Ursula

Tim Burke has some comments (on a New York Times article I have avoided reading) about the way liberal-arts schools sell choice which seem remarkably aware of the ways in which the liberal arts are genuinely elite.

My roommate for a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates several years ago was Hoa. At some point not very far into our acquaintance, she asked me, "There aren't very many Asian kids at your school, are there?" at which point I said, "Huh?" and she explained, "You seem to have trouble understanding my accent."

My small-elite-liberal-arts-college was full of Asian-American students; but it didn't have many students like Hoa, who had been in the U.S. all of two years, and had switched her major from teaching (in Vietnam) to mathematics (at a large East Coast state university). Hoa seemed to conclude that my school was horribly expensive; but of course it was too well-endowed to ask anything at all from someone like Hoa. The issue was more that nobody like her would have considered attending an institution focussed on writing and reading and being a better person. She was going to college-- and participating in a competitive math REU-- so she could get a good job when she was done.

That was the true luxury of Swarthmore: the luxury of getting an education, rather than a career. It was a class distinction, but not the distinction of pricetag; and I think that elitism was invisible to most of us.

I'll be off to Pennsic as soon as my ride to the airport arrives. I'll be back Sunday night, but between grades & jury duty I don't see any way to avoid something like an all-nighter, so I won't make real contact until Monday evening.

Early Stuart Libels is just what the name suggests: a database of rude seventeenth-century poetry (with a few late Elizabethan verses thrown in for good measure.) I'm tempted to imitate it for SCA purposes, but my aversion to drama dissuades me, or at least restricts me to generic commentary:

Epitaph.

Here lies a man festooned from ear to ear
With laurels, gouttes, medallions: a great weight!
What drove the man to carry such a freight?
Without this mass, none knew he was a peer.

I've webbed my emblems documentation:

http://www.doomchicken.net/~ursula/sca/imprese/emblems.html

It doesn't have as many images as perhaps it ought, but there are links to many of the emblems I used as models.

siriaeve has posted the Wimsey Papers (published in The Spectator in 1939-1940):

I and II
III and IV
V and VI
VII and VIII

. . . For Sierra Club Board of Directors.

Friday night I went to the Merc with various SCA friends. The Merc is a private Goth club, so naturally I spent a good fraction of the time thinking, "Dude! Vampire: the Masquerade!" I chatted with sablebadger about heraldic politics, with scourgeotheseas about my hunt for an advisor, and was told by yimisty's very cute, small, Southern, drunk mother, "Don't tell nobody, but all the guys are talking about how sweet and pretty you are." (Why, thank you, Badger!)

Yeah, I know, I'm not very Goth.

If I ever do have a Vampire character based on the Merc, she will be a Trivial Pursuit fiend.

***

On Sunday I finished matociquala (or, as the title page reads, elizabethbear)'s novel Hammered. One can't say a novel starts slowly when a kid splatters blood all over the first few pages, but I did think the story was slow to focus. In part because I do read matociquala's journal, and thus have seen bits of her reviews, and comments on the worldbuilding, and have acquired the unjustified belief that I can affect what she writes, the info-dumping stood out too strongly. I already knew that the US had decayed and that Canada was a superpower by default and that global warming had done horrible things and that The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is a good book, I wanted to cut to the plot already, not the intricate backstory, the plot, and did it really have to be Feynman?

But when the plot starts going, oh does it go. Hammered really is as satisfying a gritty near-future action novel as I had hoped it might be, and with extra spaceships. (Though I wonder, writing this, if grit is the right word. The characters don't seem quite resigned enough for grit, despite all the bourbon: they're edging closer to realms of despair, and of true love.)

Every time I start to think that I know where you're coming from, I realize you have a whole different set of fascinating stories yet to tell. Here's to learning ever more!

I won't be on the right side of the continent to attend your senior exhibition, but I am genuinely sorry to miss it. I have envied you the book arts, and in particular I envy you the future printing presses. If and when you have access to a fifteenth- or sixteenth-century-style typeface, tell me, and I will commission you.

You have a flair for the dramatic which is most evident in the way you read Greek, in a voice too big and rolling and melodious for an ordinary seminar room. You are grand and expansive and effective on a large scale dealing with large problems. I don't think you've ever explained your private demons as a sort of claustrophobia, but maybe that's what they are: you're scaling down to ordinary niggling proprieties, much too far and much too fast.

Since our society expects stage fright to be directly proportional to the size of the audience, not inversely, you're doomed to a certain amount of misunderstanding. That should not stop you from being astonishing.