Archive for November, 2007
I am Denver
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on November 30th, 2007
Via the incomparable Mary Robinette Kowal’s blog, I found the “Which Major US City Are You?” quiz. As I’ve noted elsewhere, I don’t really care for these quiz thingies too much — due to my over-analyzation of each possible question and answer — but this one had matched Mary with Portland, which is rather remarkable given her own history. So I gave it a shot.
Your Score: DENVER!
You scored 17% Style, 12% Climate, and 37% Culture!
You are Denver, Colorado. Denver is the largest city in Colorado, the state capital, and the seat of Denver County. It lies at the foot of the Rocky Mountains at the junction of the South Platte River and Cherry Creek. Today, Denver is an important communications, transportation, manufacturing, and agribusiness hub. Telecommunications and biomedical technology are two of the largest industries; construction, real estate, and retail trade are among the fastest-growing industries. The city is also home to many environmental organizations, including federal government agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
Hm, probably not very interesting to you since you’re a little low on the ‘culture’ scale. You don’t like heat much, and prefer cool weather and a landscape filled with majestic mountains. You may not be one for city life, and prefer a slower pace. You are sporty and adventurous, but not one to partake in typical ‘higher class’ activities, like the opera, and that’s just fine. Not all culture is bad though, and you might even find that you enjoy a good play now and then if you give it a chance 
| Link: The Which Major U.S. City Are You? Test written by weeredII on OkCupid Free Online Dating, home of the The Dating Persona Test |
I daresay the test ain’t bad, ladies and gentlemen. It ain’t bad at all.
Swamp Trekking
Posted by Michael Livingston in Adventure, Homelife on November 28th, 2007
The one-line email came last week. A simple, seemingly vague question:
Up for a walk in the woods with a Citadel legend?
The Citadel is a place of legends, you understand. It’s steeped in the ghosts of tradition and story and myth. Yet even so I knew at once what I was being asked to do: spend a weekend wandering through a swamp with Colonel James Rembert, a recently retired English professor and former member of the Army’s Special Forces.
Col. Rembert is a living legend around here, and his “swamp treks” are often the stuff of quiet whispers and astonished shakes of the head. People haven’t died on them (at least that anyone speaks about), but word is they’ve come close.
South Carolina swamps are, by definition, rather inhospitable places. They’re riddled with water, mud, and muck, hemmed in with thick thorny brush and poisonous plants, and filled to the brim with bugs, snakes, gators, boars, and spiders. (Fact: there’s a higher concentration of poisonous things in South Carolina swamps than anywhere else in the country.)
Rembert’s idea of fun? Pick a point “A” on one side of a massive swamp, pick a point “B” on the other side, and then use a compass to travel from “A” to “B” by going through, over, or under whatever obstacles you encounter between them. No trails. No help. Just point to point, lugging the minimal gear you need to survive for the 2-3 days it takes to make the trudge.
That’s a swamp trek, “a walk in the woods with a Citadel legend.” Was I up for one?
Sure. Definitely.
Our destination, I’m told, will be Hell Hole Swamp. According to the writer Andrew Mosier,
The renown of Hell Hole Swamp dates back to the Revolutionary War. In a letter to King George, General Cornwallis called the swamp — from which Francis Marion (Mel Gibson’s character in “The Patriot”) and his band of guerrillas mounted their attacks and then vanished — “one hell of a hole of a swamp.”
Another author writes:
Hell Hole Swamp … long has been called “a hell of a hole,” but there are conflicting ideas as to the name’s origin. According to some, moonshiners secluded in the swamp concocted such vile potions that their customers, after a few pulls at the jug, thought they surely were in hell. A more sinister suggestion points to the fact that in a certain area of the swamp, no trees will grow — allegedly a sign that Satan has cursed the ground.
Ghosts of the Revolution, old moonshiner nests, and demonic curses … Who could say “no” to that?
Bloody Head
Posted by Michael Livingston in Homelife on November 27th, 2007
I replaced the blade on my razor late last night and completely forgot about the fact this morning as I stood in the shower, lathering up my globe and preparing to shave it. A few slashes later I found my hand red with blood after I utilized the surprisingly sharp edge to even out a bug-bite lump at the back of my head. Quite a gusher.
As I looked down at the gore on my hand, the hot water and shaving cream took the opportunity to soak into the wound. I gasped something like “Aaaarghuh” and did a few high-knee dance steps as I applied my other hand — the one without the sharp blade, you see — to the task of scrubbing it out.
Some naughty words followed.
It took a bit of time and pressure to slow the wound down enough for bandaging, which was certainly made more trouble by the fact that the cut is just beyond the event horizon of my looking in a mirror. I had to resort to that old looking into a mirror at a mirror trick, which confuses my mind all to heck — I try to move my hand right and it goes left or down or back or some darn thing. Worse, reflecting a reflection back at its reflection always makes me wonder if I’m causing some kind of hole in the space-time continuum as infinities of reflections carve their way back through dimensions I cannot see.
But all is well now (at least in this dimension), with the only real harm being the fact that I have a rather dorky “I cut my noggin” band-aid on my head for at least the rest of the day.
His Dark Materials
Posted by Michael Livingston in Uncategorized on November 26th, 2007
I’m not sure how it happened that I read the first book in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy — The Golden Compass — and never got around to reading the remainder, but somehow it was so. It’s not that I didn’t have the opportunity: I bought all three books several years ago and read that first one right away. I enjoyed it, as I recall, but somehow things just kept getting in the way of me continuing.
Until this past week. I saw a trailer for the upcoming film version of The Golden Compass (looks pretty wild) and immediately kicked myself for not finishing the trilogy. I’ll freely admit that my reaction may have something to do with seeing Nicole Kidman in the role of Mrs. Coulter, the stunningly graceful mother of the trilogy’s primary protagonist. Mrs. Coulter is a woman who could seduce, well, anyone she wants, and I can think of no better casting, perhaps in the history of man, than to give the former Mrs. Napoleon … er, Tom Cruise the role. (I think Ms. Kidman was my first bona fide film crush, in fact. At least, I can’t remember going gaga for a gal on screen prior to 1989’s Dead Calm.)
Anyway, I decided I needed to read those last two books — The Subtle Knife and The Amber Spyglass — and spent part of my Thanksgiving break doing so. They were, I’m pleased to say, pretty darn good books.
They’re not perfect books, by any means — there are far too many conveniences in the plot for my complete happiness — but they’re very entertaining and surprisingly fascinating at an academic level. By his own admittance Pullman sets out to invert the Heaven-Hell dynamic in Milton’s Paradise Lost, and one can also see a profound influence of William Blake throughout the works. In addition, the trilogy seems a fairly direct rebuke of C.S. Lewis — both his theology and his fiction.
And, as I said, the series is entertaining. Pullman’s scope is suitably massive, the worlds he’s created are magnificently drawn, and the characters are great fun to follow. Definitely recommended.
For those who have read the books, there’s a fun little “what’s your daemon” gadget on the movie’s official website. Pretty swell. I just did mine — I really do hate these kinds of quizzes, as I overanalyze each question — and it says my daemon is a lion named Delila, which I think makes me Samson.*
*I shave my head. Get it?
Relaxing at Last
Posted by Michael Livingston in Uncategorized on November 18th, 2007
I had no idea the weight of the Paraphrase. Sure, the book will be at least 700 pages long. It’ll be heavy. But the weight of it on my shoulders was apparently enormous. I’ve been in a relatively vegetative state since sending it out, which is rather uncharacteristic of me.
I’m crawling out now, though. Slowly but surely.
I did spend a few minutes yesterday looking over my most recent teaching evaluations. It was interesting: I’m consistently scoring low (relatively, like a 4.4 out of 5) on “starting and ending class on time.” Odd. I never had that anomaly at Rochester. It must be that these time-constrained cadets take such things a bit more seriously.
Paraphrase Sent!
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on November 13th, 2007
‘Tis done.
At 9:05pm I hit the last “send” key in Gmail, emailing my formatted-for-print 700-page edition of The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament off to Russell Peck and the other good folks of the Middle English Texts Series. I don’t suspect that I’ll start getting corrections until the new year, and I’m frankly glad for the time off from it.
Seriously, my brain is fried. I spent all day today wrapping up a handful of notes that required combing through a two-inch thick stack of (sometimes badly) photocopied pages from a thoroughly massive Old French manuscript. And while I like manuscripts as much as the next medievalist (who am I kidding? I love manuscripts!), but what Old French I know is self-taught in times of research such as these. In other words, my French ain’t speedy. Add in the bad manuscript scans and you get magnifying glasses and two dictionaries in hand for hours and hours on end.
But done. Now a day or two of rest before a return to fiction — either a half-finished Science Fiction piece (a prequel to my Writers of the Future winning tale) or Caesarion. I suspect it’ll be the former first, but I daresay I’m in no present condition to make such decisions.
Former Student Fun
Posted by Michael Livingston in Student Successes on November 9th, 2007
I’ve had the pleasure of teaching quite a few students over the years. Hundreds, certainly. I don’t think I’m up to thousands yet, though that day will assuredly come. I’ve taught at three institutions, with students at all levels of experience: from wide-eyed freshmen to serious-minded PhD candidates to long-out-of-school retirees.
When I was a student I figured that teachers hated certain students, and I hoped I was not counted among them. Yet while I cannot speak for other teachers, I can say that I haven’t really disliked any of my students. Not that I can remember, anyway. So I really do mean it when I say teaching has been a pleasure.
Of course, I would be lying if I claimed that there aren’t students who stand out in my memory. Writing this, my mind wanders to think of…
- the young man who came to my office to work earnestly on his writing almost every day and went from an F- to an A-student in the course of a term;
- the wallflower from the back row who shocked me at the end of a term when she presented an astounding, brilliant, and original final research paper;
- the blind boy who wanted so desperately to experience the Middle Ages that I redesigned my class website with the help of a blindfold, so that the speech software could better parse it for him;
- the girl who fought repeated personal illness and family tragedy over the term, reminding me how utterly unimportant my class can be;
- the polymath who could hardly focus on any one thing, but when he did turned it to brilliant diamond;
- the girl from Hawaii, who despite the bitter cold of a Rochester winter managed to find a fresh flower every day and wear it in her hair;
- the young man who was so casually brilliant but maturely grounded that I hope to see his name in political circles one day;
- the elegant and accomplished female trombonist who, to my continuing astonishment, was a huge Tolkien fan in addition to being a talented young musician;
and so many more. Names, places, faces … memories of a student wearing a Viking helmet, memories of another sitting and laughing in my office, memories of another met in a restaurant, or still another talking about her family in Lebanon during the conflicts there … it’s hard to keep them down once they start churning.
I think of all this now because that Tolkien-loving trombonist, Liza Malamut, dropped me a line a few days ago. Trolling the ‘net after watching Bagby’s Beowulf (oh how the heart races!), she looked me up and found this website.
I’m always thrilled to hear from former students — where they are, what they’re up to, what odd medieval connections they’ve noted in the world — and this was certainly no exception. Liza’s doing great work and seems generally happy in the world, for which I’m very glad. She also notes in passing that she may audition for the Charleston Symphony, who would be foolish not to snap her up at once.
I should note how hearing from her did make me realize what an utterly ignorant man I remain, though. Liza writes:
I’ve actually played Renaissance and Early Baroque music (and some medieval slide trumpet, though this is more recent) for several years now. It’s among my favorite genres, and contains collections of incredible music for brass that is still being discovered today. The quality, as well as the virtuosity, of the music (think Castello, Weckmann, Lassus, Hammerschmidt, etc.) is really astounding.
She means well, I know. By kindly listing some representative composers she intends to help my poor little mind understand the kind of music she’s working with. Only … I don’t know any of these names. Even trying to “talk down” to me, Liza’s mind soars above mine!
On the plus side, the whole thing sounds marvelously wonderful, and it does serve to emphasize one of the great benefits of teaching: I get to meet interesting people in the prime of their lives who teach me far more than I teach them. I mean, if it wasn’t for Liza I wouldn’t be listening to the mid-Baroque sounds of Andreas Hammerschmidt while I grade papers this afternoon.
Thanks, Liza!
PS: Liza links on her blog to an apparently man-snaring recipe for cookies.
Paraphrase Complete!
Posted by Michael Livingston in Academics on November 5th, 2007
As I was finishing up my first MA degree in 2001, I began looking at possible destinations where I might continue working towards my PhD. I wanted a good school, obviously, but I wanted a particular kind of good school. One that was relaxed, for certain: some schools are anxiety-driven, and I didn’t want that at all. I wanted, too, a school where I could continue working to become an experienced editor of medieval texts: someone who takes a nearly illegible medieval manuscript and produces a printed text of it, making it available to more than just a few specialists. Beyond that, I wanted to go somewhere to work with a specific someone, an authority in my area that I could work closely with for the many years it would take to finish the degree. Add all that up, and I came up with one man, one school: I wanted to go to the University of Rochester to study with Russell Peck.
So I applied to Rochester. In fact, I only applied to Rochester — something that just about made my then-current advisors faint. But I figured that anything else wouldn’t fit as well, so it was Rochester or nothing.
They admitted me (whew!), and I visited the school during a quick weekend road trip from Kalamazoo to Ottawa (well, it’s sorta on the way) in order to attend a Chris de Burgh concert (don’t laugh). I met Russell, who was everything I had heard and hoped, and he sat me down after a meal. Things had been very relaxed, very fantastic.
“So,” he said, “what do you want to do for your dissertation?”
I recall smiling — I usually do this when my mind has been unexpectedly forced to go into high gear — before I admitted that since, well, I was just finishing my MA thesis, I hadn’t really had time to think about it.
Russell nodded sagely — he is by definition a sage, so I suppose he just nodded — and then said, “You should think about editing The Middle English Metrical Paraphrase of the Old Testament.”
I said I’d have to think about it — mental note, “Look up what the hell he just said” — and we moved on to other things. That afternoon I was alone for a short time in my now beloved Robbins Library, and I looked up this Paraphrase thing Russell had talked about.
Huh. 18,372 lines of Middle English. For my MA thesis I was just completing an edition of James I of Scotland’s poem Kingis Quair, which runs to just under 1400 lines. I was young. I was cocky. So I figured I had me a dissertation.
About five years later, as the dissertation rolled around, I had only managed to complete the Octateuch portion of the Paraphrase. The finish line seemed a distant mirage, determined to outpace my attempts to reach it.
Until Friday night.
Yes, this past Friday night I punctuated and glossed line number 18,372. I finished the first draft.
Here that, world?
I finished.
Now it’s on to revisions, which will be a far more finite process. I’ve been formatting the edition for publication as I’ve gone along, so I can say with authority that if I turned it in right now it would be a 700-page book. I’m hoping to cut that down to, say, 675 over the next week or so.
Then this one’s off to other hands and I can turn, in earnest, to Caesarion and the other matters plaguing my mind.
