Ursula

My sister thanks you all: her sample size doubled after I posted.

Here's a game I'd like to try: Comment, and I will write an entry (about my own life, naturally) in the style of one of your journal entries.

The Light of Saint Bunstable scroll is done, save for seal, signatures, and the name of the recipient. Small images are below the cut; larger ones are linked.

( pictures )

glasseye commissioned earrings from Bill Dawson for my birthday, based on fifth- and sixth-century Germanic jewelry. They're silver hoops with truncated cubes at the bottom, which makes them geeky in at least three different ways.

( cut for pictures and to protect the bitter )

reasie has the featured story at Reflection's Edge this month, where I told her to submit; therefore, I win proxy gloating privileges.

In personal gloating privileges, IROSF has just offered me money for a review of Band of Gypsys [sic]. Thanks to nobu for saying nice things about the first draft, and to franzeska for saying mean things about the second.

I'm translating the text for the Light of Saint Bunstable (our local college's award) into Latin. If your Latin is less rusty than mine, or your knowledge of medieval Latin better, or if you're generally curious, I'd appreciate your comments.

( in several stages )

I had to engage in a certain amount of verbal contortion because I don't know whether a man or a woman will receive the award; the rabbit is a standard joke on Bunstable/ Bunnies, but I inserted it because rabbits are grammatically masculine, while one person or one student might not be.

I'm back, and enjoying the combination of coffee and Internet.

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yagowe made this icon for me. In case you hadn't noticed, it's the same upside-down.

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This article on Academical Dress in New Zealand has an extensive and detailed discussion of medieval academic dress, but alas, no pictures. A fifteenth-century English Master of Arts' costume might consist of cassock, robe, tabard, hood, and knitted cap. Plain purple tabards actually sound like a good Bunstable project (especially since we're lacking in undergraduates). Does anyone have fifteenth-century images of tabards?

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The Instituto de Matematicas office in Morelia had elaborate Christmas decorations (still, in the middle of January), including a Christmas tree, a creche with mossy background & attendant sheep, and several large stuffed toy snowmen with long arms and legs. Somehow it's easier for me to understand the creche in a state university than the lanky pseudo-secular snowmen in a place where it never snows.

I've just finished Mary Renault's The Charioteer and Anthony Trollope's The Claverings in quick succession. The Charioteer proceeds on far subtler shifts of emotion than The Claverings; this creates the impression that England in 1940 is far more foreign a country than England in the 1860s. (Would one allow a man who had just finished five or ten strong drinks composed mostly of whiskey to drive one home, or share a cigarette with a small child in hospital, in the nineteenth century?)

The two books have the same plot, in broad outline: classic love triangles, in which a man must choose between his first love, who has gained more experience of the world than is entirely wholesome, who is strong and proud and essentially lonely, and a younger person, more innocent, but braver in moral conviction. Both heroes find themselves in the awkward position of having declared genuine love to two people at once. Harry Clavering has an easier choice: one of his loves is socially acceptable and one is not, and though he does not personally have much sense his mother does, so he can let her make up his mind for him, and then live happily ever after. Laurie has to choose for himself. Unlike Harry, he has the insight to do so on his own; but then Laurie needs it, since he has neither a wise mother nor a societal rule to fall back on.

I was disappointed in Tooth and Claw, which bills itself as Trollope-with-dragons, because I thought that in substituting real violence for social violence it ruined the suspense. There's a genuine guilt and uncertainty in defying your selfish uncle, say, which disappears when that uncle has definite plans to eat you for dinner. (Tooth and Claw also breaks the rules of Victorian novels by giving a happy ending to a woman who would in the normal course of things have had nothing for it but to die gracefully, which increased my sense that all the strictures were arbitrary, and inevitable consequence lacking.) I wonder now, though, if the real problem is that I don't admire Trollope. I enjoy him, certainly-- he has flashes of very clear-headed observation, as in the remark that people must work, and those who attempt to lead lives of pleasure will end by turning their hobbies into work as well, and my copy of The Claverings included the original illustrations, which was an amusement all its own (men with moustaches! bridesmaids in veils!)-- but overall Trollope seems to take the easy way out.

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I feel as if I ought to post about Morelia, but I have become distracted by drinking limonada and arguing about Stephenson and watching the fountain; so later, perhaps?

A link from greythistle on feminism, housework, and choices that aren't makes me wonder about the liberal arts & ambition-- there's no particular reason why an English or sociology degree should doom you to life as a secretary, but so many of my non-math friends seem to feel stuck between temping and grad school . . .

Questions from alsoelsewhere.

1. What was the subtle boredom you've occasionally mentioned?

A lack of focus: that is, a failure to focus my attention sharply on any one thing, which is restful at first but eventually produces a generalized feeling of aimlessness, and an inability to engage in distractions more complicated than interpersonal politics or video games or endlessly hitting refresh. I have a certain mental cycle: stressed and working hard, and also procrastinating in elaborate ways, followed by a deliberate attempt to block the world out (beat a game, read a book a day), and then an increasing sense that I ought to be getting back to work and doing something real; but when I don't have something which feels real to do I waffle about aimlessly.

I'm in rather an odd state at the moment, in that I think I'm just at the leading edge of the working-hard-and-procrastinating-interestingly state, but I'm also still dealing with my chronic Victorianate illness (it seems to involve a sensitivity to mold?), so that some days even making tea is hard, and I exhaust my store of motivation before I reach the projects I care about.

2. Do you put much effort into avoiding pretention? What is it really and why is it bad?

Pretending to wisdom or originality one doesn't possess makes for bad writing and tiresome public speaking. I avoid some sources of irritation unconsciously, and I try not to commit pretention by mistake; but as for effort, well, I'd rather make more tea. *

3. Your dreams. Recurring images, distinguishing features?

I have a large number of intensely everyday dreams-- that S. returned an e-mail about a (possibly trivial) presentation in Morse Theory with the remark that of course! I would be the natural person to do this, since I presented the very same thing two years ago in Manifolds, to pick a recent example-- some nightmares caused by sleeping with too many covers, uneasy dreams about wandering through airports-cum-shopping malls, and then the rarer and more treasured story. The most recent dream of this sort involved running from the head minion of an evil enchanter. I tried to escape by transforming myself into a white dress shirt in a closet full of identical white dress shirts, but she discovered me by analyzing the cut: "It would be all natural fibers . . . And a classic design . . ." Running from the enchanter or enchantress is a recurring plot, but more often those dreams become all about the running, scrambling up and down streambanks, twisting through woods.

4. What needs to change? What must be preserved?

Those dreams about whether I'll miss my flight; and ginger.

5. What is to be done?

It has to do with teaching in a building covered with white plastic, penguins marching, and Tukwila. And then there's finding a thesis problem.


* The would-be pretentious reader may compare Edith Wharton's Summer.

Every year my sister and I produce a calendar for my father's birthday. This year most of my contribution is medieval-art themed. I've scanned several of the pictures, but I haven't worried too much about color balance or size.

Gouache painting based on eleventh-century Spanish manuscript painting
Colored-pencil drawing based on another medieval Spanish illumination
Gouache-colored version of lion block print
Linoleum-block print based on image from fifteenth-century book of Aesop's fables