The View From Kalamazoo

I should mention, again, that my boss is a wonderful, wonderful person.

I should mention it daily, however I think that would clutter the blog a bit.

I can’t tell you how much I will miss him when we retires. If you plan to apply for the position, once they actually get around to advertising it, I hope I like you even half as much. (I also hope you get and appreciate my odd references to The Prisioner, whomever you are.)

This Chronicle piece, hereafter known as the Tribble Drivel, came out Friday, but I was off-line (and up to my nether regions in Pine Sol, thankyouverymuch) completing The Move From Hell cleaning rituals. So for the last 24 I’ve been bouncing around catching up with all that was said over the weekend, and rather than just respond to ‘Tribble’ and say what has already been said (and likely, said with more eloquence) I’ll suspend my regular wordy rambling in favor of a list of some of the responses I’ve read, in case there’s someone y’all haven’t caught, yet:

• Bitch Ph.D.
  
• Matthew G. Kirschenbaum
• Daniel Drezner
  
• Frog in A Well
• The Chutry Experiment
• Acephalous
• Planned Obsolescence
  
• Easily Distracted
• ABD
• Playing School, Irreverently
  
• Thanks for Not Being a Zombie
• In the Shadow of Mt. Hollywood
• Caveat Lector
• The Little Professor
• Ancrene Wiseass
• Blogenspiel
• Badger
• Tightly Wound
• Household Opera
• Steven D. Krause
• Unlocked Wordhoard

There. I suppose it’s time to admit that one of my faults is a chronic urge to be helpful.
(I’m sure there are three former applicants to a small liberal arts college who are darn thankful they dodged that bullet.)

La Profesora Abstraida also comments, and handily categorizes blogs.

Contrast the drivel to Ralph E. Luker’s Were There Blog Enough and Time, which I have been meaning to blog about, but there’s this pesky move, and all. Read it. Let the hollow place inside you left by troublesome ‘TribbleÂ’ be re-filled.

I had a few thoughts on the Leader article. I had originally posted the link last week, but have only had time to re-read it and comment now:

First: all written communication is contrived and the forms of written communication carry with them built-in cultural assumptions and limitations. I think this goes without saying.

Second: the fascism of the format? Consider that, ignoring the issue of paper v. electronics, a newspaper is really just a heavily-structured group blog. Does news happen on a 24 hour publishing cycle? Or history — how absurd and fascist to try to fit the events of human history into a few hundred or thousand pages. I agree that it would be “more than a little unreasonable to declare a mode of communication fascist just because of the mode’s popularity”, however this doesn’t seem to be slowing Leader down any.

Third: I also find it interesting that Leader misses the most obvious delimiter for blogs – it isn’t sex or race but age. It isn’t difficult to run across a lot of blogs by blacks, Asians, whites, transvestites…but I, for one, rarely run across a blog maintained by someone over 50. Blogging is disproportionately a youth movement. Even the non-Western world is more represented than the AARP set – you can find plenty of Iraqi, Indian, Iranian, etc. blogs. (the only continent not well represented is Africa, but due to its extreme poverty it’s not merely blogging that is under-represented). Come to think of it, why is he trying to shoehorn human experience into the rationalist fascist media of formal publications, which inherently empower white males and enforces passive rather than active engagement with the world. Besides, are there even really such things as “publications”? The word originated in the late 14th century to signify making something “public” but what exactly is this “public” but an artificial construct that excluded women and ethnic minorities behind its facade of an all-encompassing rational human community.

It’s a pea and shell game.

Leader complains that blogs turn the internet into the equivalent of a high school popularity contest with the whining edge to his prose that one might expect from the second-runner-up for class president. Many, if not most, of the blogs I read bare little resemblance to the grasping and greedy bastions of solipsism he luridly describes. And very f-ing frankly, his characterization of female bloggers, feminine forms of communication, and insulting and assumptive. “Those people who are less able to exploit the new (and almost-mandatory) format for electronic communication”? Women! I’m surprised he doesn’t quote the President of Harvard University when yipping about gender in ways that echo Summers’ “innate differences”. Barbie once said “Math is hard!” Leader has her saying “Blogging is hard!” Mattel corrected their transgression, will Leader?

(Be the hit of your next party or gathering! Every time Leader uses the word ‘patriarchy’, drink!!)

I think what George is trying to say is ‘We shouldn’t have provoked Hitler over Poland!’
(#1513 Respect MP George Galloway says: “We argued, as did the security services in this country, that the attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq would increase the threat of terrorist attack in Britain. Tragically Londoners have now paid the price of the Government ignoring such warnings.”)

Attaboy, George.

Winston Churchill to V-E Day crowds, Whitehall London, 8th May 1945

There we stood, alone. Did anyone want to give in? Were we down-hearted?
The lights went out and the bombs came down. But every man, woman and
child in the country had no thought of quitting the struggle. London can
take it. So we came back after long months from the jaws of death, out
of the mouth of hell, while all the world wondered. When shall the
reputation and faith of this generation of English men and women fail? I
say that in the long years to come not only will the people of this
island but of the world, wherever the bird of freedom chirps in human
hearts, look back to what we’ve done and they will say “do not despair,
do not yield to violence and tyranny, march straightforward and die if
need be – unconquered.” Now we have emerged from one deadly struggle – a
terrible foe has been cast on the ground and awaits our judgment and our
mercy.

But there is another foe…a foe stained with cruelty….We must begin
the task of rebuilding our health and homes, doing our utmost to make
this country a land in which all have a chance, in which all have a
duty, and we must turn ourselves to fulfil our duty to our own
countrymen, and to our gallant allies of the United States who were so
foully and treacherously attacked….We will go hand and hand with them.
Even if it is a hard struggle we will not be the ones who will fail.

[as previously posted in my lj]

House of the medieval dead lurks in lawyers’ basement

More found objects:

From Cronaca:
After 2,600 years, the world gains a fourth poem by Sappho

Traces of hidden Leonardo sketch revealed

And found at Mirabilis.ca: Statue of Orpheus unearthed

I don’t know that I can express clearly enough how much I dislike the smell of bluelines. CfP rolling right along…

And an additional note to Friday’s post about tile: I have a bunch* of 8X8 bathroom tile, now, too – windsurf. Good thing because I want so badly to pull everything off the walls and re-plumb the main bath I can hardly stand it.

*in this case, a bunch is about 100 tiles.

I edited the other post to include direct links to the 12X12 tile colors. I have mostly taupe, with a little over 50% of that number the ebony, and less than 20% the stipple, so I need to get some graph paper out and plan, plan, plan.

Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts
“The Schoenberg Database of Manuscripts encompasses more than 60,000 searchable entries of manuscripts written before 1600 and consisting of five or more leaves. This database is intended to be a powerful tool in:

• Locating and identifying information about particular manuscripts.
• Establishing the history and provenance of manuscripts.
• Aggregating descriptive information about specific classes or types of manuscripts.

It includes bibliographic information culled from approximately 4,000 catalogues issued by 400 dealers and auction houses since the early nineteenth century. This data is supplemented by entries from inventories and catalogues of private and institutional libraries. With twenty-nine searchable fields, it provides broad access to manuscripts through a range of discrete descriptive (i.e., vendor, catalogue name or number, item number, price, etc.) and physical (leaves, size, illuminations, etc.) properties. Multiple references to the same manuscript are cross-referenced to facilitate the tracking of individual manuscripts. The database is updated and augmented periodically on an ongoing basis.”

A comment from a friend has led me to make this suggestion: how about a Congress badge with only a picture of a Penny Farthing and a number? (I’d want to be number 6, of course.)

*cue Rover*

Thanks to Cacciaguida for a link to the news in Latin.

Library turns over new leaf, from Mirabilis.ca.

Medievalists, blogging, and thou. If yer interested email me, or if you’re willing to sign up and navigate the Conversant system feel free to post, ask questions, whatevah.

I get a lot of SAM in my job. I often wonder what is really said. Oh well.

FYI: If the going-on-14-hour headache I have doesn’t depart soon I may have to seek out a tall building to jump from. Darn Michigan. Darn sinuses. Darn pressure systems.

We have, in our upstairs hallway, a very small closet tucked under one of the cape cod overhangs, a bit under waist-high (note: I’m not playing for the WNBA), probably about 2 ft. wide and 3 ft. deep. Odd little storage area, but the house is full of ’em. Colin informed Bri that’s ‘where we’ll keep the monkeys!’
?!!!??

I think I have moles in my back yard. 🙁
I may also have rhubarb.

I get to see my sister and bro-in-law for the first time in nearly a year this weekend. And meet my nephew, born at Thanksgiving-time. They have brought me Crossville tile. Lots of tile from the reduced price reject pile at the factory. (a combination of antico taupe, ebony, and burgundy smoke, judging from the on-line color examples. I’ll stagger them…black grout, I think.) Anyone in the Kalamazoo area who finds peace and deep satisfaction laying ceramic tile gimme a call, willya? I’ll be ripping out the old-and-nasty dining room/kitchen carpet, getting much mastic and grout – a good time had by all. (No, Bri won’t be taking part in the adventure. I’m the handyman, he draws the line at electronics)
Next step – trying to tone down the knotty pine in the dining room. SO orange-y. SO uuuuuugly. Pickling? A cherry stain? Anything not orange will be an improvement.