action transvestite!

i have no brain.

i've been doing the last-ditch revisions of my thesis for -- well, what feels like several years now. checking my email, i see it's only since the 1st of december. it feels like longer. my brain is slowly turning into swiss-cheese'y stuff but thanks to my wonderful friend diana (you should go and read her blog and decide that it is awesome and go and vote at the best librarian/library edublogs 2009 site. that link right back there), i have truly gorgeous slide backgrounds for when i turn to making my slide-show presentation.

for my presentation.

which is next week.

immediately after which, i have a job interview. so that's going to be a really good day!

anyway, the upshot of all that is, determined though i am to stick to this random and self-assigned every other day schedule, i have really nothing to say this friday except "bleerrrrrrrr" and "has my professor's handwriting always been this awful and i've never noticed before? what the hell is that word?! is it important? oh, god, what if it's important -- oh, crap--" and other things of that sort.

so go watch some eddie izzard instead. really. it's about star wars. you'll like it.

"words. words, words, words."

the other day i was at work (big surprise, yes?) and i clicked to the main website rather than the archives website and i found this news story about a professor working on a legal project. i must confess that i didn't read the story through very closely at first (i have since read it over with more care); what caught my eye immediately was the acronym: sgbv.

quite often the neu news feeds feature stories about research scientists working at the university, or professors who have gotten grants, or engineering grad students who have presented something nifty to someone interesting, or people on co-op doing something spiffy -- but that's not what this story is talking about.

and i should say right off the top that it sounds as though this professor is doing dynamite work. if what she does gets help for people who need it, that's great. more power (and chocolate) to her.

but the acronym -- sgbv -- struck me and i couldn't think why for a minute until i realised it reminded me of the opening of this george carlin routine. (i'm not bothering to embed the player because i couldn't find a live cut and i really don't want a still shot of george carlin (r.i.p.) glaring out of my blog at me.) the part of the routine i'm thinking of is the first two to three minutes -- not very much of an eight minute cut, but the rest is absolutely worth listening to if you like what you're hearing so far.

he's talking about the shift in language over the course of the 20th century from "shell shock" to the current "post-traumatic stress disorder." (i'm not even sure he gets as far as ptsd; i think he might stop with "battle fatigue" but you get the idea.) and he's talking about this shift as a softening of the words, a multiplication of syllables -- and a distancing from the actual poor sod suffering from the medical/psychological problem in hand. he was making a very specific point in regards to vietnam veterans not getting adequate medical or psychological attention for the issues they were suffering from, but i think his idea, besides being very funny in a "wow, that isn't really funny at all is it -- but why am i laughing?" sort of way, has broader applications and i think "sgbv" is along the same lines.

what the hell does it stand for? well, according to the news article, it stands for "sexual- and gender-based violence." okay. so, in old-school terms, physical attacks like rape. i realise there is a broader spectrum of attack possible here covering not only the physical (probably the highly aggressive physical searches most of the republican prisoners i'm writing about underwent count under this heading -- both the physical search itself and the resulting trauma) but anna isn't here for me to pick her brain for what these things might be and i am very tired, so i'm just going to let you fill in the blanks on your own. i'm sure you've read the odd news story you wish you hadn't about horrible things happening to children or young women or old women or young men or old men or dogs or cats or chickens; just pick something from there.

and as i said before: if what she does gets help for people who have these horrendous things happen to them, good. excellent. but i don't know if i think this kind of acronym is going to help.

it's...catchy. sort of.

it's memorable. -ish.

it covers a lot of ground. absolutely. almost too much, in fact. if you say "sgbv," people say, "huh? what?" but if you say "rape," people know what you're talking about. there's an immediate visceral reaction to the word. this is bad. something bad has happened. (and if you recognize that really vague movie allusion, give yourself a hug.)

i thought i would have a really coherent post to write about this, but i find that i don't. i just find the shift away from what seems like the precise language to the vague acronym -- troubling on some level. maybe it's just me.

but whichever way you think about it, that's a pretty miserable thought for a wednesday (and i could go on about the irish republicans. really. i could. with quotes. you don't want me to.) and so i'll leave off instead with a clip from my latest fun thing which is eddie izzard's stand-up. netflix has been insisting for years that mr. izzard and i are meant to be "bff." i didn't believe it, so i didn't watch any of his stand-up until this week. the up-side of this is that now he has something like six (6!) routines that i get to watch -- yay! (plus or minus movies, of course.)

anyway, this is from his dress to kill show in san francisco; if you watch nothing else of this, watch the first 2-4 minutes and take in the full glory of his theory of european history (and i want his nail polish):

probably nsfw. :)

"cheese, gromit! we'll go somewhere where there's cheese!"

i debated about putting this up on sunday because that was nick park's real birthday, but i thought that wallace and gromit videos might be a nice touch on a monday which i, for one, am not looking forward to.

so, yesterday was nick park's birthday; i think that's awesome; and i think we should all watch some w&g in celebration. i tried to find a full online cut of "a grand day out" which was the first aardman full-length short (er -- that sounds funny -- it was about 20 minutes long and the first long piece they did with wallace and gromit) and my favorite, but the only place i could find it was a chinese site that wouldn't cough up an embed code. at least, i don't think it would. it probably would have if i spoke chinese. which i don't. so it left me rather nowhere.

fortunately, hulu came through! and then hulu totally failed and took down the episodes i linked to. i've taken down the embedded windows because, well, they were totally pointless and quite ugly. you'll just have to take my word for it. wallace and gromit = very fun = go watch some. sorry.

and then because i'm a historian and i find it really hard to look at much of anything without saying, on some level, 'so where did that come from?' i also went and found one of oliver postgate's 'clangers' shorts.

these were -- apparently -- used on the bbc (i'm guessing for filler between shows) in the '60s and '70s; there's actually an episode of doctor who called the sea devils from the early '70s where the master is in jail (temporarily) and sitting in his cell watching television. he's watching what i now realise is an episode of 'clangers;' he's quite cheerfully whistling back to the little clangers and enjoying the show when the warden of the prison comes in and asks what he's doing. the master replies that he's apparently watching some interesting form of extraterrestrial life. the warden looks at the screen and says, "they're only puppets, you know. for children." the master smiles, shrugs, and turns off the television, returning us to the main storyline. but it was incredibly satisfying to discover the 'clangers' through one of my rss feeds last year. anna since tracked down a dvd set of the episodes and they're just great. very cute; entirely reassuring and soothing to watch. and clearly inspirational for nick park and aardman. (there's stephen fry in that last link, too, if you need another reason to click.)

music overkill

so in the throes of trying to decide on a title for my colloquium thesis presentation -- which i'm looking forward to about as much as unanesthetized dental surgery -- i ended up surfing through most of my music collection looking for inspirational lyrics. luckily for me, breaking benjamin and linkin park came through in spades for me -- good lads! -- and i found a title. i'm not sure what arthur griffith or bobby sands would make of linkin park but they're both dead, so that's okay.

but before i found that oh-so-awesome title (yes, i'll put it at the end of this post), i wandered around youtube for awhile because...well, it was better than grinding out more pages of rewrites. and in the 'but what about that song...and didn't that one have a good line...'-ness of it all, i came across a few music videos, then deliberately looked for a few more and, because a good tune is always handy for getting you through a saturday....

is this the most emo video ever? bar, of course, anything made by the nine inch nails?

and the answer is possibly, yes, bar this one by papa roach:

and then there's this -- another entry from seether which i personally think of as "the best way to blow off your celebrity ex-girlfriend in public" video:

sorry about the sound quality on this next one; the lead guitar is a little swallowed up but the one i really wanted i couldn't embed for reasons which pass my technical expertise.

theory of a deadman santa monica
Uploaded by allianceE. - Up-to-the minute news videos.

and because i can't do a post of videos without breaking ben...

oh, and the title? "memories consume: irish republican nationalism, 1980s-1890s," thanks to these guys:

"such a lonely little boy. lonely then and lonelier now."

last night i finished my last grad school library science paper. perhaps in after years this will take on major significance in my life, but mostly it was just another paper and i wrote it and now it's done and i'm okay with that.

i managed to wrangle out a paper topic i was rather proud of. in the face of a suggested list of topics from my professor which included "write about the history of a typeface" and "consider biblioklepts over the years" (okay, they were really cooler than that, but you get the idea), i put together a proposal to write about the history of books in horror fiction.

really, this was just an excuse to re-read a lot of h.p. lovecraft and call it schoolwork.

and it mostly worked. i can't say this is the best paper i've ever written or anything like that, but it's a fairly solid paper; i know it would go over well with either of my history professors, but the lis professors are a peculiar and uneven crowd and difficult to foreguess. we'll see what happens. i am proud of myself for writing a single paper which allowed me to footnote -- within nine pages! -- jane austen, neil gaiman, stephen king, and neal stephenson. oh, and some academic'y stuff, too.

anyway, this is really one long lead-up to what i actually wanted to talk about which was a biography of m.r. james that i read for the paper. (i mostly wrote about two short stories james wrote -- "canon alberic's scrap-book" and "the tractate middoth" and a bunch of miscellaneous lovecraft including "the case of charles dexter ward," "the dunwich horror," and "at the mountains of madness.")

james was a late victorian, born in kent in the mid-nineteenth century, went to eton, then to king's, then proceeded onto the kind of calm, untroubled academic existence that e.m. forster and evelyn waugh, in very different ways, blew right out of the water with maurice and brideshead revisited. (to say nothing of dorothy sayers and gaudy night.) so, in order to garner any useful biographical details -- perhaps best described as "gobbets" in the tradition of irwin from the history boys -- about james's career as an antiquarian and rare books enthusiast for my paper, i read this biography, m.r. james: an intimate portrait, by michael cox. published in 1983 and before you ask -- how can it then be "intimate" when the author was, at best, an infant when the subject was in his last years? who knows. your guess is as good as mine. personally, my guess involves thinking that cox wishes he had been at cambridge in the '80s, '90s, and '00s rather like noel annan and his the dons. fairy tales for the true ivory-tower academic? maybe. we probably all need 'em on some level.

better him than me; they wouldn't even have let me in the door. literally.

the biography is very affectionate and not badly written; cox is clever at picking out good anecdotes and putting them together and teasing out significance from diaries and letters, not always an easy task. he generally resists making wild speculations. he does have a bad habit of smoothing over james's worst points and sometimes refuses to speculate at all just where you'd really like him to -- when it comes to james's private life for example. he never married but had a series of close, affectionate friendships with other men. none of them wildly underage; nothing "inappropriate" -- no fumblings at choirboys or anything like that -- but... i couldn't help feeling that forster, who was up at cambridge while james was there, must have had him in mind when writing maurice, at least a little bit. i think it's laudable that cox wants to avoid the kind of "pseudo-analytic biography" that wants to find significance in everything and claims to be able to know the deepest, darkest thoughts of the subject from grocery lists, but it also seems relatively plain -- even from the evidence cox puts forward -- that, whatever james was, he was no ruler.

is this a bad thing? no. a problem? only in that following his proclivities to the natural conclusion would have been illegal. small issue there. the wilde trial was international headline-making news during james's lifetime; i'm sure he didn't see that as a great "tallyho!" towards emotional satisfaction.

so that's all fine and really only regrettable in that it makes cox seems somewhat hidebound and stuffy in terms of defending his subject from something that isn't really an issue requiring defense and james must have led a sad life at times.

the really annoying part is that cox eternally defends james from charges of being conservative and out of touch with the times. while quoting things like james saying that undergraduates should aim to be able to "con" a page of greek as easily as they can a page of english or french. this is in 1925. okay, that's a laudable ambition but possibly a tad mid-victorian and, y'know, there's been a major world war and lots of people died and--did any of this register with you?

and the answer to all that seems to have been, no, it didn't. and, when it did, james took a fairly natural action and retreated back to familiar ground. familiar ground for him was an evangelical anglican religion and the comforts of eton/cantabrigian academics; a world run entirely by men, for men, whose rules he knew, and in which he had been comfortably at home since the age of 9.

i don't know if this is any more or less in need of defense than his (possible) homosexuality, but it does strike me as being a bright and shining example of why the british empire crashed and burned up against the first 20 years of the 20th century, particularly the first world war. they had people like this leading it and they thought the answer to everything was most likely something that had happened in their childhood. really, if it took place after 1890, it was a little new-fangled. (you should read what he said about the irish! dear god! not quite "white chimpanzees" but not too far off. "inspired by...")

and i don't know if i have any great closing thought for this little mini-rant but it just occurred to me riding home today on the t, reading about james trying to hold a place at king's (cambridge) for the classics against the dubious onslaught of liberality and the natural sciences. no wonder the machine gun came as such a shock -- how would you say it in greek?!

"i love deadlines. i love the 'whoosh!'-ing sound they make as they go by."

notes from a tuesday-that-really-really-really-feels-like-a-monday.

why is it that all deadlines -- no matter how far in advance you knew about them or how well prepared you really are -- hit like bricks? is this some cosmic rule of which i was not informed? if so, i would like to call a foul. or at least an inconvenient. the latest brick to hit are the end-of-term thesis deadlines. argh. two weeks. argh. i realise that i had to be finished editing it and coddling it at some point, but does it have to be so soon? *sniff* (and did it really have to be when i had editing to do on another paper and a paper not included post to write and...and...and...? and the answer to all that is "yes," 'cause that's how life works.) i'm trying very hard to see all these scary deadlines and not-having-a-full-time-job-yet-ness as being opportunities to learn to deal with the universe on a different level -- challenges being handed out by a good teacher, so to speak, to make you stretch a bit -- but minus a good night of sleep in several weeks and plus stress, it's hard. not impossible, but hard.

i'm still determined to keep up my every-other-day posting routine here; i don't really know why since it's a totally arbitrary schedule i thought up more or less at random, but it's something that isn't school- or work-related and i figure it's important to have a couple of those type of things floating around.

i don't have any neat short book reviews for today, but i do have some unconnected thoughts i was hoping to work into something more major later. i picked up hilary mantel's wolf hall from the library the other day and so far it's slightly bizarre but very good. i don't normally care for historical fiction very much -- not for a.s. byatt's self-serving and whiny reasons ("they don't do it good like me!") -- but because i get too caught up in my own speculation about what happened and whether i like how the writer is writing the person and whether i happen to know that an actual historical detail is being elided for the sake of a good story. (okay, maybe that is kind of like what byatt says but, damn, that woman annoys me.) i don't necessarily object if this happens, but it does tend to bump the book further down the "must read now!" list.

i have read and enjoyed more "historical" mystery series than anything else: laurie king's mary russell novels; elizabeth peters' amelia peabody series (colorfully described by my mother as "bonking all over upper egypt"); and c.j. sansom's matthew shardlake books, of which there are only four at the minute, though i hope for more!

i also have eoin colfer's and another thing..., but i haven't been able to bring myself to crack the covers yet. i wouldn't say that i hold the original guide trilogy (in five books) particularly sacred, but i really do love them and i disliked the idea of a "ghostwritten" sequel as soon as i heard about it. nothing i've heard about it since has made me feel any better about it and i just don't have the energy to read one of my treasured pre-adolescent literary memories being done badly.

and now off to write part 2 of my pni post about the internet archive and the wonders of the bookserver project. i won't put any links so you'll all have to head over to pni and increase our traffic!