Tuesday, 10 April 2007
I’ve often been impressed by Gwen Ifill, even more so after reading this essay—and I have to agree: it’s an unequal playing field out there for most of us.
One issue I’d pick with Ms. Ifill, though: those Rutgers players are women not girls.
Tuesday, 3 April 2007
…historians consistently differ from ecologists, who more often than not treat people as exogenous variables that fit awkwardly if at all into the theoretical models of the discipline. The historian’s tendency is quite opposite. The chief protagonists and antagonists of our stories are almost always human, for reasons that go to the very heart of our narrative impulse.*
We archaeologists often try hard to get people, emotional people, into our publications, but it’s difficult to do while appeasing the gods of science by describing what is nearly unarguably true—systematically observed truths, anyway (and replicable, if at all possible—that’s why there’s so much data published in addition to discussions and analysis).
Charles Hudson’s recent fiction, Conversations with the High Priest of Coosa, is an example of a premier ethnohistorian abandoning the limitations of academic publishing in a search for (adventure in?) truths not readily accepted there.
BTW, a triumphant (not triumphal) 4.6 miles today at 3.6 mph. Whew! T-shirt weather already, even before 8 am.
* William Cronon. 1992. A Place for Stories: Nature, History, and Narrative, Journal of American History 78:1347–1376.
Wednesday, 7 March 2007
Finished Daniel Tammet’s autobiography Born on a Blue Day (2006). He’s got both Asperger’s syndrome and synesthesia. The former is a mild form of autism (so They say, but nothing about it sounds “mild” to me), and the latter makes him associate colors and other physical attributes to numbers (“one” is a bright white light). The volume starts with more on the synesthesia, and ends with more on his life. I kept wondering what the synesthesia is like in his adult life, as I couldn’t find much on that.
Anyway, it’s quite readable if you’re interested.
And an antidote to ponderous reads on the Archaic-Formative transition in Mesoamerica….
euryhaline
an aquatic organism able to tolerate a wide range of salinity
Sunday, 4 March 2007
Magnolia liliiflora, or Japanese magnolia, although the species is from China.
From Carl Hiaasen in Nature Girl (2006, pg. 188):
Thirty years in the seafood business combined with grossly irregular bathing habits had cloaked upon Louis Piejack a distinct and inconquerable funk. Were it cologne, the essense would have included the skin of Spanish mackerel, the roe of black mullet, the guts of gag grouper, the wrung-out brains of spiny lobster and the milky seepage of raw oysters. The musk emanated most pungently from Piejack’s neck and arms, which had acquired a greenish yellow sheen under daily basting of gill slime and fish shit. Nothing milder than industrial lye could have cleansed the man.
I shivered reading that and the image of standing on a wharf awash in the odor of sea-ness filled my mind and nose. You can tell Piejack is a bad guy, right?
Overall take on the book: loved the character and adventures of Honey Santana. A good read.
fetor (Br. foetor)
a strong, foul smell
We usually use fetid (Br. foetid), the adjective, rather than the noun form….
Wednesday, 28 February 2007
I believe that once or twice I’ve commented on the fiction of Jim Harrison. Here’s the beginning of his poem Suzanne Wilson:
Is it better to rake all the leaves
in one’s life into a pile
or leave them scattered? That’s a good question
as questions go, but then they’re easier to burn
in one place.
I’m sure I’m doing Harrison a disservice by not including the whole text (so you get the whole idea), instead leaving it up to you to find a copy of Saving Daylight (2006), page 101, on your own.
Meanwhile, my copy is due back at the library tomorrow….
Wednesday, 21 February 2007
Vocabulary of the day: geopiety. Basically, a kind of topophilia.
And there’s nothing dirty about either one!
Thursday, 25 January 2007
Found this periwinkle on our stroll over to our nearby library branch. And also a friendly tortoiseshell kitty.
Bounty in the NYTimes: this article on author Jim Harrison, who grew up in Michigan and used to hang out in the Grand Marais area. His writing is luminous and I find it difficult to forget his characters’ sometimes wrenching circumstances.
Is it any coincidence that our downstairs thermostat should go whacky this evening, just when the meteorologists are predicting low temps tonight that will rival our lowest so far this winter? Poor JCB is off at the hahd-wahr stoh getting a replacement, handyman that he is.
epigenetic
resulting from external rather than genetic influences
Monday, 22 January 2007
If only it were just a toggle switch….
The election season is upon us. I saw my first negative ad today (watch it here). From moveon.org, I’m sorry to say. It dissed John McCain, and smeared George Bush in the process, saying sending in more troops is McCain’s idea, thus making Bush McCain’s puppet.
Without a doubt, he’s somebody’s puppet!
Sunday, 14 January 2007
At the urging of KAH, I recently switched from relatively generic fish oils (Target, Meijer), to this fancy Omega 3.6.9 from Nordic Naturals. It differs from the rest of its ilk because it is “filtered” and I am letting myself believe that that is important….
Sometimes investigating jargon leads us to interesting vocabulary lessons. I recall some time ago when I encountered the word “subaltern” and had no idea what it meant. The usage was in the jargon of agency studies (and Anthony Giddens), and referred to the low status and powerlessness of the commoner masses (I think). The word, however, has an upstanding prior meaning. As a noun, it meant a low-ranking British army officer. As an adjective, it did refer to those of low status (hence its co-opting by social theorists), but it also has this meaning (thank you Apple Dictionary):
Over my head!
Tuesday, 29 August 2006
One of Atlanta’s many nicknames is Gate City, as in the gates to a better life (with Biblical overtones to many ears, I’m sure), and Rebecca chose to refer to that name in the title of—ta-dah!—her new book, Rage in the Gate City, available at your local independent bookseller, and, of course, from Amazon.
The book’s coming out party was tonight, at the Margaret Mitchell house (where she lived in an apartment when she authored GWTW—it’s rarely written out in these parts), in Midtown Atlanta. Rebecca’s book is about riots—lynchings and beatings and other violations of civil rights—committed against Blacks in Atlanta by Whites in late summer and fall 1906. R tells of the horrors with the deft hand of a seasoned journalist, and will be in the forefront, along with many others, in events scheduled to commemorate and remind us of the poison of divisiveness we humans can be so deft at generating (viz. current events in southwest Asia, southeast Asia, portions of Africa and South America, hrrumph).