Just in case you haven't seen this video yet:
"Fidelity": Don't Divorce… from Courage Campaign on Vimeo.
I don't usually use this blog as a space to urge people to sign petitions or take political action, but I'm making an exception. Because invalidating loving couples' marriages, breaking up the legal arrangements they've made to be recognized as committed to each other, is a pointlessly cruel thing to do, no matter how you look at it.
Yesterday I finally went to a wine tasting at Thames River Wine and Spirits, which hosts these evenings every week. It was a nice event, and I love their cavernous underground cellar space, which looks like a stage set for a prison scene in some Verdi opera or another, only with wine racks lining the walls. All the same, I could feel my Wine Store Anxiety ratcheting up: the feeling that I really should know a lot more about wine that I do, the dread of revealing my wine ignorance to other people, the fear of being laughed at by more knowledgeable oenophiles, the sheer baffling information overload of all those bottles and regions and names and types of grape. (Plus I didn't know anyone there, which, for me, creates anxiety of a different kind. Maybe I'll find someone to take with me next time.)
It's ridiculous, because I know there are plenty of people out there who are happy to help, but Wine Store Anxiety still plagues me every single time I try to pick out a bottle of wine. I always feel like I should be able to teach myself about it on my own, but I never know where to start, and the prospect of asking for help makes me want to run and hide. Most of what I do know about wine I've learned from knowledgeable friends who were willing to give me pointers; I think if I had more conversations like that, or maybe a little semi-formal instruction,* I'd probably feel less intimidated by wine stores.
It occurred to me that this is probably how students with "library anxiety" feel when they walk into a library: overwhelmed, ashamed of their ignorance, afraid to ask for help, and in over their heads. It's not a perfect analogy, of course, but I suspect that many of the same approaches might help both types of anxiety: friendly outreach, a bit of class time, the chance to work with a peer and feel a little less alone, small manageable assignments (only one database at a time; only red wines from northern Italy) rather than trying to learn everything at once.
None of these ideas are earth-shattering. But it's probably good for someone in my job, with years of library-related education, to know how it feels to be a panicky newbie.
* I always meant to take a course at the Wine School of Philadelphia back when I lived a couple of blocks from it, and I never had time. Ah well. Someday.
The answer to that question, it turns out (with all due apologies to Percy Shelley), is "No. Not really." At least, it doesn't seem that way in the dead zone at the end of January and the beginning of February, when it seems like it's been winter forever and spring is still two months away. For several weeks now I've been feeling generally blah: my excitement about the first snowfall of the season faded gradually into "Oh, for the love of little green apples, it's snowing AGAIN?", my mood soured to crankiness over the perpetual slush and the skyrocketing heating bills, and I've been uninclined to blog or write or read or do much of anything entertaining in my spare time.
It took me until recently to realize that the season was getting to me, less severely than it used to in Ann Arbor (where someone once described the winter as "a sunless horror, devoid of joy or hope"), but still. I pondered investing in one of those full-spectrum lightboxes. I wondered if I should have spent more of the winter break somewhere warmer and sunnier.
And then I went for a walk, and realized that what I needed was the exercise. Before the snows set in, I'd been walking home from work most evenings. My walk home is a little over a mile and a half, and while it's not the most scenic walk ever, I vastly prefer to get my exercise that way than on a treadmill in a gym. We had several successive heavy snowfalls that made part of my walking route impassable, thanks to the city's policy of not bothering to clear snow from sidewalks where there aren't any houses and plowing snow onto the sidewalks in some places. So I've been taking the bus home instead of walking, and feeling lethargic and out of shape.
But yesterday, with most of last week's snow gone and only an inch or two newly falling, I walked home for the first time in weeks, and felt better for it; I stopped thinking of the snow as a nuisance and started finding it beautiful again. I walked home again today, listening to the Digital Campus podcast, and on the way I had a train of thought about teaching and the construction of knowledge that might end up leading somewhere very interesting. The podcast sparked the train of thought, but so did being in motion, breathing in the cold air and feeling it circulate through my bloodstream.
I think on, and with, my feet, and I think I always have. I knew this already, but it's helpful to have further evidence.
I've blogged previously about characters from TV shows (most notably Battlestar Galactica) showing up on Twitter. And it's not just BSG: just recently I started watching AMC's Mad Men, twittered about it, and shortly thereafter got a notification that "Peggy Olson is now following you on Twitter." It turns out that the twittering Mad Men characters are the work of fans, not the network, and that after a clumsy attempt on AMC's part to shut down the unauthorized tweets, the network relented and the characters returned to Twitter.
Having fictional characters turn up on the web is an interesting sideline, but the main stories on BSG and Mad Men are still being told on the shows themselves. But I've also been seeing more and more instances of people using Web 2.0ish ways to tell stories interactively. There was the War of the Worlds reenactment on Twitter last November (postmortem here, tweet archive here), itself a reference to Orson Welles' transposition of H. G. Wells' novel to the new medium of the radio and the resulting confusion between fiction and reality. And one of my favorite things on the web last year was an online series called Shadow Unit, a kind of virtual science-fiction/horror/police procedural about FBI agents, written by a very smart crew of writers and conceived as a written homage to episodic TV. It took me a while to realize that in addition to the episodes themselves, several of the characters were keeping LiveJournals in which the storylines continued to play out—and fans could interact directly with characters. It's as if Mulder and Scully had blogs where we all could comment, only somehow much more satisfying (probably because the Shadow Unit writers don't have to answer to any non-fictional network). I'm waiting eagerly for the start of the second season.
I have a theory that fiction and fan fiction are heading toward some sort of convergence with the social web, and we'll be seeing a lot more virtual audience participation (and creation, as well as participation) in the future. I suspect that Cory Doctorow's vision of a near future where masses of people contribute to an online novel, the best bits of which find their way into fan-produced physical books, isn't all that far from happening. I'll be very interested to see what happens next.
So where were you yesterday for President Obama's inauguration? I was at work, but we had a bunch of viewing rooms all over campus set aside for the occasion. I wound up in one of the library viewing rooms with several coworkers, commenting from time to time but mostly just sitting and watching history unfold. Then I went back to the reference desk, rather more red-eyed and less cynical than I usually am in the middle of the day on a Tuesday in January. I'm sure at some point I'll go back to feeling like everything is just the same as it always was and ever will be, but not, I think, just yet.
A few inauguration-related things I noticed around the web:
As a friend of mine said over IM yesterday: Happy new era!
It's been well below freezing in my part of New England this week, with attendant snow and ice and blasts of arctic air. My heating bills don't bear thinking of, and I've been wearing about fifteen layers and still can't get warm. (Though it could be worse. I could be living in Minnesota.)
So certain poems have been in my head lately. Wallace Stevens' "The Snow Man," especially, and Thomas Hardy's "Snow in the Suburbs." But today I thought of W. H. Auden's "Brussels in Winter," which I first encountered ages ago in one of my favorite classes. And then I couldn't get it out of my head, so here it is:
Wandering the cold streets tangled like old string,
Coming on fountains silent in the frost,
The city still escapes you; it has lost
The qualities that say "I am a Thing."
Only the homeless and the really humbled
Seem to be sure exactly where they are,
And in their misery are all assembled;
The winter holds them like the Opera.
Ridges of rich apartments rise tonight
Where isolated windows glow like farms:
A phrase goes packed with meaning like a van,
A look contains the history of man,
And fifty francs will earn the stranger right
To warm the heartless city in his arms.
Remember that idea I had for a project dealing with Dracula and information technology some months back? I think it may turn into an actual article, or at least the makings of one. I’d been thinking, over the winter break, about which of my various research ideas (some library-related, some more literary, some, like this one, in-between) that I might want to pursue in the new year, and the Dracula project suddenly started calling to me. I’ve been using some of the downtime before spring semester starts to pull together a bibliography, and I’m rereading the novel with a steadily increasing level of interest in what it has to say about documents and their circulation.
What’s intriguing me right now is the parallel between Dracula’s self-replication (by making more and more vampires) and the replication of documents by everyone else (by copying, transcribing, and typing out in triplicate). Dracula himself is a sort of oral register of Transylvanian history. The very last paragraphs of the novel call attention to the scarcity of “authentic” documents, e.g. handwritten ones, among the fictional archive of records out of which Jonathan Harker claims to have assembled the narrative. Lots of people turn out to have already written about Dracula and the telegraph, the phonograph, and other communication technologies of the 19th century, but I think there’s something I can add.
I keep having to remind myself that even though I’m not by training a Victorianist, the great advantages of being an independent scholar are not having to produce at the speed of the tenure clock (and hence more time for research into new subject areas) and being able to work on whatever one wants to. If something good enough to publish or present comes out of it, I’ll be very pleased; but it’s also a nifty project that unites a bunch of things I’m interested in—history of the book, technologies of writing, supernatural literature—but haven’t really had a chance to write about yet. It may take a while to finish, but I’m remembering just how much fun a good research jag can be.
I've had a chance to try out the new iPod Touch lately, and I'm predictably in love with its combination of usefulness, high-end aesthetics, and ridiculous but cool features (among the apps I've downloaded from the App Store, just for the hell of it, are a Magic 8 Ball simulator and a carpenter's level). The email interface is simple and sensible. I love the fact that if I'm in the kitchen wondering what to make for dinner, I can use it to grab my building's wireless network and surf over to Chocolate and Zucchini in search of a half-remembered recipe. (I like the colossal storage space for music and whatnot, too, but since I've already experienced that with an earlier-generation iPod, it's not as much of a novelty.)
But far and away my favorite application is Stanza, an ebook reader that allows downloading from various free ebook sources, from Project Gutenberg to a few I'd never heard of. The download catalog is a bit tedious to navigate, but reading on the 2" by 3" screen is surprisingly easy on the eyes. Over the Christmas holidays I read an entire short novel, Cory Doctorow's Little Brother, on Stanza. I never saw the appeal of reading on anything as small as an iPod before, but now I do. Carrying a massive book collection on the train or plane in a tiny device that fits in one's pocket is the perfect solution to my perpetual "must bring along a ton of stuff to read" travel quandary.
But the real advantage of reading on the iPod is that it cuts down on the distractions you get while reading ebooks on a computer. Oh, you can still close the Stanza application and fire up Safari or check email or whatever, but the internet access depends on there being a wifi network available, and the process is slower than just opening up another browser tab or a new window. Speaking of Cory Doctorow, he has an excellent podcast on this very subject: the unrecognized usefulness of the codex format for screening out distractions. The iPod doesn't quite screen those distractions out, but it does make it easier to focus on one thing at a time.
So: the iPod is a much better reading device than I'd thought it would be. Though I still wouldn't want to write anything longer than a Twitter update or a quick email on it, because tapping at the screen-keyboard with my thumb makes me feel like the world's clumsiest and slowest hunt-and-peck typist.
I have plenty of things I'd like to accomplish in 2009, but I'm not framing them in the form of resolutions because I've made a meta-resolution not to make any more resolutions that I won't enjoy keeping. I just don't have time to guilt myself out. So the goals go on my to-do list instead.
I'm just going to make one New Year's resolution this year: I will try to be more embodied, in as many ways as possible. I doubt anyone who knows me would be surprised that I live a lot in my head. My brain, and not my senses, is usually my first point of interaction with the world. I don't see my thinkiness as a problem to be fixed, or a failing to apologize for; but it does mean that I can let myself get sensorily deprived if I'm not careful. It happened a lot when I was working on my Ph.D. I've gotten much better about paying attention to my senses as well as my cerebral cortex, but I think I need reminders every so often.
So, among other ways of being more aware of living in my body, I'm going to try to:
I'd include "wear perfume every day" on the list, but I already do that, thanks to the geniuses at the Black Phoenix Alchemy Lab. It's kind of a self-indulgent resolution to make, I know, but it's also a way of trying to engage more with the world, and the more I look over the list I've just made, the more connections I see with building community where I am, which is also something I'd really like to do on a larger scale.
Did you make any New Year's resolutions, Reader? What are you trying to do more (or less) of?
