The View From Kalamazoo

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.

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.

Major excavation at Roman forts
Revealed: our friends the Romans did not invade Britain after all

aaannnnd – plague news

Eye of Sauron sighted. Send in the hobbits!

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’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.

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…

Loan approved. I hate moving. I hate packing. And I hate doing it in 90 degree heat. So there.

IASL Online

Perseus Digital Library

Europe’s oldest civilization found

Roman mosaic discovered in Libya (more here)

“German scholars from the University of Heidelberg” have confirmed that the two fragments discovered by the archaeologist N. Ovcharov in the Eastern Rhodopes mountains, southern Bulgaria, are written in the Linear A script

A group of workmen laying water pipes near to a Worcestershire church have uncovered the remains of about 20 people dating back to the Middle Ages.

English Heritage has delved into medieval herb-lore to breathe new life into a monk’s garden at Mount Grace Priory, near Northallerton.

Plans to save a Shropshire town’s medieval walls from crumbling are due to be revealed.

An early medieval coin and a rare glass vessel have been discovered at an archaeological excavation.

Archaeologists searching for remains of a city’s medieval past have made an intoxicating discovery – a cache of World War II beer.

And have you ever seen the Behr website? It’s like being able to poke through paint chips without having to find a parking apot at Home Depot!