friday!

and so i'm now in post-thesis-completion aftermath which basically means spending a lot of time unearthing emails that have gone too long unanswered, working on ebooks blog posts (which i keep promising to our poor editor well in advance and continue to email to him the day before they need to go up!), and planning things to do here. and i have a nice fat stack of books that have absolutely nothing to do with my thesis topic, including hilary mantel's wolf hall, which i started from the library a few weeks ago and haven't gotten to finish, and stephen king's under the dome which is fat enough to keep me going for at least two days. :) plus a brand-new 30% off coupon from borders burning a hole in my email.

and this mostly means that i don't have a plan for today, of course, so, instead i'm proposing that you all go and get addicted to freakangels.

"dull. abysmally dull. a triumph...the dullest of the lot."

so this is it, folks. you saw it here first:

and what is this you're looking at, you ask?

that right there is the desk of a person who just did her last day's work on her master's thesis, thank you very much.

under the sudden looming pressure of an inescapable desire to get the fucking thing done, she drank more caffeine than five people need, drove her girlfriend nuts for a long weekend, and forewent sleep, emailing friends, regular exercise, and food with nutritional content (other than chocolate and the milk in coffee).

but the thing is done, by god, and she is not revisiting a comma of it.

it is done. finished. completed. and will be printed tomorrow to be a (hopefully) cheery surprise for her two professors on thursday when they weren't expecting it 'til next week.

but that's what the desk looks like.

why isn't she there, you ask? why, because she's busily crawling her way to her bed. which is out of frame.

see? the bed is that green bit over there on the left with a total lack of bibliographies, footnotes, or block quotations. goodnight, folks. that's all she wrote.

action transvestite!

i have no brain.

i've been doing the last-ditch revisions of my thesis for -- well, what feels like several years now. checking my email, i see it's only since the 1st of december. it feels like longer. my brain is slowly turning into swiss-cheese'y stuff but thanks to my wonderful friend diana (you should go and read her blog and decide that it is awesome and go and vote at the best librarian/library edublogs 2009 site. that link right back there), i have truly gorgeous slide backgrounds for when i turn to making my slide-show presentation.

for my presentation.

which is next week.

immediately after which, i have a job interview. so that's going to be a really good day!

anyway, the upshot of all that is, determined though i am to stick to this random and self-assigned every other day schedule, i have really nothing to say this friday except "bleerrrrrrrr" and "has my professor's handwriting always been this awful and i've never noticed before? what the hell is that word?! is it important? oh, god, what if it's important -- oh, crap--" and other things of that sort.

so go watch some eddie izzard instead. really. it's about star wars. you'll like it.

music overkill

so in the throes of trying to decide on a title for my colloquium thesis presentation -- which i'm looking forward to about as much as unanesthetized dental surgery -- i ended up surfing through most of my music collection looking for inspirational lyrics. luckily for me, breaking benjamin and linkin park came through in spades for me -- good lads! -- and i found a title. i'm not sure what arthur griffith or bobby sands would make of linkin park but they're both dead, so that's okay.

but before i found that oh-so-awesome title (yes, i'll put it at the end of this post), i wandered around youtube for awhile because...well, it was better than grinding out more pages of rewrites. and in the 'but what about that song...and didn't that one have a good line...'-ness of it all, i came across a few music videos, then deliberately looked for a few more and, because a good tune is always handy for getting you through a saturday....

is this the most emo video ever? bar, of course, anything made by the nine inch nails?

and the answer is possibly, yes, bar this one by papa roach:

and then there's this -- another entry from seether which i personally think of as "the best way to blow off your celebrity ex-girlfriend in public" video:

sorry about the sound quality on this next one; the lead guitar is a little swallowed up but the one i really wanted i couldn't embed for reasons which pass my technical expertise.

theory of a deadman santa monica
Uploaded by allianceE. - Up-to-the minute news videos.

and because i can't do a post of videos without breaking ben...

oh, and the title? "memories consume: irish republican nationalism, 1980s-1890s," thanks to these guys:

"i love deadlines. i love the 'whoosh!'-ing sound they make as they go by."

notes from a tuesday-that-really-really-really-feels-like-a-monday.

why is it that all deadlines -- no matter how far in advance you knew about them or how well prepared you really are -- hit like bricks? is this some cosmic rule of which i was not informed? if so, i would like to call a foul. or at least an inconvenient. the latest brick to hit are the end-of-term thesis deadlines. argh. two weeks. argh. i realise that i had to be finished editing it and coddling it at some point, but does it have to be so soon? *sniff* (and did it really have to be when i had editing to do on another paper and a paper not included post to write and...and...and...? and the answer to all that is "yes," 'cause that's how life works.) i'm trying very hard to see all these scary deadlines and not-having-a-full-time-job-yet-ness as being opportunities to learn to deal with the universe on a different level -- challenges being handed out by a good teacher, so to speak, to make you stretch a bit -- but minus a good night of sleep in several weeks and plus stress, it's hard. not impossible, but hard.

i'm still determined to keep up my every-other-day posting routine here; i don't really know why since it's a totally arbitrary schedule i thought up more or less at random, but it's something that isn't school- or work-related and i figure it's important to have a couple of those type of things floating around.

i don't have any neat short book reviews for today, but i do have some unconnected thoughts i was hoping to work into something more major later. i picked up hilary mantel's wolf hall from the library the other day and so far it's slightly bizarre but very good. i don't normally care for historical fiction very much -- not for a.s. byatt's self-serving and whiny reasons ("they don't do it good like me!") -- but because i get too caught up in my own speculation about what happened and whether i like how the writer is writing the person and whether i happen to know that an actual historical detail is being elided for the sake of a good story. (okay, maybe that is kind of like what byatt says but, damn, that woman annoys me.) i don't necessarily object if this happens, but it does tend to bump the book further down the "must read now!" list.

i have read and enjoyed more "historical" mystery series than anything else: laurie king's mary russell novels; elizabeth peters' amelia peabody series (colorfully described by my mother as "bonking all over upper egypt"); and c.j. sansom's matthew shardlake books, of which there are only four at the minute, though i hope for more!

i also have eoin colfer's and another thing..., but i haven't been able to bring myself to crack the covers yet. i wouldn't say that i hold the original guide trilogy (in five books) particularly sacred, but i really do love them and i disliked the idea of a "ghostwritten" sequel as soon as i heard about it. nothing i've heard about it since has made me feel any better about it and i just don't have the energy to read one of my treasured pre-adolescent literary memories being done badly.

and now off to write part 2 of my pni post about the internet archive and the wonders of the bookserver project. i won't put any links so you'll all have to head over to pni and increase our traffic!

"who said anything about panicking? this is still just the culture shock!"

not a lot of time to put up something thoughtful today -- had a meeting with one of my professorial thesis pair yesterday and, in among a whole slew of other very nice and helpful comments, she dropped one bomb about a major restructuring of material that has me tizzying just a little right now. so i just emailed off a revised outline -- at this late date! -- to take into account my professor's excellent -- if daunting -- idea and am waiting to hear back. in the meantime, i have to do some last-minute "studying" for a test in my history of the book class which may or may not take place tomorrow, i'm not sure. we haven't had class for two weeks and our professor is not the best of electronic communicators. it's a good thing that my "term paper" for that class has a lower page limit of 7 and i'm writing about something silly -- the history of the necronomicon.

but just so i don't get out of practice with this whole blogging thing, i found this very funny set of photos someone took to answer the eternal question: "just what do stormtroopers do on their days off?" not target practice apparently although that might be helpful; "only imperial stormtroopers are so precise," my left foot. and some more thoughts on movies from cinematical.com, this time about what makes for a great villain. i'm not sure the "coffee cup" test works for a lot of my favorite villains -- i don't remember the predator eating anything ever -- but i like the general idea.

then there's this very awesome set of bookmarks from secondhand books from the age of uncertainty blog.

to end on another book-related note, here's arachne jericho's review from tor.com of the new terry pratchett, unseen academicals. im pleased that she seems to think it's lighter than his last few -- monstrous regiment, thud!, and company. thud! i only really got through because i love sam vimes; sort of the same way i got through night watch, except i thought that one was more successful.

"it's alive!"

...and with that lame young frankenstein reference (sorry, mr. wilder, sir), we start again.

i realised the other day that it was entirely ironic preparing to write posts for a blog in england when i couldn't even keep my own blog going at the rate of a post a week. so i'm going to see if i can do better than a post a week.

the recent hiatus -- so-called -- has been the result of a) the recurrence of an old wrist injury due to too many years spent typing at marlboro; and b) trying to write a master's thesis. surprisingly, it takes a hell of a lot of time! who knew?

anyway, i return now because -- more or less entirely on a whim -- i sent my name in for consideration for part of a new project being set up by a blogger i read out of london. he wanted to put something together about e-books. "aha!" i thought. "i know next to nothing about e-books, but gosh, do i have some opinions!" (only part of that last statement is true.) so i sent him an email; he asked for a "trial post"; i wrote one (largely about the school in massachusetts which recently hit a lot of front pages for declaring it was going to get rid of all its books in favor of the kindle) and sent him that; he liked it. so now the "team" of people he's chosen from all the (dozens? hundreds? ten?) people who sent him emails in the first place are slowly assembling ourselves into something that will -- some day soon! -- resemble a blog about e-books and associated topics.

so i come back here for two purposes.

one is to solicit stories -- do you have links to cool things about e-books? do you use a kindle? a sony ereader? neither? do you live on google books? please -- send me stuff to write about! i'm not honestly afraid of running out of material -- a blog post isn't that long after all -- but i figured if anyone was kind enough to still be hanging on and reading this thing after such a long...we'll be kind and call it a "gap"...it would be worthwhile to put the request out there.

the second is to put into effect the new plan of microposts to solve the above-mentioned issue of the 'once-weekly' post. this way, i figure i can write a little more, clog up all your rss feeds a little more, and not put too much more strain on my poor wrist.

conferences, sessions, and commentors, oh my!

so i spent yesterday at the new england historical association's spring conference in portland, maine. i got to attend two sessions (apart from the one i was presenting in) and got a truly awful lunch into the bargain. (really, guys, vegetarians do not live on salad. i assure you that we have moved beyond this. and i had no faith that the catering people were keeping beef burgers apart from veggie burgers.)

anyway, the first session i went to -- on communities and conflict in germany and yugoslavia -- was interesting. one panelist was a very nervous speaker; i wanted to reassure her that, if the audience did suddenly turn into brain-devouring zombies, she was really closest to the door and had the best chance of escape bar the chair of the panel who was a few inches closer. a professor for whom i ta'd last fall gave an excellent paper on community conflict in yugoslavia.

a friend of mine from the gslis dual-degree program and i were presenting -- not together, sequentially -- in a panel on nationalism in ireland, along with a recent post-doc. from amherst (very nice guy -- has his first book coming out in august which i have to remember to put on goodreads). we happened to have both a chair -- introduced all of us and kept time -- and a commentor who just commented on the papers. our chair was very nice, quite gracious, and, all in all, almost silent. i'm not sure he felt he could do much to restrain the commentor who, once he got rolling, had a less than collegial effect.

possibly his commentary can best be described by the fact that i later overheard him ask a colleague of his who was also at the panel, "so, was i mean enough?"

i really don't think this is the best way to judge comments you have delivered on someone else's work. i still think my mother's rule, by way of a friend of hers, applies: "you have to say one nice thing. even if you have to scrape for it. even if it's 'nice margins' or 'gosh, you spell well.' say something nice."

the only other thing i would really like to add is that, on the basis of a single publication in the field, possibly he could have found it in his heart to be just a tad more generous. the assumption that your style is the best is overbearing and unattractive in anyone, i don't give a damn who you are. and, when i spoke to him briefly after the panel to ask a question about a book he had mentioned, his attitude seemed to be that talking to me was a rather low priority on his list and, please, since i was just an annoying little student, could i just go away now? add to that the fact that, within the hour after the panel, three separate people found my friend and me to tell us not to listen to him, that he had a reputation for being ridiculously overpicky, and, honestly, his opinion only weighed that heavily with him, i think perhaps things could have gone better.

having now thought over what he had to say, read his comments, and given them due consideration, i think i can safely say that i have come up with his major objections on my own, have a list of them, and will deal with them in my thesis. so there. (insert appropriate sound of raspberry, if you wish.) other than that -- if he has any clever way in which we can magically somehow comprehend with any degree of certainty what people in the late 19th century were thinking or reading at any given moment in time, i would really like to hear about it. personally, i haven't seen the tardis around lately, so i'm thinkin' the doctor isn't about to intervene.

so, yes. could've been better. 

but the other panels were good -- there was an excellent, though short because one panellist had a family emergency and couldn't come, one on british imperialiam overseas in the afternoon. lots of stuff about metropole and periphery which i would have been better able to cope with had i not been getting an awful sinus headache. as it was, i hung on for the general outlines; both presenters were really impressive, i thought.

the speech at lunchtime, i have to say, i nearly had to take notes on. this guy -- the outgoing president of neha -- and david starkey of a few posts ago should get together and have a little pity party for the death of the white male ivory tower academic.

"remember the atrocity committed against us before which forgives the atrocity we are about to commit today! hurray!"

so interestingly enough i was thinking the other day about writing a post about the use of emotive language in the writing of irish history. specifically i've noticed that historians -- and i'm using this term to cover, as you might say, a multitude of sins from memoirists to journalists to professional academics to passing people who just thought, "what the hell - i can write about that!" -- tend to use the phrase "shot dead" rather than "killed," "murdered," or simply "shot."

and then look at this! a splinter group of the ira -- the actual original ira must be so long gone now -- goes and proves my point: two soldiers killed at antrim army base. "shot dead." right there. guardian coverage. while they were accepting a pizza delivery. and two of the delivery guys got shot, too, but not killed. (at least last i knew -- no-one seems to be too bothered about them.)

anyway, this isn't the post about that because i haven't really finished thinking about it yet. this is more of a post to comment on the fact that, suddenly, there's present-day coverage of my thesis topic.

most of the news commentators i've read have been saying things like, "but it's been so quiet here -- what the hell!" (except -- you know -- in more formal language than that.) even ian paisley's son has made a comment to that effect -- which is really odd, because i was expecting him to come out fulminating the same old orange rubbish that his dad spouts at every opportunity and, so far, he's been remarkably restrained. points to him. 

really what all this "but it's been so quiet!" translates to for me at this point is that something has been bubbling away quietly for at least the past, oh, say, fifteen years? and everyone's been ignoring it or hoping it would go away. which is probably true. what they're now calling "dissident" republicans -- the guys who used to just be "gunmen," "provies," "provos," or, occasionally, "terrorists" or "guerrillas" back in the day -- were never happy with the truces that were called in the '80s or '90s. they were never happy with the good friday peace agreement. they fought the international observers in the late '90s -- not literally, admittedly, but still. they dug in their heels when it came to dumping arms. and one of these groups, the real ira who has claimed the shooting deaths of the two soldiers, were the ones who bombed the bus in omagh in 1998. frankly, i'm still surprised that more people haven't tried to kill martin mcguinness or gerry adams as traitors to the cause. my guess would be that, despite their protestations to the contrary, they both still know enough names and enough doors to knock on to keep themselves from a messy death.

in any case, the present little explosion seems to have been tipped off, or at least immediately predated, by the announcement that the british military would be sending in undercover forces to northern ireland. most people saw this as an admission that there was something going seriously wrong somewhere and "conventional" forces weren't enough to get at it. martin mcguinness almost immediately put out a press release to say he thought it was a bad idea (i can't track down this article any more; if anyone sees it around, would you please send me a link?); i agree. if nothing else, if you're going to do it, don't fucking make an international announcement about it. how many policemen do you want shot? do you still think the irish can't read?

and this morning -- i've begun checking my news feeds with more trepidation than i've felt for a long time -- there was a bbc report of a policeman was shot and killed while responding to a call for help. who wants to sign up for the force, kids! being a cop in northern ireland has to be one of the top 10 worst jobs you can get in the u.k. 

the really fun thing is that all the rhetoric being used by the politicians commenting on the events -- from the head of the police force, sir hugh orde, to gordon brown, to gerry adams and ian paisley -- would sound totally familiar to any irish nationalist from the 1890s: these are the actions of a dissident group; they don't represent the feelings of the majority; we must respect the feelings of the population... this must sound dishearteningly familiar to anyone who lived in northern ireland, or even passed through it and read a newspaper, between 1969 and 1990. this isn't a new response; despite claims to the contrary, this is the same old response trotted out yet again. lets see if it works this time!

(the subject line, by the way, is poorly quoted from memory from a terry pratchett discworld novel. it's a line he uses more than once. i think i might be cribbing it this time from... jingo maybe? or possibly fifth elephant.)

"coraline"

did you know that benedict anderson (of imagined communities fame) was responsible for the mass suicide at the time of the hale-bopp comet?

me neither.

but, according to tom garvin's mythical thinking in political life: reflections on nationalism and social science, such is the case. apparently anderson -- and some others including, tangentially, eric hobsbawm -- are responsible for the survival and support of a "murderous" (not my word) system of ideas which led to the cultist suicide.

uh-huh.

i've been reading through garvin's work because he kept coming up in footnotes of other people i was reading -- i can't remember where the first one i saw was; i just made a note of the title after i saw it for the third or fourth time. i've come across the name before but this is the first time i've had the time/desire/need to read through the stuff. now, in relation to my thesis work, it seemed relevant and who really needs sleep, right? 

i just finished his nationalist revolutionaries in ireland 1823-1928 which was very good except for the fact that it dismissed most of the things i find most interesting at the minute including the 1890s and what arthur griffith did before he founded sinn fein. (some really interesting things, take my word for it -- including, in all fairness, the dissemination of some depressingly anti-semitic rhetoric. *sigh* feet of clay after all.)

anyway, back to garvin: nationalist revolutionaries verged on the angry-sounding at times; mythical thinking is verging on the outright histrionic! garvin seems to be teetering on the edge of calling hobsbawm a closet stalinist and describes anderson's work as "overrated." well. okay, the last bit might be kind of true, but it elides, i think, how important anderson's book seems to have been when it first came out. it seems old hat now but everyone subsequent to him has used his stuff; admittedly, sometimes it gets used to say "there's a hole in his logic" or "gosh, he missed this thing" or "gee, this is really cool but--" garvin has written a preface to mythical thinking mentioning that he wrote it specifically for use in a class he teaches so maybe the point is to get his students arguing. i think it would work very well!

anyway, it struck me as odd at 7.30 this morning when i was drinking my coffee and eating my fig bar before work.

the only other really interesting thing i've got to pass on is my little thumbnail review of coraline.

i was really a little nervous when i first heard about the coraline film adaptation -- it seemed like so many things could go wrong and it's such a marvellous book, i would have hated to see an awful film version. but it's all okay, because henry selick -- not tim burton as several people, including film critics, seem to think -- did a lovely job. even dakota fanning was, i have to say it, really good. 

and it's completely ludicrous, by the way, that even one film critic -- let alone several! -- have credited tim burton with this film. i hope they're apologizing.

i did picture the story differently -- i had a much more british setting in mind: something like a london townhouse with attached garden or backing onto a larger strip of woods...something like the house in torchwood's "small worlds" episode (if you haven't seen it, stop reading this, go join netflix or find the discs at your local library, and watch them). the voices of the characters were all british and coraline particularly so -- sort of like wendy with an attitude. and since my only other connection with dakota fanning was the egregious adaptation of war of the worlds where it seemed like she screamed nonstop for two hours and i had to put up with tom cruise... it seemed like bad things could happen.

that being said, selick's vision of how the world looks is solid enough that i'm willing to go with it and fanning's stock has inched up. keith david as the cat is great and what's not to love about ian mcshane as the strange russian guy training a jumping mouse circus? al swerengen in spangles!

i still like the book better, i have to say -- the "other mother" will always be more terrifying that way although she's pretty damned scary on film, too -- but the movie is really, really good.