HSU IT Department

First, the good news. The MARAC conference this past weekend went very well, my bit was well-attended and (I think) effective in getting the basic groundwork of its subject across. Did a little schmoozing and networking. Met an archivist from the Woody Guthrie Archives and one from the Rockefeller Foundation, which was cool. Archivists are found in such interesting places, places you'd never think about. I mean, who wouldn't want to be the archivist for the Metropolitan Opera or Blue Man Group, or the reference librarian for NPR?? There we are, working away in the background, making sure things are where they're supposed to be and questions can be answered. Go us :)

Also -- bonus! -- I had the opportunity for a lovely long chat over wine with the very talented and intelligent ennyousai. We swapped book recommendations, theorized about why so many librarians and archivists write fanfic, and agreed that Patrick Stewart and Derek Jacobi could read, oh, the telephone book and we would still be giddily enthralled. We also shared our puzzlement over why libraries all seem to feel they must be on Facebook. I mean, if you're a fan of the library, you're already a fan of the library, right? A Facebook page is unlikely to persuade throngs of library non-fans to come to Jesus, as it were, so what's the point? It just becomes a time-suck and yet another place that has to be kept up to date and interesting. Like we don't all have enough work to do, what with backlogs and reference requests and so on and so forth.

The bad news was family: my grandfather died on Friday. He was in his 90s, very frail and in hospice, so it wasn't unexpected, but still...he and my grandmother were married almost 70 years and I don't think they've spent a night apart in, well, ever. So we're leaving Thanksgiving day to go back to my home town to spend a few days with her, and for the memorial service on the 30th.

I have wonderful memories of him -- he was a huge fan of the Bugs Bunny Roadrunner Show and of Hogan's Heroes (he was a pilot in WWII), and I remember sitting on his lap as a child watching them with him. I still think of him when I hear the Hogan's Heroes theme song :) When I was little and staying with them, my grandmother would let me bring him his coffee in the mornings. I remember myself at maybe seven years old, carrying the coffee mug ve-e-e-ery carefully, setting it on the bedside table, and carefully prodding the big mound under the covers that was my grandfather. He would be all covered up with just his wild hair showing, all sticking up like porcupine quills, and he would open one squinty eye (he was NOT a morning person LOL!) and one hand would snake slo-o-o-owly out to get the mug and pull it in. Then in about half an hour he'd finally be awake, and if it was Saturday, we'd pile into his big lounger chair and watch cartoons together. Once when my brother came to visit, he complained about Mom forcing him to eat veggies and my grandfather sent him home with a signed certificate saying he didn't have to eat broccoli LOL! And then there were his sneezes. They started somewhere around his toes and you could hear them rumbling upwards until they arrived with something like Force 5 on the Richter scale :)

He was smart and funny and kind and generous and very, very dignified, and I will ♥ miss him ♥...

Top Chef Just Desserts. I actually watched it twice last night just to see Seth do his huffy pouty meltdown thing. Spouse also observed that while on Iron Chef (which I'm not ashamed to admit I watch) some of them may in fact be gay, you'd never know it, whereas here it seems to be a casting requirement to have one in every season. (Sidebar: Iron Chef Cat Cora is in fact gay; she recently spoke out on that so-heartbreaking Tyler Clementi suicide.)

Sister Wives. Maybe because I've never been good at having female friends, I'm fascinated by these women who are such good buddies they manage to SHARE A MAN. What's that all about??

Teen Mom. Just for Macy. The rest of them are train wrecks but that girl seems to have her head on straight.

I really should cancel my cable. It's rotting my brain, and it's not like I have enough brain cells to be able to spare that many. (NB: The theory that killing off the weak brain cells makes you smarter turns out, sadly, to be flawed.)

Now that I've owned up to habits so disgraceful that none of my friends (either real life or virtual) will respect me ever again, I'm going back to my medieval history, comparative religion and Neil Gaiman. Just to prove that one can enjoy both ends of the intellectual spectrum without spontaneously combusting. Though I do feel a little flushed...

Q: How many hours of LoTR can one television station show in one weekend?

A: All 72 of them, apparently.

Spent the holiday weekend doing THINGS I WANTED for a change. Go me :)

♥ Worked on first SSIAW* for my writers' group; story has a beginning and an end but way too much middle, and the far end of the middle doesn't yet connect with the end. Not sure how to rein this in, and I only have until midnight tomorrow night to sort it out.

♥ Got all my fic posted to Archive of Our Own. I'm impressed with the site thus far -- design, functionality, features, layout, everything.

♥ Spent a radiant half an hour laughing myself into hiccups over Hyperbole and a Half's latest gem, on the Four Levels of Social Entrapment ("Trying to end a conversation in the grocery store is like battling a sea monster that has an infinite capacity to revive itself..."). Go. See. Giggle.

♥ Positively devoured more books than any human being should in three days, as follows:

- Sister Emily's Lightship, a terrific collection of retold/reimagined fairy tales by Jane Yolen. Since it's SSIAW in my writers' group I'm trying to soak up all the tips and tricks I can on short stories, but beyond that she's a great writer. Some of the stories were in the Ellen Datlow/Terry Windling fairy tale collections (e.g. Ruby Slippers, Golden Tears) but most were completely new to me. The title story turned me off -- just a bit too off-beat -- but the rest were excellent.

- The Book of Lost Things, an excellent story that includes remaginings/retellings of fairy tales, by John Connolly. Reminded me in many ways of a darker, more mature version of The Poor Little Rich Girl. His version of the seven dwarves is positive genius! Get the later edition that includes his notes at the end on the various fairy tales, plus the original Grimm versions.

- Faithless, by Joyce Carol Oates. I'm trying Oates yet again, having failed with two of her other novels (them and I forget the other one) and been left permanently scarred by one of her short stories ("Where are you going, where have you been"). So far it's not looking promising. She's an excellent writer, that's clear, but the characters are all so unlovable and unlovely, so damaged or stupid or just plain unpleasant, that it's hard to enjoy spending time with them.

- The Fifth Child by Doris Lessing. Doris is another one that I sometimes have trouble with. I disliked The Golden Notebook, was moderately impressed with A Survivor's Tale, and was captivated by her Shikasta series (which I still haven't finished). With this one I can't tell if it's meant to be a metaphor for the compromises one makes as one gets older, and the pain that results, or if it's meant to be literally about an evil changeling child. Either way, it's gripping, horrifying, and very, very desolate at the end.

Sadly, tomorrow it's back to work and flailing madly in a sea of emails and meetings. Blech.

*SSIAW = Short Story In A Week

I like this article about Law & Order because it manages to work in the word Thersites; I can't decide if that's a tribute to the NYT or L&O, but either way, I give props to them.

This week was what I like to call a Sprinkler Week. You know those automated sprinklers with the little lever that goes chk...chk...chk...chk each time whacking the sprayer into a slightly different direction, and then eventually it gets to the end of its rotation and goes chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga back to its original starting point? These things.

My entire week was like that. chk...an email comes in, I fire off a paragraph about this...chk...another one comes in, I send off an approval of that...chk...another one, I shoot off my best effort at a list of the other things...

By the end of the day I'm my brain is spinning round and round going "chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga-chugga!!"

Wine....where is my wine...

Finally back from (and recovered from) SAA! A good time was had by all, many interesting presentations, and -- bonus! -- I was able to meet up with the very talented ennyousai ::waves:: Among other things, we compared notes on favorite books (yay Pride and Prejudice!!), the ending of Deathly Hallows, and Why We Love Fans. On her recommendation Spouse and I made a point of visiting the Folger Shakespeare Museum -- although we were disappointed not to see any costumes on show, their current exhibit (Lost at Sea: The Ocean in the English Imagination, 1550–1750) had some truly beautiful and unusual pieces, so we thank her sincerely!

The conference was here, which means we felt underdressed every time we left our room.

Most interesting session was this one, on archives and international justice. The first presenter outlined a project being undertaken to digitize all records from the UN genocide trials in Rwanda -- something like 500 terabytes of data, audio in three languages, redactions of audio/video to preserve anonymity of protected witnesses...the sheer scope is overwhelming. The second speaker gave a historical overview of archival evidence used in various cases; he touched briefly on Nuremberg but spent more time on some lesser-known cases like Klaus Barbie and Ivan Demjanjuk. A bit inspiring to think that your chosen field can actually support international justice. He ended by suggesting that perhaps archivists ought to be more active in this area -- for example, if someone wants something classified for political rather than security reasons, should we push back? Food for thought.

Our session went well (C-Span filmed us!) despite being at an ungodly early hour; on the plus side that freed up the rest of the day for Spouse and I to hit the National Zoo. Yay pandas! Yay komodo dragon!! Yay otters!!!

And of course we ate and ate and ate and ate.

I should be fully recovered by Friday, and possibly able to look at food again by Saturday.

Working my way through Neil Stephenson's Anathem. Holy cow. Talk about a demanding read -- mathematics, religion, linguistics, music, philosophy, astronautics, physics, metaphysics, not to mention herbology, cosmology, quantum mechanics, and change-ringing!! This book has it all. For the first hundred pages I floundered along in a daze, feeling rather like someone in a language immersion program trying to live and breathe a completely alien communication medium, until suddenly it clicked around page 250. So far I've recognized Plato and a few other core philosophical approaches (though I don't know them well enough to put a name to them -- what, or who, is the opposite of Plato?).

Fraa Erasmas' descriptions of the urban youth, with their "caps with beverage logos," made me giggle, while the enormous expanse of time that is the backdrop to the mathic view of the outer (extramural) world is breathtaking. It's reminiscent of Asimov's Foundation series, only the Foundation is looking forwards while the maths have a multiple-millennia perspective on the past.

Stephenson must be a terrifyingly intelligent person. The most complicated concepts are presented so simply, and yet without the slightest sense of shallowness; there's a depth of comprehension behind it that's staggering. And I want a sphere!!

OK, on the plus side, I discover that Goodreads has added a "stats" feature. Click on this and it shows you a nice bar chart of how many books you've read in a given year. Click on "details" and you get a pie chart breakdown by category (your own categories). Click on "pages" and it changes to give the number of pages you've read.

It's kick ass. I've updated my info for last three years based on the paper lists I was keeping, so it's pretty impressive ;)

Plus, they answered my question about how to be able to include different language versions on your list, rather than having them collapsed into a single title. So I now have both Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone and Harry Potter a l'ecole des sorciers, along with both Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter et la chambre des secrets. w00t!!

Finished a new bio of Anne Boleyn yesterday. Being accustomed to Genevieve Bujold in Anne of the Thousand Days, Mr Bernard's Anne was something of a startlement since he assumes she might actually have been guilty of the charges of adultery brought against her, but as historical analyses of primary sources go, he's on pretty solid ground. Given that the earliest biographers (not detractors, but biographers) of Anne were writing during the reign of her daughter Elizabeth, it's not surprising they would have inflated the power, piety and Protestantism of the mother of their beloved queen. Bernard does some scrupulous deconstruction of contemporary sources to demonstrate that in fact Anne might simply have been a beautiful sexy woman who engaged in a few indiscretions and then had the appallingly bad luck to be found out. He still makes some large-ish assumptions, but his logic and his deductions hold up pretty well.

I always thought Genevieve was so beautiful. Until I googled her tonight, however, I had no idea she was the original choice for Capt. Janeway in Star Trek: Voyager!!

And people say the internet isn't useful for education...

Agh, agh, agh. How is possible to be reading not one, not two, but THREE books at the same time?? Not to mention breaks for The Economist, Newsweek, The Hedgehog Review, and my local paper. It ought to be impossible. The sheer number of words beating on my skull ought to somehow cancel each other out, or the most interesting ones ought (by the law of survival of the fittest) to beat the %&*^ out of the other ones until they limp quietly away. And yet it does not happen. I lug multiple books to work with me, in the insane belief that in a 45-minute lunch hour I can somehow inhale all of them, or at least some of each of them. I pile them next to my bed at night, in the happy delusion that in the half hour between the time I lie down and the moment at which my eyelids acquire a weight of roughly 2.6 earth normal, I will wade through a chapter or two of each.

I need an intervention. Or an external hard drive I can plug into my head. Or something.

Currently I'm working on a ginormous behemoth of a book, Neil Stephenson's Anathem, which in addition to weighing about eight pounds has the dubious distinction of more made-up words per page than anything I've ever read anywhere, including Clockwork Orange. It's so brain-straining that I have to take breaks and work on the next Sandman volume. Which is short, so in between those I've got a new bio of Anne Boleyn -- yay! At least that one's vaguely topical since the Ren Fest is going on and we're there every weekend in garb. ("Say it now and say it loud, I'm a Rennie and I'm proud!")

So there you go. A little TMI about my addiction to the written word. Go stories! Go words!! Go narrative!!!

The Old Spice guy gives a thumbs-up for libraries -- huzzah! Sexiest library spokesperson ever :)

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