I am going to a history conference in Maryland this afternoon, which means I explode out of my afternoon seminar today and run for the parking lot by the library, where I will be picked up by a friend and driven to the airport. With any luck the air-traffic-control-related meltdown that seems to happened this morning will merely delay, rather than prevent, my arrival in Baltimore.

This means that I have to miss a scheduled talk this afternoon entitled "Unexplored Aspects of the Life of Richard Baxter." Ah, well. (Richard Baxter is a seventeenth-century English divine. The problem with this talk is not the life of Richard Baxter as such, but rather that the unexplored aspects of his life are probably far less exciting than the stuff I am capable of dreaming up.)

Also, random student email of the week, from yesterday: "Haha, I love how it took me 2/3's of the semester to realize we had the same initials."

This was the entirety of the email. It was in response to an email I had sent to the entire class, which I signed using -- you guessed it -- my initials.

Finally. It came to my attention yesterday evening that the song "My Way," which I had always assumed was a Sid Vicious/Sex Pistols song, is actually a Frank Sinatra song. Huh.

My recently-acquired Penguin edition of Montaigne's Essays is translated and edited by a man named Screech.

One of my students in class today said "Sapphic victory" when I think she meant "Pyrrhic victory." As in such and such a battle was a Sapphic victory for the British, since etc. etc.

This was one of those hard-to-keep-a-straight-face moments. I do not think that the British had many Sapphic victories in the eighteenth century.

However, I am willing to be corrected on this point.



(I think this whole business can actually be blamed on the NYT, since they had an article today about gay marriage that used both "Sapphic" and "Pyrrhic" in the title, at least in the web version. Possibly the student had seen this some time during the day and the words had gotten associated somehow.)

About 30 minutes ago, there was a knock on my office door, and a student stuck his head in. This was not a student I recognized -- it was a kid with a very brightly colored gray, mint green and yellow hoodie and Japanese-style David Bowie hair. He asked if he could talk to me. I said sure, thinking this has to do with courses next semester, or something like that. But this kid seemed peculiarly jittery and anxious.

What emerged was that this student, Joe, was working on a paper for a course on early modern Japan. His professor had gone home, the Writing Center had no appointments left, no one was left upstairs in the English department, and he was wandering around in search of help with his paper -- anyone, at this point, would do. Hence the anxiousness. I explained that I was a colonial Americanist and my advice would be limited in its scope due to my utter lack of background knowledge.

So, Joe and I talked for about 20 minutes about a play I have never read from a period of history I know very little about, and what he was going to argue in his paper about said play. He had his thesis and outline on his iPhone, which he showed me. It became one of those teacher-as-reflective-surface sort of conversations, where all I've got about this topic is what he's telling me, so all I can do is look for themes, or interesting questions, in what he says, and ask him about them. So we talked about samurai values, competing notions of order and honor, and variety of other things.

With any luck, I have helped rather than hindered. I mean -- really, I do not know much about eighteenth-century Japan. I do not know whether what just happened was pedagogy in its purest, most abstract form, or a complete and utter waste of Joe's time.

More conferences with students today about research papers. Some of them seem to have an intuitive grasp of how to frame an argument -- and with one of them, despite an entire semester of discussions, has still, I suspect, not really grasped the distinction between history and historiography. When I asked him what the scholarly context was for his argument, he said, a little nonplussed, that it was about manifest destiny. Fine, but what have historians been ARGUING about manifest destiny? How does this particular paper contribute to that discussion? He looked at me like I was the participant in the conversation who had utterly failed to understand the point.

He is the only one who I think has this problem as far as I can tell. However, either he wasn't listening (and he's a talker rather than a listener -- one of those people who utterly fails to read cues as to when he's supposed to shut the hell up) or I need to have another class discussion about what secondary sources are for. They are not (as this kid seemed to think) merely an inferior version of primary sources. Gah.

I am currently in Kentucky. It is not as different from Tennessee as one might think (I am still getting used to the concept that November in the south = 70 degrees on many afternoons). Also, on the news, there are often "frost warnings." We must be warned?

Large British history conference this weekend. I am giving a paper on Sunday. In the interim I will be, with any luck, listening to other people's papers and asking, if not useful, at least not stupid questions. (Yes, Virginia, there is such a thing as a stupid question.)

Also. I went to bed early last night because I was tired, but my colleague with whom I'm splitting a hotel room went down to the bar, where there were evidently a lot of very, very drunk historians. When historians get drunk, they tend to say the things about one another's work that one has only suspected that they think. Also, they complain about their graduate students. I am very glad I am no longer anyone's graduate student.

Although I have been mistaken for one once already this weekend. And then last week, I was asked at a departmental function whether I was one of Dan's students, Dan being the department's (other) early Americanist. This is frustrating. I am dressed like a grownup. I am polite, well-groomed and generally well-behaved. What is the DEAL here?

I agreed to go to a student thing tomorrow morning -- it's related to funding for cancer research, and one of my students asked if I would stop by. So I will stop by. I tend to default to yes on invitations like this, because it's sort of fun.

Also, I have dinner at my department chair's house next week. This is somewhat nervewracking. I will have to dress up. And somehow I need to communicate the not-eating-meat thing.

Other than that I have been doing nothing but grading papers (I got one superlatively good one about the social and cultural functions of alcohol in William Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line) and writing cover letters for jobs. And boxing up a copy of my entire revised dissertation/book mss for this one postdoc application -- this seems excessive. They are going to get about 150 applications for this, and possibly a LOT of boxes of stuff similar to mine. I don't really believe that the committee is going to read every single one. But hey. Whatever. If they want it, they can have it. (Fortunately, the department will pay for me sending it, so the $10 or so in postage is not my problem.)

I need to go home and eat. I am so hungry I can hardly spell. (It took me three tries just now to type "hardly".)

Also, we had to have a conversation in class today about what postmodernism is. I suppose it is appropriate that I don't really think anyone in the room (potentially including me) emerged with a clearer understanding of postmodernism. After all if postmodernism exists, doesn't it necessarily follow that attempting to define it is pointless, since truth (definitions included) is subjective and context-dependent?

Six people in seminar today. Out of fourteen. We get a long weekend this weekend, aka fall break, so I was not surprised that most of them checked out early. So, after a brief discussion of research methods, I contributed to the general delinquency and wrapped it up for the day.

When I get back on Monday, there will be thirty papers (with any luck) about William Byrd II waiting in my inbox.

The grading, it burns . . .

I just discovered that my dissertation, one tiny corner of which I'm hacking up to reconstitute as a conference paper, contains the following sentence: "Harvey’s policy on new grants of land, not to mention memory of his earlier visit to the colony in 1624, left the council and the planters generally with little reason to love the governor."

Sweet home . . . Jamestown?

I have been invited by one of my students for a reception for the Asian-American Students Association next month -- there will be both tea and calligraphy!

Also, I said "shit" in class today. The context was eighteenth-century medicine, the point being that many early modern medicines were designed with one of two outcomes in mind -- either they make you vomit, or they make you shit. They seemed surprised that I would use this word. We were all fine with "penis" in class when we were talking about an article about an ambiguously gendered (and ambiguously sexed) person in early Virginia last week, but somehow English four letter words are worse.

I just wrote that letter of recommendation for the student who asked me for one last Friday. First one I've ever written. Well, a few years ago I was asked by a professor I'd known as an undergraduate to write a letter for her tenure file, to provide evidence for undergraduate teaching and mentoring, but that was slightly different.

Now, I have got to read almost all of Byrd's Histories of the Dividing Line between now and tomorrow. I kept telling the students (who had about two weeks to read this) to do a little for each class, to space it out, because reading all 300pp the night before is not much fun.

However, I have signally failed to follow my own advice. In my defense, I'm probably a quicker reader than many of them, particularly of this kind of text, and I have read this before. But still. I should know better.

I just finished my book orders for next semester. Desk copies will soon be winging their way toward me. With any luck, I have chosen books that will work for class discussion. For the death class, I went with Hamlet over The Spanish Tragedy, in part because I think it'll work better for discussion, and in part because there is a politics to reading lists -- I want a decent enrollment for this course, and people tend to sign up for classes with Great Books on the syllabus.(Liberal anti-western bias in universities, my ass.)

I learned my lesson about textbook adoptions this semester. I went with the Penguin version of Utopia because it was cheap, but I should have gone with Norton or Oxford -- the Penguin translator decided to render Raphael Hythlodaeus as Raphael Nonsenso, which is etymlogically accurate but for some reason slightly irritating. So, next time, if I teach this course again, we're going with Norton. Also, with Norton, you get all that extra stuff in the appendices.

I was talking to one of my students before class today, and he mentioned that a friend of his is in my History 200 class and really liked the reading for this week. It's an article on Thomas/ine Hall of Warrosquyoake, Virginia, who was biologically intersex and switched off between presenting his/her self as a man and a woman. Which the good people of Warrosquyoacke found troubling, leading to court cases, documents and ultimately this article by Kathleen Brown in the Journal of the History of Sexuality (if anyone's interested).

Anyhow, it's always good to know that one's reading is causing conversation.

Data entry makes me slightly sick to my stomach. It's peculiar. Also the whole contacts-sticking-to-corneas thing. I spent about an hour just now entering addresses into an envelope template so that I can email said addresses to Previous University, and they can then dispatch my letters of recommendation and transcripts, etc. to the jobs I am applying to. I complain about entering the addresses, but then again, I am lucky to have come out of a department who will do all the assembling-of-letters-and-mailing for me. Sweet.

One of my students, who missed class on Wednesday, came to my office today to ask what he'd missed. He hadn't really done the reading, and partly he wanted to be filled in on the discussion -- I told him to re-read the article and then come to me with some questions, if he wanted to discuss -- and partly just wanted to chat. So, we talked about Stephen Ambrose, and early America, and history in general for a while.

And then another one emailed me late this afternoon for a letter of recommendation. I would be happy to do this, but Jebus H. Christ, the deadline is Tuesday. Today is Friday. A little advance notice, please. (Please?). However, I will do it. She sent me her resume and her last paper, so I will get my shit together on Monday and do this.

I read two papers today which said basically the same thing. Not in a plagiarism kind of way, but in an accidental resemblance kind of way, like the way there will often be people at European train stations that look like your college roommate.

One of them merits an A- and the other a B at best, though, because the first is well-written and argues the point in an interesting way and the second is fuzzy, repetitive and under-sourced. (Sort of like me and that roommate. Hah!)


(Also. Why isn't there an LJ application that will make my text scroll towards a vanishing point, like in Star Wars? This seems obvious.)

So, I have one student who has been admitted into the university's psychiatric hospital, which is why he has not turned in his paper. Fair enough. Poor guy -- I hope he's on the mend.

And the other guy, who had an extension but failed to produce at the revised deadline, came to my office hours the other day and we had a long talk about the paper. In addition to the issues that required the extension, he had been having trouble formulating his thoughts, and with the paper that he eventually turned in last night (one copy under my door, one in my dept. mailbox, and a third in my email) he included a note that explained he's happy with it now. Excellent! It's still late, but I suspect it will be better than it would have been otherwise. He mentioned being nervous about coming to see me, and feeling much better afterward, but I take this with some skepticism; this guy, despite being clever, comes off as a little bit prone to BS.

Also, one of the kids from the Wednesday section has this capacity for making really good arguments, but occasionally using the wrong word for things. Not entirely the wrong word, but the right word's third cousin, which is sometimes even worse. I will be reading a otherwise logical and interesting passage but be stopped in my tracks when the student mentions some fact about 18th century Virginia planter Landon Carter and goes on to note that we as historians need to be "cognoscente" of this fact. I think he means "cognizant." Although at this point in the semester, we've been talking about Virginia for so long that cognoscente might well be appropriate. Although we would be cognoscenti, rather than being "cognoscente of" something. (It's a noun, not an adjective, as far as I know).

End Diction Police Interlude.

I am finishing my list for next semester's book orders. I think I'm going to assign Hamlet for the "Death in Europe" course -- I want to do a revenge tragedy, it would be either that or Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy. Kyd is gorier, and the Elizabethan appetite for blood and guts is worth talking about in the context of the course, but I think Hamlet might be more fun. I don't know. Still on the fence about this one, the more that I think about it.

Also, I may hit them with some Decameron action. Although my patience with medieval literature wears very thin very easily. All that goddamn allegory -- it's a form of intellectual constipation.

This is made of awesome. (Click to embiggen).



The comic is by an artist named Kate Beaton. Here is her website. There are lots of other history strips, too.

I have tracked down all the missing History 200 papers -- or, almost. I gave an extension to one student, but he still hasn't coughed up the assignment; another one asked what the rules are for late papers, and I have seen neither hide nor hair of him, or his paper, since then.

I've read five of this round so far. Not bad, although one has a serious case of straw man -- i.e. the paper claims that the secondary source we read is arguing something, and then argues against that, but the secondary source is not in fact arguing that at all -- quite the opposite, in fact. So, I had to write one of those comments that goes something like, "the difficulty here lies in the basic premise of your argument . . . "

Interestingly, the straw man that was set up in this case was the based on the assumption that "counter-culture" is necessarily a pejorative term. This surprised me. It certainly isn't in the book in question -- and not really in real life either, I don't think. It's a morally-neutral term, as far as I know -- I mean, it all depends on what you think of the culture that is being "countered," right?

Also, spelling error of the day: "adventuress" for "adventurous." I wish the early Virginian settlers had been more adventuress on the whole, but alas, no.

There is a stack of 30 papers waiting for me on Monday. Some will be good. Some will be terrible. Some will be utterly impenetrable. We'll see how this goes. One poor kid emailed me to tell me that his parents are visiting, and he's had so much caffeine he's throwing up, and what is the penalty for late papers? Another one was 5 minutes late turning it in because she likes to have her roommate proofread her English (she is not a native speaker) which I am inclined to let slide. In most cases, I'll give them up to 15 minutes grace before I consider a paper late -- one of my favorite teaching memories is being just about to go home and seeing a student of mine burst through the double doors down the hall and come racing, in flip-flops, down the length of the building, waving a paper and calling "Wait! Professor! I've got it! I've got it!"

In two cases, no paper at all has graced my inbox. One is from one of the top students in either section, the other from an individual who sits there with his arms folded and his legs stretched out and glares at the tabletop all through seminar. I'm going to have to send some emails on Monday morning.

Also, there is a Very Large Spider ensconced on the outer sill of my office window. This means, functionally, that I cannot open the window until the VLS either dies, relocates or is blown away in a storm, because I don't want the damned thing to crawl into my bag, which is usually on the interior sill, or onto my chair, or onto me, when I am not looking. This is one of the disadvantages to not having screens in the windows.

(Yes. I am afraid of spiders. My character has all kinds of interesting quirks and sub-absurdities.)

A few weeks ago in my history methods seminar we did an activity about footnotes -- what types of thing you can use these for, how to format, how many sources can go in a footnote, etc. I used a few random pages from a well-known book on slavery for this.

Today, their reading was a chapter from this same book on slavery. As explained in the syllabus, it was Chapter Nine, pages 497-558 or somesuch.

In class, the discussion dragged a little. I was surprised, since this section of the seminar tends to be very talkative. Finally, someone asked, "what part of the reading are we talking about?" After some puzzlement on my part, a few probing questions and finally a poll, it emerged that only three people had read the chapter that was assigned. The other 13 had thought that the reading was the three random pages of this book that we'd discussed several sessions back.

Gah.

The good thing is, we got over an hour's discussion out of it, regardless. I had them divide into groups and asked the ones who HAD done the reading to explain it to the others; we talked about slavery for a while; and then I let the discussion wander a bit. We talked about research papers, among other things.

But seriously. I am trying to decide whether this is somehow my fault or not. I am leaning towards "no" at this point, but nevertheless I will put a note in the syllabus next semester that the chapter they are assigned to read at this point in the class is NOT the three random pages I gave them when we talked about footnotes.

At which point next semester's students will probably look at me like I'm some kind of idiot.

Oh well.

They've discovered that I am in my office most afternoons -- even outside of office hours. Which resulted in a freaking conga-line through my office today.

I don't mind, on the whole. I would rather have them come and knock on my door than not, if they have questions or want to know whether their paper topic addresses the prompt. One had a contact lens emergency during our conversation (fortunately I had solution) and another one informed me that the B I had given him was the lowest grade he had ever gotten on a paper. (Seriously?) And he is a junior-year history major who has never heard of the Chicago Manual of Style. Several of them have told me this, actually.

Well, I am here to remedy such things.