The View From Kalamazoo
addendum
A chronology from HNN.
This space opened for business June 3, 2003. Second anniversary come and gone.
I shouldn’t comment with the headache filter on, so I’ll do that later.
the name game
It’s been wicked hot and humid, I’m still trying to slowly move in fits and starts, I’m behind in painting, 2 weeks past due picking some things up and finishing them at the KIA, and it’s clear I’m hopelessly behind on reading, responding, and writing here.
SO while I’ll eventually post some more photos, and I really hope I will find all of my work still at the KIA and not disposed of unceremoniously, I do need to comment on this gem from a few days ago.
Of Chivalry and Convention Badges
It’s interesting. I was an odd bystander. At the time I had fielded questions about the missing affiliations (a technical error, basically)…some from those truly Irritated (if not Insulted) souls, some from the curious, and others who commented that they really, really liked it and we were geniuses, geniuses. It was fascinating to watch Congress wander by and observe who were the first to write their affiliations in under their names, watch as the number of those uncomfortable with relative anonymity grew somewhat…and those who stood pat – sneeches without stars and sneeches with stars on thars danced before me in some sort of psychological experiment in this multidisciplinary microcosm of medievalists. Others on the home team received comments, some that made perfect sense (exhibitors, for example, should be plain both for our staff and for participants to easily identify), some tilting toward the rant side, and others offering applause.
From the beginning the success of the Congress has been fed by the camaraderie and free exchange of research and ideas fostered by a level playing-field “…the most important was the egalitarian strategy successfully argued by Sommerfeldt. Invitations to present papers at the Kalamazoo conference went out to everyone in the field, and abstracts were invited from anyone who wished to be considered. This approach was considered radical at the time, but served to open scholarship to a much broader range of individuals, including advanced graduate students who sometimes read their first papers at Kalamazoo.” (from this history) There have never been titles, no herrprofessordoktors cluttering the name-tag landscape – those who attended were and are medievalists, brought together by a common bond of time-period, not driven apart by jockeying and hierarchical hoo-ha. I first attended as an interested undergraduate minoring in medieval studies. I marveled then, and still do marvel (frankly), about what has been built here. I won’t start in on utopian monologues, but what is here was radical, has been inspiring and influential, and is, still, unique.
As WMU has been on my tag all along, the affiliation game I was most often pulled into was that of giving directions and asking questions, but on more than one occasion a fellow grad-student from a Much More Important Place had turned around, looked at my tag, sniffed haughtily and turned away. I’ve read responses from others who have felt the affiliation elitism sting personally. Even given the intention of creating a space where equal footing to exchange ideas can flourish there are those who will still try to subvert it.
The decision is not mine (I am, you realize, merely Chief Minion…still, at the end of the day, a minion) but I rather hope to see the blanks under the names again next year. Not only because observing the tango of the self-secure with the self-important in the form of the write-in affiliation is darn entertaining, but because I think the spirit of the conference and the intentions of those who conceived it are served.
On Romans and buboes
baaa. survey sheep.
Mordor?
I need a beer and a nap. Not necessarily in that order.
I hate moving. I hate moving with a great purple passion. I hate applying texture paint to ceilings only slightly less. I have painted, and moved crap, for closing on a week. My roller hand is permanently cramped, the up and down stairs and step stools has my hips screaming and my gait resembling that of my bursitis-suffering mother, and let’s not discuss the joy of being a fat woman on my feet painting and painting and painting for 4 days straight, ok?
Latin, politics, and Boston. Gotta love it.
Workplace Blog
Medievalist blogs en Français:
Un nouveau blog sur le manuscrit médiéval
Ménestrel: Médiévistes sur l’Internet, Sources, Travaux, Références en ligne
Those pesky Germans!: Germans blamed for Viking invasion
Other news:
Archeologists recover medieval ceramics from Volkhov River
Found at mirabilis.ca: Ancient ‘Bog Body’ Unearthed in Germany
A team of experts are to trawl the Aegean for triremes, the ships that were crucial to the victory over Xerxes of Persia
I love Modigliani: A rarely-seen portrait by Italian artist Amedeo Modigliani of his lover Jeanne Hebuterne has been sold for £3.25m in London.
I like Picasso, too: A former lover of Pablo Picasso is to sell 20 sketches by the artist at an auction in Paris later this month.
I hate sinus infections. Jus’ sayin’…
I’m no adjunct, I’m not even that on the food chain, but I thought I should get around to posting a lot of these links I’ve been collecting. I’m still not reading the crystal ball well, and I don’t know what will happen during this period of caring for Bri’s grandmother and after..what will be possible. I neither want to say I’ve given up on it all in the face of Shitty Life Occurences nor admit, I guess, that I would still prefer to look at everything through rose-colored glasses and remain hopeful. Hopeful and stupid, I suppose Brian would say. I’d rather not consider the possibility that my job that drives me nuts, exhausts me no end, and no human can survive for long (yeah, the one with the tremendously crappy State-U-Schlub pay, on top of it all)..that my job is All There Is for me.
I’ll likely set up a list of links on the sidebar at some point:
Workplace: A Journal for Academic Labor
Adjunct Nation
National Coalition of Independent Scholars
Adjuncts.com
Maybe Brian will let me buy a kiln and I can make artsy ceramic tile for those who want to pay for it. Maybe he’ll post the pictures I took of the winter term’s stash, too. 😉
I need to go to the KIA and finish with the majolica glaze on my mosaic tiles. And pick up the stoneware tiles I’ll paint a mural on, if I can find where they put them (they should be out of the kiln). And then buy table bases, plywood, grout, and mastic to finish up the mosaic-top tables – one irises, the other inspired by Mondrian (for my Dad) – once the tiles are finally out of the kiln.
And pack to move next week.
And get the paint for The Boy’s room. And my bedroom – still deciding on particulars, there. Speaking of paint: While not the brand I’m buying (I’m having a uber-washable kid-guard tinted, no flat for my little messmakers), if you go to behr.com and look up the following you can see a rough representation of the kids’ room colors:
Emma: cupid arrow, 100C-1
Life is all pale lavendar and white trim. pale sagey-green accents. How f-ing girlie is that?!? (I sound in at roundly anti-Barbie pink, but I can live with purples. I was hoping she’d agree to the pale green on the walls and purple accents to work with her comforter, but no dice.)
Colin: rapture blue 520C-3
I’m thinking, since this is over panelling, I’ll get it in both satin and semi-gloss and do tone-on-tone vertical stripes, working with the stripes made by the panelling divots. Or that might be too much work. White trim, again – I just bought a mega-gallon of the stuff so I didn’t have to nickel-and-dime a bunch of disperate quarts.
Still not sure how to manage the white aluminum siding and some color. Maybe berries and cream 100D-5 or shale gray 540E-4 combined with witch hazel 780D-6 will help cheer the pale-gray-and-mauve front door and shutter action that presently leaves me cold. Dunno. Should probably do a shutter replace mission at some point, but that’ no where near the top of my to-do list.
A Wish List.. brought to you by an almost-former renter looking forward to gardening, and the letter C:
iris’ (around the front tree)
peonies (not close to the house, obviously)
oriental poppies (again with the tree)
a red bud tree somewhere in the back yard
morning glories and moon flowers climbing across one side of the back yard (currently a bare chain-link fence).
I’m tempted to do a climbing old-fashioned rose on either side of the front door, training them to trail up to cris-cross over the lintel. (lintel? am I thinking of the right term? my head is filled with congested allergy goodness) That may be a little too too, however.
lilacs, probably along the back fence somewhere.
and yes, there will be juniper.
probably hostas to fill in the rest of the raised-planting-bed-around-the-tree in the front yard, too. or something.
more
After 2,000 Years, a Seed From Ancient Judea Sprouts
I want a new…job.
One that pays what it should.
One that won’t make me feel too bad.
One that might let me feel sorta good.
One that won’t make me nervous, wonderin’ what to..smash.
One that doesn’t make me feel like I will crash…
Untitled
Loan approved. I hate moving. I hate packing. And I hate doing it in 90 degree heat. So there.
varia, the backlog
added. check these out:
medievalmanuscripts.net
http://digitalmedievalist.org
My month-late Congress commentary:
This is, of course, too brief and mentions too little, but I can call it done.
Met many really lovely people who I have only spoken with electronically as well as those friends I usually only get to see once a year as we are separated by great distance. I’m always surprised but pleased at being remembered – Shana brought me chocolates from a fantabulous Toronto shop, and I had a visit from George Ferzoco re: a link I had posted in Dec. to a project I thought looked marvy. He signed the book on the project for me…a lovely thing, and a very nice visit with a very nice person. See – blogging doesn’t just get you death threats. 😉 When he popped up I was far from 100% and didn’t recognize the project from the cover of the book – the fact that I can’t read Italian compounded my insta-stupidity. I just hope he didn’t fly back to the UK and tell his colleagues the Kalamazoo Coodinator is a scatterbrain…not that I’m not much of the time, but I do try to keep it more under wraps. (chronic and frenetic multi-tasking ain’t for the faint of heart)
(realize that I’m not mentioning all of my visitors, but I need to get back to work, here)
SO yes, I danced many of the ‘you owe me a dance!’ dances, shook it like a polaroid picture. There were witnesses to my gracelessness, and Mike, duuuuude, you need to come next year, because I’m a very poor substitute for Bad Touch. It’s a darn good thing D’s amazing, because she had to carry it in the face of my utter surprise coupled with an inability to move with more smoothness than that of a inebriated water buffalo.
Had many fruitful conversations, including the one that led to the session proposal. It was a very talk-y Congress for me – which was a good thing overall…relaxed, but effecient. Societas Magica‘s proposal line-up looks yummy, and one rather behooves me to toss my hat in the ring again so I suppose I should get off my tuckus and write.
