For those of you trying to guess the location of Fellowship City...

...it's not in the tropics:


This was the view from my front porch yesterday. And this photo was shot an hour and a half before the snow stopped falling. If blowing sideways can really be counted as "falling." Needless to say, I chose to work from home that day.

Go ahead, all you with your jobs in the snow-free states. Laugh it up.

Did we really need a study to tell us this?

In today's New York Times, confirmation of what many of us have known all along. But it's worth reading anyway.

I do find it interesting that the initial study was on a group of "high-achieving women." If that doesn't describe the cohort of people I've talked to about our experience with this very phenomenon, then I don't know what does.

Meltdowns and the Intellectual Girl

Yesterday, I had a meltdown with regards to the writing. This chapter has been kicking my ass for two reasons: 1) It's a grab-bag of things that are vaguely related to each other, but not nearly as much so as in the other chapters; and 2) I can't figure out which way round to string the various elements. The frustrations built to a point where I started to question whether I was even capable of writing this book, and whether I'm not good enough to do the thing I thought I had a reasonable knack for doing. So, I curled up on the couch and cried a little.

Yes, that's right: this chapter has officially brought me to tears.

Now, this is not the first time that suggestions (whether internal or external) as to my competence in my chosen profession have made me weepy. There was a mini-meltdown after my latest round of Revise-and-Resubmit with Journal of Excellent Studies; I wept copious tears after I got rejected in grad school for omigodhowwillidomyresearchwithoutit grant; meetings with my M.A. advisor made me cry on a weekly basis for almost two full semesters (though never once in his presence). I do not have a particularly thick skin when it comes to my work.

Now, this can all be related back to earlier discussions of fraud complex. But it makes me wonder about gender and visible meltdowns in academia. Is this more common among women? Do they all, like me, try to hide it, for fear of not being taken seriously? Do men cry about these things, but just not talk about it? Do they process it differently – say, with anger, or by dismissing critics as uninformed or irrelevant? Do they have thicker skins?

Or is it just me?

The good news is, the meltdown seemed to be therapeutic (as meltdowns usually are, for me): combined with some solid emotional support from Interesting Development and a good night's sleep, I woke up this morning determined to make some progress, and to let the chapter be whatever it will, so long as it's done.

That'll teach that meltdown who's boss.

Ferrets are HOTT (or: A Cautionary Tale about Plagiarism)

Okay, I know I'm hardly the first to post a link to this, but just in case you missed it, a tale about how entire passages from a semi-scholarly article about black-footed ferrets appeared nearly verbatim in a bodice-ripper, making for some of the worst postcoital chatter of all time.

I'd like to make some of my students read this, as an object lesson in how, when they plagiarize, there are jarring shifts in prose style that give them away. But I suppose I should just be grateful that, after lifting entire passages from an online article on Hildegard von Bingen, they don't immediately shift to her and Volmar having hot monastic sex up against the cloister wall.

Hard on the heels of triumph, despair.

First of all, thanks to all who congratulated me on hitting the halfway mark. I can only hope that today's post doesn’t make me seem ungrateful for the support. But here goes:

Sometimes I wonder whatever made me think that revising the dissertation into a book was going to be a straightforward process.

Here's what I told people: Since completing the dissertation, I had figured out what the analytical framework tying it together should have been, and I'd done a bit more research in the archives, adding substantially to the data. My revision work would involve four things: 1) Rearranging the extant material into a new chapter framework that foregrounded the Big New Idea; 2) Incorporating the new materials; 3) Smoothing out the chapters to make sure that Big New Idea was threaded through all of them; and 4) Writing one chapter from scratch that went in depth into Big New Idea. Seemed pretty straightforward.

Except that it hasn't been. The chapters have been blocking me at every turn, being balky, and far from the "easy rewrite" I had assumed. If I don't keep a close eye on them, they wander far, far away from Big New Idea, and then I have to spend time herding them up again. Material that I spent months gathering for the dissertation is completely out the window (though I'm saving it in a "potential articles" file), and I keep waiting for the easy part to begin.

I know for a fact that nobody writes effortlessly. But does it really have to be this fucking hard?

Yee-fucking-HAW!

Check out the word count, folks.

That's right: as of 11:17 a.m., I am officially HALFWAY DONE WITH MY MANUSCRIPT.

((happy dance, happy dance, happy dance!))

Why do all that medieval stuff?

Anyone reading in the historical (and especially medieval) blogosphere over the past week or so has probably seen the meme out there on "Why teach history" (examples here, here, and here). There have been a lot of really excellent responses out there, to which I can add very little, except to say that I teach it because it's what I love. But I want to call attention to a piece in the recent issue of Perspectives, AHA President Gabrielle Spiegel's essay on "The Case for History and the Humanities."

Spiegel nicely summarizes the usual justifications: that studying the Humanities helps us to understand "what it means to be human," and the updated version of that: the emphasis on critical and reflective thinking that is central to the study of the Humanities. But then she says this:

"Given the current situation of the world, I can't think of anything more important than reaffirming the intrinsic humanity of all peoples, however different ethnically, religiously, politically, or even medically. The great and abiding task of the humanities is to cultivate appreciation for the immense variety of the ways that peoples and societies live and think. […] The humanities teach this most importantly of all the disciplines, in that they require an imaginative, not merely objective or logical, investment in their investigations."

So how does this relate to research in Medieval Studies, a field that I love, but that I sometimes feel can be a little self-indulgent? Spiegel points out that the medieval world is the West's very own historical Other, alien to our own society in many ways, yet intrinsically tied to us. As such (and this is my own musing on the subject now), it informs us that we cannot responsibly interpret our past through the lens of the present; even more importantly, we cannot take a teleological approach and assume that our present is the result of an inescapable evolutionary process. It forces us to exercise that historical imagination that Spiegel speaks of, and then – hopefully – to apply the results of that imagination to ourselves.

I would never suggest that we look to the medieval past for precise parallels or solutions to our own problems of, say, relations between church and state, between members of different religions, or between men and women. But these are persistent questions, and thinking critically about how our own historical Other addressed these issues can shock us out of presentist thinking and the sometimes disastrous complacency it can produce.