New Feature

Hey, all: In my effort to be better at keeping up with the blogs I read regularly, I've added a new "what I'm reading" to my sidebar. This is mainly for my own benefit, but I invite you to peruse at your leisure. It's about 80% academic blogs (with a high medievalist content), but there are a few other friends and sundries thrown in.

And a bleg to Another Damned Medievalist: I've been trying to include a link to your blog, but it doesn't seem to take. If you know why, and want to contact me, let me know.

EDIT: Hmmm.... some confusion, it appears. "Unassigned reading" is the paper book I'm reading (and apparently have been for months); the new feature, "What I'm reading", is further down, and lets me know when one of the blogs I regularly check in on has been updated.

To all y'all headed to the Berks this weekend:

WHOO-HOO!

Medievalists represent!**



**Okay, and the rest of you non-medievalists going to the Berks have fun, too. Notorious would like to be there, and hereby pledges to get off her butt and answer the CFP the next time it comes around.

I just did some calculations

...and it's entirely possible that I can finish a draft of all the substantive chapters by the end of this weekend.

The thought has me salivating.

Well, this is no big surprise.

36 As a 1930s wife, I am Poor Take the test!

On the other hand:

71 As a 1930s husband, I am Superior Take the test!

(I would have scored higher on the second one if I provided ID with a better allowance or more labor-saving household devices.)

Hmmm...

Dry as dust

The current section I'm writing, that is.

You know, it occurs to me that I've complained about most of my chapters. But in the end, they're fine. But here I'm writing a section on (spoiler alert!) jurisdiction and procedural law. For the argument I'm making, I think it needs to be in there. The problem is that, for reasons that I won't go into, I know too damned much about this topic. Canon law? Check. Ius commune? Check. The decretals of Innocent III that were the foundation for the high medieval procedure known as inquisitio? Darn tootin' I know that.

The problem is that I can't seem to shut up about this stuff. I know a gazillion little details, and this part of my brain refuses to generalize, for fear of being called out. So this incredibly dry section is up to 4,000 words, including footnotes. And I can't have eight pages of dry, boring shit in my first chapter (already not exactly the attention-grabber that the later chapters are). So, I haven't posted these 4,000 words in my count, but am instead going to force myself to chop this section down to 2,500 words. That will be five in-print pages, by my reckoning, which will probably still be three pages too long for some people, but them's the breaks.

This slash-and-burn is my goal for the next two days. I'll check in Monday night and let you know how it goes.

(Oh, and also? Visit to the Lady Doctor on Monday. Life just keeps getting better and better.)

The View from Inside the Bubble

Last weekend, I accompanied Interesting Development to his college reunion at a selective liberal arts college located in the middle of nowhere.

You have to understand something about ID's relationship to his alma mater: he loves this place. So I was excited to visit the place that had made such an impression on him. I thought I was more or less prepared, because I'd attended a SLAC myself – albeit an urban one, and as a sophomore-year transfer student.

Then we got there, and I experienced some pretty severe culture shock. Sure, it was superficially similar: Student population of under 2000; small classes; emphasis on academic excellence; all that. But this was different. For one thing, the place is located in a "town" of 1900 (that's including the students, mind you). It's a residential college, both by design, and because the college is the town (and the next nearest tiny hamlet is a ten-minute drive away), which means that if you're a student there, you live on campus for four years. You have a sandwich or a coffee at one of the three restaurants in town (a coffee shop with a small breakfast/lunch menu, a brew pub/restaurant, a deli). You buy beer and munchies at the local market, which is really a convenience store on steroids. No need for real groceries, because you take all your meals in the dining hall. You don't worry about juggling work and class schedules, because the only work to be had in town is at one of the aforementioned three restaurants, or work-study. Your life, in other words, is the college. Everyone knows the canonical college songs, and sings them.

It would be easy to make fun of the insularity of the place. But here's the thing (and this is very hard for someone with a longstanding and resolutely lower-middle-class identity to admit): I liked it there. I liked the ivory-tower-ness of it all. I liked the collegiate gothic buildings and the prettiness of the campus. I liked the idea of the centrality of the college to students' lives (as opposed to my own experience, where my job and my off-campus life were important counterweights, and to the experience of my own urban-commuter-uni students, for whom the university is the periphery of their lives, rather than the core). God help me, I even liked the college songs (well, not the songs themselves so much as the idea of them). This, to me, was like a dream of college, rather than anything I had ever seen in action.

It was a bubble, for sure. But after spending 72 hours there, I have to admit that the view from inside the bubble is pretty nice.

Still Alive

...and madly procrastinating. More tonight on the final chapter, the latest from Outside Project, and the trip to Interesting Development's college reunion. Stay tuned...