Household Opera

The Renaissance person's dilemma

Two recent trains of thought:

1. If you had the time, money, and leisure to go for another degree, or at least take enough courses to become reasonably informed about something you're interested in, what would you study? Me, I'd have a hard time deciding where to start: music theory and musicology, or geography with a digital-humanities focus, or anthropology, or classics (my old undergraduate first love), or bibliography and textual studies and book history, or urban planning, or psychology, or computer science, or, or, or... So many things to learn, so little time in one life span. I don't know how I ever thought I could be a specialist in one and only one field. How about you?
2. On a related note: One of the great, freeing things about not being a tenure-track faculty member is getting to indulge one's Renaissance-person tendencies. On the other hand, one of the drawbacks of not being a tenure-track faculty member is not having structures in place to motivate one to actually carry out a project to its finish instead of getting distracted by the next bright shiny topic. Today I tried to draw a concept map of all my current interests, and came to the conclusion that, while they're all interconnected in a dozen different ways, there are altogether too many potential projects to work on at once, and I'm having a hard time making myself choose one and stick with it. Fellow Renaissance people, how do you cope with Intellectual Magpie Syndrome?

My Seattle trip in pictures

My camera is finally working again, and I've just gotten around to uploading the pictures I took in Seattle during ACRL. Herewith, a long-overdue summary of the non-conferencey parts of the trip.

Spectacular views of the Rockies from the plane on the way over:

Below the surface of the city on the Underground Tour:

Historic coffee technology on display (holy steampunk, Batman!):

RARRRRR! (It's a monkfish at the Pike Place fish market.)

Inside the Seattle Central Library, an all-red floor that's pure Stanley Kubrick, a clever call numbering system, and a glowing yellow escalator:

And a view of the library's reference desk, a.k.a. the "Mixing Chamber," from on high:

I would have taken pictures of the Experience Music Project and Science Fiction Museum, especially the latter, but that evening was when I dropped my camera. I'm glad I got to geek out at the Central Library before the Camera Incident happened.

Back-to-blogging link roundup

Sorry for the unannounced blog hiatus. There wasn't really a reason for it; I was just severely lacking in inspiration there for a while. Now I've got a backup of things I've been meaning to post about, which means it's time for a massive link dump:

• Last weekend's Amazon.com "glitch" (a.k.a. #amazonfail) that resulted in lots and lots of GLBT-related books and books on sexuality being suddenly deranked, thus making them much harder to find, is still rippling through the blogosphere. It seems to have been a combination of human error, screwed-up metadata, and PR people who apparently didn't think it was important to explain what was going on. (The last is the part that irked me the most. It's like a textbook example of How Not to Respond to People's Legitimate Concerns.) I've been bookmarking commentaries from Mary Hodder, Chris Forster, Clay Shirky, and Sarah Warn, among others.
• Neuroscientists think we might someday be able to edit memories. Could we actually wind up living in the world of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? And would we want to?
• Summarize an opera plot in 140 characters or less, win a prize! Here are the guidelines. And here are my entries for Gluck's Orfeo ed Euridice, Bellini's Norma, and Donizetti's L'elisir d'amore.
• A remarkably elegant map of web trends laid out like a subway map. I want this on a poster for my office wall.
• "Listening to College Writers" by Anne-Marie Harvey, an essay I wish I'd read when I was teaching first-year writing.
• Literal poetic feet: iamb and trochee foot tattoos (via Emily Lloyd).
• Tweenbots: an art and technology project featuring small, adorable robots designed to solicit help from passersby. There's something fascinating about the video footage of random New Yorkers steering the robot on its way and guiding it around obstacles.

This is not an April Fool's Day post

...but it is rather silly, in its own way. Consider:

First there was the Facebook Hamlet, at McSweeney's.

Then there was the Facebook Aeneid ("Dido changed her relationship status to Married. Aeneas changed his relationship status to It's Complicated.") and the Facebook Pride and Prejudice.* And the college class that reenacted Romeo and Juliet on Facebook and used the Friend Wheel to graph the connections between characters in the play.

And now there's the Facebook Haggadah. No, really. If you're among the five people who haven't seen it yet, go read it. It's fantastic.

Is this the beginning of a whole new subgenre of humor? And, specifically: why Facebook? Parodic retellings of the canon are nothing new, but what is it about Facebook that invites them? Is it the way it foregrounds relationships (especially their beginnings and endings)? Or is it the contrast between Facebook's telegraphic style and the text being parodied? Or something else?

I find Facebook kind of annoying a lot of the time, but this trend toward using its format to retell the classics almost makes up for the deluge of applications and invitations that greet me every time I log in.

* I want to do a Facebook Emma, myself. "Emma Woodhouse posted an album: Pictures of my family and my new best friend Harriet Smith." "10 of your friends are attending the event Exploring Party at Box Hill." And that game of anagrams could very easily turn into a game of Lexulous or the like, don't you think?