HSU IT Department

Mr Psmith and I are finally back home after a week-long combination business/pleasure trip to the (very soggy) midwest.

The pleasure goal was to see a bunch of family, including my brother J (recovering from a seven-year case of severe Ph.D. which resulted in the biggest diploma I've ever seen) and 8-year-old nephew P (a bundle of energy if there ever was one and a devoted fan of I Love Lucy, M*A*S*H and Star Wars, I have high hopes for him); my grandmother (95, still going to French club and playing bridge every week); and my Dad, who turned 71 on Thursday. Since J and P live only about 40 minutes from Dad he was kind enough to come pick us up, and en route to his house we stopped to see my aunt and uncle and cousin B, with whom we had a rousing political discussion about how horrible the governor of this particular state is, so much so that even his own party hates him. Then a couple of days with Dad during which we ate sushi and got to visit the aquarium in town (VERY nice!). Saturday night most of the extended family -- step-siblings, half-siblings, spouses and offspring ranging in age from babes-in-arms to last week's high school graduates -- gathered at a restaurant for dinner, after which everyone came back to the house for homemade strawberry shortcake courtesy of my sister A. Scrumptiousness and boisterousness abounded.

The business goal was some consulting for an organization near my hometown that has a museum, library and archive and wanted a professional evaluation of what was needed to house and maintain it properly. Quite interesting stuff; took tons of photos and will be writing up a report for them over the next couple of weeks,

Both goals achieved, we got home early this afternoon to find all of our menagerie well, though the rats had emptied their water bottles and one of the cats had eaten some lily petals and barfed on the arm of the couch. Ah well, could be worse.

Since we were traveling on Sunday I indulged in a Sunday New York Times (bliss!) and found this jewel of a poem on p. 50 of the Magazine. Spending time with family made me think of summer evenings of my childhood, the warm darkness, voices calling, the streetlights coming on, and this seemed to say something about that, about how a moment can be both old and new, eternal and yet fresh: "nothing is over, only beginning somewhere else"

One of the Evenings
by James Richardson

After so many years, we know them.
This is one of the older Evenings -- its patience,
settling in, its warmth that wants nothing in return.
Once on a balcony among trees, once by a slipping river,
so many Augusts sitting out through sunset --
first a dimness in the undergrowth like smoke,
and then like someone you hadn't noticed
has been in the room a long time...

It has seen everything that can be done in the dark.
It has seen two rifles swing around
to train on each other, it has seen lovers meet and revolve,
it has seen wounds grayscale in low light.
It has come equally for those who prayed for it
and those who turned on lamp after lamp
until they could not see. It deals evenhandedly
with the one skimming downstairs as rapidly as typing,
the one washing plates too loudly,
the one who thinks there's something more important,
since it does not believe in protagonists,
since it knows anyone could be anyone else.

It has heard what they said aloud to the moon to the stars
and what they could not say,
walking alone and together. It has gotten over
I cannot live through this, it has gotten over This did not have to happen
and This is experience one day I will be glad for.
It has gotten over How even for a moment
could I have forgotten? though it never forgets,
leaves nothing behind, does not believe in stories,
since nothing is over, only beginning somewhere else.

It could be anywhere but it is here
woth the kids who play softball endlessly not keeping score,
though it's getting late, way too late,
holding their drives in the air like invisible moons a little longer,
giving way before them so they feel like they're running faster,
It likes trees, I think, it likes summer. It seems comfortable with us,
though it is here to help us be less ourselves.
It thinks of its darkening as listening harder and harder.

The Western black rhino was declared extinct today, and the top story on Yahoo News was Suri Cruise's new haircut.

[Edit: The link above was to an old news item, sorry, and now I can't find the correct one. Curse you, interwebz! However, in trying to find it, I did learn that they've found footprints of the Sumatran rhino someplace where they thought it was extinct, so the news isn't all bad. Still...]

Humanity, I weep for you. And yes, that's a poem, so it counts as one of my 100 Things. *sigh*

First of my 100 Things (100 Poems) blog posts!

"A sonnet might look dinky, but it's somehow big enough to accommodate
love, war, death, and O.J. Simpson. You could fit the whole world in there if
you shoved hard enough."

Or so says Anne Fadiman. And I agree.

I think sonnets are amazing creations: a very strict, very small form, but within it you can say literally anything you like. Anything at all. It's like the difference between bouncing about gleefully on the dance floor and executing a perfect fiery tango without a single misstep, a combination of freedom and structure that can be so much more than the sum of its parts. Or like those medieval miniatures, where you have a very small space in which to work, but within that space you can draw monsters or birds or leaves or tessellated patterns or tiny people, or whatever you like.

At any rate, it's a sadly under-used form these days, perhaps because it takes so much work to craft a good one (it's a bit like assembling a jigsaw puzzle, where you have to keep shifting the little pieces around until they fit just right), so I was thrilled when someone wrote a beautiful one for deeply_horrible's "Bring Back the Bastard" fest this year. It's hard to believe that so much angst and so much history can be packed into so few lines. This is not a happy sonnet, or a love sonnet. This is a bitter and angry sonnet, in which Severus has some choice words for Dumbledore. Hope you like it as much as I did.

Title: From the Beehive
Author: primeideal

I've lived too long for faith that life is fair...

Two weeks ago I ranted briefly about how no woman has moderated a presidential debate in 20 years, and how three young women from New Jersey were trying to change that with their petition on Change.org. Amazingly, it has worked!! ABC News reports that CNN's Candy Crowley will moderate the debate on October 16th. w00t!!!!

The town of Corigliano d'Otranto has gone all brainy. They've put up ceramic plaques around town with quotes from the likes of Augustine, hand out conversation-starter postcards with questions like "Why were you born?" and even hired a Municipal Philosopher.

Does this not astonish you, in this age of tweets and sound bites, knee-jerk ideologues and their blind followers? It does me..

Graziella Lupo, the first person to hold the position, actually trained as a philosophical consultant at the Ca' Foscari University in Venice. I didn't even know such a degree existed!! Had I known, I might have made different choices as an undergrad ;)

So, the Philosopher is available for consultation on Friday afternoons to help you clarify your thoughts and puzzle over Deep Junk. Is this not a wonderful creative fascinating thing? Are not amazed at the intellectual fire of this tiny (pop. 5900) town?? Of course it is and you are! (I wish MY town had a Municipal Philosopher.)

But guess who thinks it isn't? The local branch of the psychologists' professional organization. They say that the use of a consulting philosopher is "not only misleading and confusing, but utterly perilous" and state that they will take "all the most appropriate actions to combat any offence that may be identified".

Well, thinking has always been a little perilous (all those highly volatile IDEAS, you know?). But somebody whose job is helping people's minds work better objects to...somebody whose job is helping people's minds work better? (This bit of course is not surprising at all. Rather depressing, but not surprising.) It's almost enough to make you question their dedication.

Perhaps I shall institute the habit of starting each day with a little Marcus Aurelius or Socrates :)

A week's trip out of town, catching up from a week's trip out of town, and mass quantities of freelance work = no time for anything, including reading, writing or (in some cases) sleeping. Grrrr. Note 1 to self: Say no to any and all jobs for the next, oh, two months. Note 2: Spend newly acquired free time gloating over the lovely SSHG Exchange prompts gifted to me by the mods. Can you say Plot Bunnies??

In other news, the transit of Venus is way cool. Watching that little circle move across the sun makes my brain feel funny as I try to wrap my head around the reality of giant flaming balls of gas floating in space. It's no wonder ancient man invented things like the celestial spheres and Prolemaic model. Much easier to grasp.

In keeping with my 100 Things (Surprises) commitment, I can add that I was quite surprised to learn how important the transit of Venus was in terms of astronomy and cosmology. Scientists used it to calculate the distance from the sun to the Earth, of all things -- the NASA guys cleverly glossed over exactly how they did this, saying something about the parallax method and trigonometry (bane of my existence) before zipping on to show pictures of the sun that make it look like some sort of hell dimension (oh great, our solar system is situated on the Hellmouth...). Other surprising Venus trivia: its surface temperature is hot enough to melt lead, its surface pressure is 92 times that of Earth, it rains sulfuric acid, and it suffers from pretty much constant hurricane-force winds. So not a good place for a vacation. Oh, and it rotates backwards.

None of which I knew before, so today was a net gain in that I learned something. Yay me!

There are no words for how behind I am with so many things, as anyone might guess from the fact that I've only posted three times this month. Gaaah. Editing a 300+ page scholarly monograph on Freemasonry in your spare time can do that to you.

But at last, at last, here I am with my next installment in the 100 Things Challenge. Yay!

The reptilian hindbrain, also sometimes called the "lizard brain," is pop culture slang for the most primitive part of the brain, the part just slightly more evolved than the autonomous functions like breathing. Its proper name is Rhombencephalon, and according to Wikipedia "it has been suggested that the hindbrain first evolved...between 570 and 555 million years ago."

But this surprise, which I experienced when I was about ten years old but still remember like it was yesterday, has nothing to do with where the hindbrain came from and everything to do with the fact that it's still in there, sulking at its superfluity, waiting to pounce and take over in certain circumstances.

My brother is five years younger than me, and when we were kids we had developed mad skillz at pushing each others' buttons. One evening when I was about ten, he did something -- I don't recall what -- that sent me into quite literally a blind rage. I was so furious I was incoherent; I distinctly recall that I felt like I had lost the power of speech, as well as all control over my actions. We were downstairs at the time, and I remember hurtling up the stairs, slamming into his room (a MAJOR breach of protocol: personal space was a very big priority in my family and you DID NOT enter someone else's room without permission)...I ran to his dresser, ripped the drawers open, grabbed handfuls of stuff, anything, whatever I could get my hands on, threw it left, right, up, down, hurling it about the room until it was festooned with socks and underwear. I felt like a passenger in my own head, like my rage had become a physical thing that had taken possession of me. And side by side with the red berserker frenzy was this astonishment: What the heck is going on? What is this??

I remember that my brother and my mom had followed me upstairs and stood in the doorway staring, open-mouthed in awe at my tiny whirling vortex of fury. (I was a very small ten year old.)

Later, my mom told me she was proud of me that instead of beating my brother to a pulp, I'd turned my rage on something inanimate, not to mention squashy and damage-free (socks = harmless). Looking back, yeah, as a mom I too would probably have taken that as a good sign. At the time, though, had I known who the Incredible Hulk was then, I'm sure I would have identified with him (sans the purple shorts).

That particular part of the hindbrain never showed itself to me again (though I caught a glimpse of its red-and-black hide once, years later, when my college boyfriend smugly opined that it was fine for him to have slept around in high school but that girls ought to be virgins...but that's another story, and it wasn't really a surprise LOL!). But I've never forgotten my amazement at this hitherto unsuspected capability lurking inside me, and my astonishment at the power of this most basic of hindbrain emotions.

So after starting out with Surprise 1, a philosophical disquisition on how much you can learn about a person from the things that surprise them, I'm going to backtrack and do a really simple old-fashioned straight-forward "Surprise!" for Surprise 2.

For a big chunk of my childhood we lived out in the country -- the real country, with the quarter-mile-long driveway and the nearest neighbor a mile away -- first in New York surrounded by woods and hills, and later in the midwest surrounded by cornfields and wheatfields. My brother and I spent a lot of time playing in the river or the barn or the abandoned chicken-house, the latter being an adventure which would probably give today's over-cautious parents a bad case of OH MY GOD NO THE DISEEEEASES, but which just gave us a high tolerance for funny smells and probably germs (I attribute my general excellent health to childhood experiences like this).

Anyway, it was big old barn, a lot of fun to play in, but for quite a few years we didn't have anything in it except mice and cats (in inverse proportions, usually) and of course ourselves. Until Christmas morning when I was eleven, and suddenly the barn had...

(That just seemed to cry out for glitter letters, don't you think?) Yep, a real live honest-to-god pony. For ME! Now, the thrill of surprise was slightly mitigated by the fact that (despite my aforementioned general good health) I had come down with a violent case of the stomach flu on Christmas Eve and every time I diverged from the horizontal, the results were rather spectacularly unpleasant. So I didn't get to actually TOUCH my pony until the 26th. But regardless, I still get to say that I got the ultimate Christmas surprise every little girl dreams of: a pony for Christmas!!

Epilogue: I had Duke for a couple of years and then traded up to Missy, a quarter horse (I was so short and she was so tall that if I got off her anywhere other than the barn I had to lead her to the nearest tree so I could climb up it and drop onto her back like some sort of "Death from Above" ambush). Sadly, we eventually moved to The Big City and there were no more ponies or horses for me. I still miss it sometimes. As Will Rogers said, "There's something about the outside of a horse that's good for the inside of a man."

This is an interesting survey by the Organization for Transformative Works -- thanks to shyfoxling for alerting me to it via her post.

The Organization for Transformative Works, for those who don't know, is a nonprofit organization run by and for fans to provide access to and preserve the history of fan works and fan cultures. They're the outfit behind Archive Of Our Own (AO3) and also the scholarly academic journal Transformative Works and Cultures. TWC has included papers on fan aspects of everything from Wizard rock to World of Warcraft to Willa Cather. They've even done a piece on silent-era movie fandoms (which operated via magazines) back in the 1920s!

They are also, which I did not know until I took the survey, the brains behind FanLore, a wiki designed to document the phenomenon of fan/fandom (making it a sort of meta-fandom of its own, I suppose?), as well as several other projects.

So yeah, I took a survey and actually learned something. How cool is that??

On another note, a lot of people are taking on the 100 Things challenge to encourage themselves to write more, and more in-depth, posts. I'm all for it (I mean, if I wanted tiny little posts I'd go to Twitter, right?). For a long time I've cross-posted my book reviews from Goodreads to LJ, so choosing 100 books (while easy) would have felt like cheating since I already do that. There's music or movies or poems, all of which are great, but none of them spoke to me. Finally I decided on 100 Surprises: the people, places, events, stories, things, ideas, etc. that have surprised me over the years. I just hope I can come up with 100 of them...