Icelandic [updated again for Will]

Eyjafjallajokull = ay-yah-FYAH'-plah-yer-kuh-duhl

Hmm.

This will take some work.

Updated with this amusing illustration:



[FROM: http://oldbitterballs.blogspot.com/ (a, shall we say, spicey address)]

Exciting additional update for Will:

FROM: http://www.harkavagrant.com/

Today's Walk in the Afternoon

No news on the book... but...

... I found this interesting:

"The scariest thing a young faculty member experiences is not, as is conventionally supposed, the “need to produce” and therefore her/his experience is not aided by the “mentorship” of an experienced scholar. Rather, the young scholar’s fear stems from the fact that no one in the department is talking to each other about scholarship. Faculty are socializing, going out, schmoozing all the time, and the ideas that supposedly drive the work they do are not being discussed. The mentor, if assigned, will try to teach the young faculty member how to navigate the minefield of the department, but that is exactly what is alienating. . The mentor, especially when well-intentioned, may be the model for what is wrong, not an aid in coping. Indeed, if the mentor is really similar to the young faculty member in terms of ideology or social identity, the mentor may be a model for what the young faculty member does not wish to become.

The one conversation everyone is having incessantly is the one about the micropolitical maneuvers within the department. This conversation is, of course always done with armor on, with an eye toward alliances and enemies already made, with everyone watching to find out which camp the new faculty member will join. And while there is a relationship between micropolitics and geopolitics, it is far more tenuous, far more mediated by local institutional conditions, than the new faculty first imagines.

Because no one is talking about substance, only alliances, and because alienation is general, a vacuum exists at the center of institutional power which is not filled by talent or argument, but by those who feel most comfortable or justified taking advantage of it. For those in power, and for those who hope to attain power, the arrival of a new junior faculty member is to be watched closely for his/her schmoozing choices. As a result, it is not simply the case that junior faculty fear senior faculty, but that the senior faculty fear the junior faculty, walking around wondering whether this new person will contribute to their already hatched plan to take over the curriculum. The fact that the new person was hired with accomplishments and expectations much higher than so many senior faculty members does not help this form of fear, of course.

While it remains true that the power differential between tenured and untenured faculty makes the ubiquity of fear particularly threatening to the careers of junior faculty members, the longer one stays the more one discovers that one’s unhappiness is simply an example of the larger misery of faculty members. Senior faculty don’t exactly help or support one another either. Tenure might lead to a sense of security; it surely does not breed happiness.

The net that academics are ultimately caught in, regardless of the structure or the “progressiveness” of the specific department, is the net of personal power. Within the capitalist professional class, the criteria by which alliances are formed and judgments made is generally limited by an abstract and objective, rather than personal, question: did you make money for the shareholders? Even where personality or group dynamics dictates one or another poor relationship, there is some criteria of performance evaluation outside of academia’s twin criteria: personal alliance and ideology. In truth, it takes an incredible number of hours to evaluate adequately any individual’s research. For all but a handful of us, the number of people who have given our work that kind of attention is miniscule. We are tied to those individuals not the way a consultant is tied to a client’s account books, but the way we are tied to lovers and friends — and ex-lovers and enemies. Obviously, I am aware that markets create winners and losers, and also, that there is no “free market” unconstructed by the intervention of human psyches. Yet at least within the bourgeoisie the existence of a monetary reference point provides some resistance to personal power, while the structure of institutionalized intellectual work permits no such outside reference point — not community service, not ethics, not, in light of the inability of humanities scholars to agree about what such a concept might mean, truth. Academia has neither capitalist forms of abstraction nor socialist forms of solidarity to recommend it."

[at http://jdeanicite.typepad.com/i_cite/2009/08/on-being-postacademic.html]

I am not sure I would say that I am postacademic (indeed, I am not quite sure what that means), but this writing does capture to an extent the way things seem to run. They say that so much depends on your research but there is no time to discuss it (as you madly try to produce your own) and it may be that you do not agree among each other about what constitute proper questions. It is all thought provoking. And harried people from outside the department determine, gratis and when they are able to get to it, your stature. (And I have done some refereeing myself--- and I was not that fast.)

But there is no help for this. It is going to be this way for the foreseeable future.

The thing for me to remember is that I do enjoy research. Also, while this year has been full of anxiety in a lot of ways, I have been able to enjoy intellectual "flow" on frequent occasions. That is what I need to hold on to.

No update on the book

I might send a message to my editor in a couple of days... or should I wait until mid-August to make it a clean three months since I heard something? Maybe I will do that.

Tooth and Bridge News

I just had my second crown of the year put in.

$$$!!!

This time it was the lower back right molar which, already crowned, cracked.

The temporary that was put on after the dentist drilled around and prepared the tooth fell off last week and the nerve, exposed, got angrier and angrier. Anyway, after a fairly painful session yesterday, when the crown was finally put on (the anaesthesia deadened my tongue and NOT the tooth--- I tensed, I knew that cold air would hurt but I was tough... except I proved not to be!!! It hurt!!), things are getting back to normal.

In other news, the Ed Hillary Teams at Bridge (AKA, The Buttercream Disaster Pairs, as I call this event to you and to Timmy at home) are finally over. My team was weak and we did not outdo ourselves, performing as expected. I have not looked at the score once and have no plans to. That said, it was fun, MOST nights (and yes there is a story there--- a tawdry story of pushy kiwi women and a man who needs to learn not to speak his mind, even if he is provoked...)

Cool Volcano Image

Anak Krakatau erupting as the stars are beginning to come out (via the very fun Eruptions Blog).

Netrebko in Lucia

I found this from the HD broadcast from the MET that we saw here earlier in the year. The experience in the theater was quite something and this little youtube misses that but it is on the whole a most excellent souvenir:



This is, of course, the first-act scena. She is so glamorous and I love the security and clarity of her upper register.

PS: Sotto voce to friends and family members: still nothing on the book.

The Rondine Aria x2

[Dress rehearsal at the Detroit Opera House, April 2008. Pamela Armstrong and Victor Ryan Robertson sing "Chi ilsogno di Doretta," from Giacomo Puccini's La Rondine. Also featuring Kisma Jordan, Kimwana Doner, and Leah Dexter.]



She does a good job.

Here is a rather famous person:



I love this aria.

It's New!**

Liking this...try to hold on until 4:40.



[It's called Music Talking and it's by The Montanas w/DJ Roland Clark.]

**New of course is a relative term; compared to the stuff I usually post, it's effing hott off teh presses or, heck, it hasn't been released yet.

One more from Ze Frank

Nicely put and boy it hits close to home:



For more, go here: http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/

Not Boring, Dirty

I have just discovered this guy. What fun.



Go to his site and try to watch only 5.

Here is the address:

http://www.zefrank.com/theshow/

Is it just me...

...or is Sacha Baron Cohen overdoing it with the promotion of his coming (what looks to be highly naughty) Bruno film?

It is like too late for Father's Day...

...but this painting, to which Will drew my attention, is just so, well, it has to be seen:



[The soccer ball, omg, the soccer ball!!]

Happy Father's Day all.

Latest News

In case anyone is reading this, I still have heard nothing on the book manuscript. My editor is positive but the readers have been slow and hard to find. The work I do is interdisciplinary (gender + religion + late empire + lots of philology) and this has meant that my process has been delayed. I am frustrated and worry that this will not have a good outcome, but, that said, everyone who has read the correspondence from my editor thinks that I should be optimistic. In my intellect I agree but my heart--- it sure does like fretting.

On a more a positive note, I submitted a long article (13,0000 words) on the Emperor Julian and his friend Salutius to one of the major journals yesterday. That project is now out of my hands for the moment. Let's hope that this set of readers will move with more dispatch.

This peer-review thing is in need of work, quite frankly.

All for now. Ciao!

A Favorite

1980, baby (Italo-Frivalo Disco):



AND the remix!, which is pretty awesome too (with a killer bass-line--- it just throbs):



Still waiting for the publisher and those readers who are hard at work (and no doubt very very busy) to give word on the manuscript. La la la wait la la la wait wait and wait some more. la!

Latest News on the Book is...

...that there is none. Four months the manuscript has been gone and it has been in the hands of readers all this time. I am to hear something "any day now", which has been the state of play for a month. Sigh. In other news, I am putting the finishing touches on an article on the Emperor Julian so while the march of scholarship is bottled up in a big way in one spot, it at least is continuing elsewhere. At present, teaching is fun if a little insane. We are missing people and those who are still around have to take up the slack. I am sleeping well, that's for sure. Back at the gym now too and I am slowly but noticeably getting back into better shape. More later? Perhaps.