...before they kick me out of this nice computer lab that's closing in 30 minutes. In all the excitement of moving to Charlottesville, I missed the ritual anniversary post. But it's already been just over a year since I started the old version of this blog. Who'd've thought it?
Everything has been happening a lot faster than I thought it would, and turning out better than I expected. Fate is a strange and wonderful thing.
Dear blogosphere,
I know I've been too distracted to pay much attention to you lately, but I do miss you, and I promise I will stop neglecting you before too long. The thing is, I don't want to use my working hours for blog-surfing, and I'm temporarily without home internet access. But I haven't abandoned you, honest! I'm just short on time and on things to link to. My writing urge is coming back now that I've had a chance to settle in, though. I just finished my first week of the fellowship, and later this month I'll be taking a class on electronic texts in XML at the University of Virginia Rare Book School; later still, I'll be attending a seminar at Bryn Mawr for all the CLIR fellows. I'm already learning an immense amount, and I feel more eager and excited about my work than I have in quite some time. In my spare time (and it's rather wonderful to have evenings and weekends clearly delimited as "spare time" with no I-should-be-grading-papers-why-can't-I-get-anything-done guilt), I'm slowly exploring Charlottesville and figuring out where to go for used books, alfresco meals, cheap movies, and international foodstuffs.
And now I have to go get ready to look at some more apartments, because my current apartment is only mine until mid-August. If I can get my hands on a camera before I move out, I'll post pictures.
Apologetically yours,
Amanda, who is currently using a terminal in the student union next to some random undergraduates
It occurs to me — well, it occurred to me when I initially posted the news about my postdoc — that my already lightweight veil of semi-anonymity has become a whole lot sheerer.* Of course, a determined and clever person could probably have already worked out my current location and my full name. But now it's going to be a lot easier to figure out my true identity. I find, also, that now that I've been doing this blogging thing for a while, and now that I'm exiting my teaching job, I'm less inclined to maintain the semi-anonymity.
Initially, I was leery of people in my department finding out about my ambivalence about academia. I was also leery about students coming across my blog; I always preferred to maintain a distinction between my teaching and my personal life. But I'm not going back to teaching, and I stopped worrying about disclosing my career-change plans months ago.
I no longer feel like it's a big risk for me to be critical of the current state of academia in my own name (I'm hardly the only one saying these things, after all). And I don't think there's anything in this blog that I'd be embarrassed to have associated with myself. I may display my amateurishness in fields I haven't studied, or get cranky from time to time, or turn the occasional clunky sentence, or go on about things I haven't meticulously researched, or yammer narcissistically about the future of this blog, but none of this strikes me as a big deal for people in my real life to know.
There's still the "mom finds out about blog" factor (anyone else remember that Onion article? and when did the Onion go all "Premium," anyway? Bastards!). I'm still not sure if I want this weblog to pop up when someone does a Google search for my full name. But I'm aware that I'm not really anonymous here, and I'm okay with that.
Somewhat related is the question of what I want this space to become now that I'm heading away from the academic track. I may well continue to post about life after academia, or my new library career path, or what I'm thinking about if I decide to keep up my scholarly pursuits in my spare time. Or I could just continue with the miscellany of topics I've already been posting about. I admire people with the energy and thoroughness to maintain specialized-topic blogs, but I'm not one of them. This blog will, I suspect, continue to be eclectic in the extreme — much like its author, who has always been fond of juggling too many interests to keep up with all at once.
* I'm thinking of Karita Mattila's Dance of the Seven Veils in the Met's production of Salome this past season. Which I didn't see, but I heard it was fabulous.
I've got a bunch of half-drafted posts and further topics to write about, but I think I'm going to go easy on the posting for the next little while. I need some time to quiet down and think. Among other things, I've just joined an unofficial poetry workshop comprised of MFA students, former MFA students, and the occasional oddball non-MFA like myself, and it's making me want to spend more time working on poems. Also, I've been feeling kind of lousy recently about assorted aspects of Real Life, and I suspect that I'm not doing myself a big favor by brooding over the current state of academia. It's time to think about something else.
A few days ago, I was reading the title essay in Nicholson Baker's The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber and this paragraph caught my eye:
All large thoughts are reluctant. I don't think this is intentional on their part. It follows from the unhasty, liquid pace of human thinking. As an experiment, overturn half a glass of wine onto a newly starched tablecloth. Watch, wholly absorbed, as the borders of the stain search their way outward, plumping up each parched capillary of cotton, threadlet by threadlet, and then traveling on — a soundless, happy explosion, with no moving parts. Thought moves at the velocity of that stain. And since a large thought seems to wish to pierce and acknowledge and even to replenish many more shoots and plumules of one's experience, some shrunken from long neglect..., its hum of fineness will necessarily be delayed, baffled, and drawn out with numerous interstitial timidities — one pauses, looks up from the page, waits; the eyes move in meditative polygons in their orbits; and then, somehow, more of the thought is released into the soul, the corroborating peal of some new, distant bell. (The Size of Thoughts, 12-13)
So I'm going to spend some time waiting for the slow spread of whatever thoughts are brewing. I'll be back before long.
Recent Google and Yahoo searches leading to this site:
found poetry
names of lace patterns
usage "empathize with"
stevens the poem must resist the intelligence
topic of wallace stevens poems
analyze "The Emperor of Ice-Cream"
And here I thought I was the only person who went around googling lines from Stevens. But if you're looking for me to help you write a paper about him (as the latter two queries seem to suggest), well, sorry, but no. Go somewhere else. Better yet, why not try sitting down with the poem again before you hit the search engines, eh?
Also found through the referrer logs: scribblingwoman. 18th-century literature, science fiction, academia, and even Valkyrie Barbies (Barbie sings Brünnhilde?). And an interesting use of blogs in the classroom, to boot. Nifty.
[taps microphone, listens for feedback noise]
Hello? Is this thing on?
Well, as you can see, I've moved. Importing of my old blog will commence as soon as I'm really desperate not to grade papers.
In the meantime, update your bookmarks!
Academic librarian, literature geek, opera fan, knitter, collector of random trivia and interesting turns of phrase.
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