetic associations, it's never semantic for me, really. Diogenes in a barrel. Etc. K calls it constellation thinking, which I prefer to the pathological tone with which people cut the phrase "free association." It's fun to write like this, how I think! Freewheeling at any rate. Kept thinking of that quote about how we are dancing animals put on earth to fart around, like. Yeah. Truly my mind woke up when I spent a day with the common cold under a gray sky running stupid Kafkaesque errands and dilly-dallying about it. An old woman came up to me and complained about the parking and the traffic and her bad leg and her bad doctor and the bad weather. We commiserated, comrades in misery, each with our bad legs and our bad doctors under the weight of the sullen sky. I love the city, I love the bus driver who greeted everyone cheerfully despite the dreariness, I love that three people on the train platform were wearing the same shoes as me, these Adidas sneakers I got at the thrift store seven years ago. It is so much easier to be open and kind when I do not feel like a prey animal all the time. Did not think this post would arrive at "encomium to anxiety medication and Going Outside [which I am able to do because of anxiety medication]" but here we are lol

#If you take an amphetamine and a benzo at the same time your brain takes a screenshot #Unfortunately in my case as we have consistently proven over and over again the one combo of psych meds that 'treats' my #Deviant Distressful Dysfunctional autism symptoms is #Two Extremely Controlled Substances & #The Highest Topamax Dose Legally Allowed

[jeannereames]

Out of curiosity, were there any facts (inasmuch as we can have in history) about atg/h that you were surprised to learn? Ones that are now in your view of them but when you learned them you thought them ooc or unrealistic

Sorry if this question doesn't make much sense, it's very late at night haha!

After studying them so long (over 30 years now), it can be hard for me to remember reactions, but two things do stick out:

When I realized Hephaistion wasn’t ethnically Macedonian.

While this is now pretty well-accepted, when I first stumbled over the name issue, back around 1995/96, working on my dissertation, nobody had assumed him anything other than a Macedonian. My discovery to the contrary was pure chance. The only place his origin town was given in our sources (Arrian) also happened to list Leonnatos as from Pella, but we know he was from Lynkestis. So I thought, “Oh, hey, I’ll go check and see if the names Hephaistion or Amyntor pop up on tombstones anywhere else in Macedonia.”

That was one BIG rabbit hole, let me tell you!

At the time, as a young scholar—even with oversight from two excellent senior ancient historians—I didn’t (in retrospect) do as thorough a job with the name search as I should have. I’ve remedied that since. My definitive work on Hephaistion’s ethnicity is now, “Becoming Macedonian: Name-mapping and Ethnic Identity. The case of Hephaistion,” with accompanying digital history mapping. But even back in the late ‘90s, my rudimentary onomastic (name) search was good enough to make my point so that it now appears in many/most entries on him. But it certainly wasn’t anything I expected to discover. An off-the-cuff question for my dissertation turned into a major rethinking about Hephaistion’s origins and helps us to better understand Macedonian naturalization.

The second surprise also concerns Hephaistion: that his military assignments were largely logistical and/or diplomatic.

When I set out to write my dissertation, my goal was to show that Hephaistion was more important than typically recognized in modern scholarship, so I collected every ancient reference to him, in all ancient sources. At the time, I did it on 3x5 cards. This research started in 1992, right after I got to Penn State. (Yes, I already knew what my dissertation would be on; I just had to convince Gene Borza that it was doable.)

Anyway, as I was playing with my cards, trying to sort them into broad types, I noticed some odd discrepancies. Now, first, be aware that statistics are a problem in ancient history because we have such SMALL samples. But looking at differences of 3-to-1, that got my attention.

That’s when I realized most of Hephaistion’s assignments were of a specific TYPE: logistical and/or diplomatic. Again, that’s now a generally accepted detail, but it wasn’t until I started making piles out of my 3x5 cards. Some of these conclusions were later published as “The Cult of Hephaistion,” with, yes, tables of these assignments.

This is a good place to make an important point for young scholars. Get in there and do the counting. Be comprehensive. Keep lists. Make 3x5 cards or sticky-notes. Record citations physically on large sheets of paper so you can visualize how it stacks up. In the day of digital, we lose track of just how much we can learn from SEEING in physical space.

Below are a couple pictures I took recently (2022), while recording Every. Single. Religious. Reference, in our 5 original sources. LOOK at it. Note the differences in patterns on the pages. That yielded a really interesting (to me) book chapter on how our sources talk about Philip and Alexander’s use of religion on campaign. This will come out in 2024 as part of a Companion book edited by Ed Anson. (Yes, there are tables!) I took the pictures to show Ed I was hard at work on it, as I was running a little late. But I’m glad I did take it, as it really illustrates how much one can deduce just from seeing.

I’ll be taking the same tactic as I move forward on my study of Hephaistion and Krateros’s careers. I’ll do for Krateros the same thing I did for Hephaistion (I still have those cards!). But I’ll also sort references by ancient author, to see patterns in how each represents the two men. I think it’s important to look at both, a horizontal examination of the type of reference, and a vertical look at trends within authors.

Yeah, I like my lists/tables. But I believe in being thorough. Impressions are suspect. Show me the numbers. (Even if I went into history to avoid math!)

#asks #Hephaistion #Hephaestion #Alexander the Great #surprises in research #Classics #Tagamemnon #be comprehensive in research #ancient Macedonia #ancient Greece #Macedonian military #ancient Macedonian ethnicity

[dirty-bosmer]

I bet this is totally unexpected, but here are some uncommon OC questions :D just do them for whoever you want to ^_^

8.What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child

10. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them?

22. How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)? 

27. What causes them to feel dread? 

36. Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap? 

41. How do they feel about children? 

And also

A) Why are you excited about this character?

B) What inspired you to create them?

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you?

G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most?

H) What trait do you admire most?

Oh my god, I answered these and tumblr glitched out on me not once but TWICE as I was reading them back. Last time it happened, I just about yeeted my computer into the wall and had to step away for a LOOOONG while before I even attempted it again. Bye-bye all my original words. 

But glitches aside, these questions were very fun to entertain. Thank you for asking 🥰

I'll answer these ones for Syl.

A) Why are you excited about this character? The necromancy mostly heehee. I am sooo excited to explore some more magical head-canons. I feel like I barely skimmed the surface of the lore while playing Oblivion, and I’m an anatomist so dead things and what we can learn by probing at them has always intrigued me 🤷‍♀️. I also thought it would be a fun challenge to write a character with personality traits that are opposite those of my last OC. Where Nim was awkward, introverted, and uncouth, Syl is confident (like unabashedly so 😩), outgoing, and sophisticated, yet she still fails miserably to fit in. I think it will be fun to explore similar themes of identity, purpose, and morality with characters who view the world through very different lenses.

B) What inspired you to create them? Well, I naturally gravitate toward scholars in fantasy worlds where we have not only 🧪 science but also 🪄 magic. I wanted Syl to fall outside my comfort zone— I’ve never played a conjurer or necromancer before, and I’m also not intending to give her any combat skills at the start of her story. I’m thinking some fish out of water vibes, maybe? TBD...

E) Are they someone you would get along with? Would they get along with you? Yeah, I would think she was cool lol. Most my friends are also eccentric nerds, so I think we’d vibe. Also she's far more stylish than I ever intend to be, so it would be nice to borrow her clothes. I think Syl would be absolutely thrilled at the prospect of having any other friend beside her brother 🥲

G) What trait of theirs bothers you the most? Syl’s lack of self awareness borders on pathological. This girl cannot comprehend why others find it creepy that she’s hauling around carcasses and stitching them back together for fun. She has a hard time understanding that not everyone values what she values and vice versa and often times her “experiments” have disastrous consequences. You can see why this may come off as deeply inconsiderate and self-centered :)

H) What trait do you admire most? Her passion. Her drive. Syl lives and breathes for her projects, while here I am procrastinating on my dissertation 😂

And these ones I’ll answer for Nim

8.What were they told to stop/start doing most often as a child Nim just wanted to run around, chase bugs, and look at flowers all day, but when you’re a castle maid, you are unfortunately not permitted to do that 😔

10. What lie do they most frequently remember telling? Does it haunt them? All the times she lied to Raminus about where she was while working for the Dark Brotherhood, especially as Lucien’s Silencer. It still makes her feel violently ill.

22. How does jealousy manifest itself in them (they become possessive, they become aloof, etc)?  The initial sting of it would be met with much denial, then she’d grumble silently, then she’d wallow in it and be a sad girl for a couple days.

27. What causes them to feel dread?  The thought of failing her loved ones.

36. Do they actively seek romance, or do they wait for it to fall into their lap?  A bit of both. She doesn’t go out of her way to look for it, but if she meets someone she likes, she’d pursue them and make a move. I doesn’t tend to go particularly well. 

41. How do they feel about children?  So terrified of them lol. See the answer to question 27 but amplified ten fold. She's thought about it before, but always reaches the conclusion that it's too much responsibility and she's

#asks #ask game #OC: Nimileth #OC: Sylawen

[grandhotelabyss]

If asked to give a commencement speech at an ivy, what would you say?

I've never gone to an Ivy, so I'm not sure. I was only ever even on the campus of one once, 12 years ago, for a conference at Brown—the ACLA, I think—where I co-chaired a panel with a friend of mine on love or affect or something in contemporary fiction. Somebody did a Heideggerean reading of Fight Club. I was later chided by my colleagues for letting a scholar who'd come from Istanbul present a dazzling and incomprehensibly intelligent neo-structuralist reading of Orhan Pamuk for 45 minutes, despite the 15-minute limit on papers. She'd devised a rose-shaped diagram to represent the structure of love and narrative in Pamuk and passed out photocopies for us to study. She'd given the diagram her own first name, a scientific discovery: "The Çiğdem Rose." "You just let her talk because she was hot!" a fellow graduate student accused. (He had presented on Louise Erdrich. The refrain of his paper was, "Techne determines ethnos." Does it?) She was hot, but I let her talk because I dislike confrontation, and I was hoping the structuralism might come clear. I had already decided I had no future in academe, so I mostly skipped the conference, mostly skipped Brown, and just wandered the steep hills of that cloud-hung city under gray March drizzle, alone. Or sometimes in the company of an academic friend who'd written something on Erich Auerbach: another Turkish connection, Istanbul double-exposed upon Providence. I stared at monuments of Lovecraft, of Dante—Auerbach's beloved Dante, the first modern poet, now banished to the other side of an ocean he hadn't known existed, well beyond the Pillars of Hercules, another fragment (like me) of that "Italo-Semitic mob" Lovecraft would not have wished to see walking up and down his dream city and eating the salt bread of exile. In an Italian restaurant, where I considered ordering the clams casino but decided against, my colleagues and I debated the ethical propriety of criticizing Mitt Romney's Mormonism in the upcoming general election. The question arose because a scholar from Brigham Young had presented on Never Let Me Go, a paper written in the style of Kathy H's ingenuous narration. "I don't know how it was where you were," he began. My colleagues earnestly discussed Santogold on the damp nighttime streets, cobbled and smelling of the sea. Santogold: "I can say I hope it will be worth what I give up / If I could stand up mean for all the things that I believe..."

Anyway, that was the closet I ever came to the Ivies. Another memory, this one from 2006. On my first day of graduate school at my humble R1 alma mater, the Director of Graduate Studies, who would later be the supervisor of my dissertation, though I didn't know that then, made a speech to us. "Go over to St. Paul," she said, "and see the agricultural campus—see those grain silos. That's the money that will get turned into culture here." She told us, "You are the stewards of capital." A jejune leftist, I was scandalized at the time; I'd gone to graduate school work for the vanguard of the revolution, not to be the steward of capital. The little speech turned out to be a repurposed bit from the end of her book on gender, capitalism, expertise, and modernism. She'd written it in a more critical tone than she'd said it in:

Thus this book carries traces, both material and ideological, of those telltale marks of complicity I have taken pains to uncover in the modernists of this study and in the expert copies they made. Yet this conformation offers all the more reason to engage the subject and to gauge our involvement in such a way that, as descendants of these expert modernists, we see ourselves for the stewards and parvenus we decidedly are.

Now, would-be parvenu that I am, I only wish I had more capital to be the steward of. So "money gets turned into culture" and "you are the stewards of capital" are therefore probably the two things I would tell the assembled graduates of the Ivy Leagues, what I would say if I ever found myself back in Providence, way up on top of College Hill some fine day in May. "Go together, you precious winners all."

#academe #ivy league #academia #comparative literature

[slimeinnocence]

Self-Analysis: Diva Academics

First off, I believe the entire process of self-analysis is an interesting and problematic maneuver; I have always been somewhat “good” at writing, so I tended to leave proof-reading or reflection for the absolute end (or, not even at all...) Graduate school has definitely tested this attribute of mine quite strenuously, and I now recognize proof-reading as probably 50% of the entire writing-process, whereas before I had considered it maybe 5-10%. Though there is certainly a logistical annoyance to the entire ordeal--as if, you had written the text and now have to read the text--I believe the issue to also be somewhat psychoanalytical. The text becomes a child, a de-morphed one, with seemingly no redeeming qualities. With time, this feeling may waiver and you might give yourself a break, but usually this feeling remains... It’s quite odd because, personally, I love to write (though, I think there are some problems to the entire process of writing, similar to those issues raised against “close-reading” in the digital humanities), but there is always some stye... Slavoj Zizek, an eccentric writer, communicates similar attitudes in a comedic fashion against writing, basically stating that he never wants to approach the experience of “writing,” at first he tricks his mind into stating he is only jotting down general ideas, and at some point, he tricks his mind again by stating that he merely only needs to edit the ideas together, never actually reaching a “writing stage.” [1].

Anyhow, I definitely do think there is an obviously methodological strain across my entire blog-posts--basically, how we can reconcile aesthetic/art history with the history of science. How can the history of science benefit from integrating visual studies and art history methodologies. As a subset of this interest, I believe there is also an integration of the personal, anecdotal, and of popular culture. I tried, somewhat, to reflect that in the writing-itself, keeping a prose which, looking back at it, is honestly reflective of how I would normally talk to friends (if, for some reason we were on these topics). My favorite post was “Dissertational Aesthetics,” as I believe it is the synthesis of all fellow posts--basically, I want the history of science, and academia in general, to stop being so serious--to not be “uptight.” This, of course, seems almost uncanny to the entire institution--academia is permeated by “status,” which has its obvious toxic implications. But, I do wonder and aspire for an academia which is more colloquial, more interested in gossip, more public, more accepting of unusual methodologies, more accepting of visuality and the daily milieu. The academic, the critic, the writer, the scholar, is too withdrawn from the public-eye; I believe they can have a worthy transition into artistry and diva-lifestyle, to turn their work into something aesthetically inspirational beyond the interesting “scholarly” writing. I believe this force is already there, it just needs to be developed. I appreciate the ease that was given to us in these blog posts--so many “scholarly ideas” we learn within classes cannot but help pass by our initial personal emotions, meaning that we translate even the most conceptually rich ideas and arguments first (or, at least in some other moment) through more colloquial manners, such as comedy or through memes.

Cecilia’s blog titled “Performance & Pedagogy” is a good entry point and thought-experiment into the literal “role” which historians can “play” in the transmission of their work. I was immediately intrigued by her statement that historians could work quite closely with the writers/actors, relaying information to them. Though, initially, I had thought about this as a duty on the part of the artists--and even so, perhaps they are not even interested in getting things “right,” more so in just distributing an idea. Mika Tajima, the artist whose work I posted in my sixth blog, actually has quite a strenuous research regiment before the construction of their work. Cecilia’s next idea, following up shortly after, is for the historians to act as artists themselves, in Cecilia’s case, for them to be a part of the play (an actor). I think that would be a hilarious and intriguing idea--it would completely subvert the idea of the cooped-up academic breathing in the dust-fumes of the books within their disheveled office. Though, I do wonder if this has ever been a thing before... Is there precedent? The historian as artist, the idea of history as art? Maybe, eventually, just as writing and reading are essential landmarks to the historian, the production of art (art beyond writing) will seep in?

Lucy Lippard, 1976.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G9SRIrWoAeo