The VICTORIA list got bogged down again in a discussion of whether we can apply the term "Victorian" to the American nineteenth century, or even to the Canadian, Indian, or Australian. I contributed the following, which probably doesn't really help matters:

A story related by the British Columbian journalist and educator Agnes Deans Cameron shortly after the turn of the century may be revealing in what it says, not only about how "Victorian" the north of Canada really was, but also about the inexorability of capitalism, personified in the Hudson's Bay Company:

"What are the two greatest things on earth?" Mrs. Wood, as a young girl, asked the dusky disciples of her Sunday School class. "The Queen and The Company," was the ready response. "And of these, which is the greater?" Little Marten-Tail rubbed one moccasin over the other, and the answer came thoughtfully in Cree, "The Company. The Queen sometimes dies, but The Company never dies."

This whimsically suggests to me a new method of naming eras. We would be, I suppose, Late Microsoftians. Or perhaps Walmartians?

Cameron's The New North, incidentally, is available in a very good Gutenberg edition with illustrations. The first one, of her with a moose head, is totally badass. I love the expression on her face.

The msvf asks me in an email:

> Do you think that american voters in the democrat
> primaries will overlook race before gender?


It's an odd question, really ("overlook"?!?), as though those are both things that are disadvantages.... And in a way, they are.

Perhaps popular culture might give us some indication; after all, it shapes as well as reflects opinions in the US. All the popular culture in the States seems to me to point to the solidification of gender roles: men and women have separate (and not equal) sports teams; the family drama and family sitcom still play off the division of roles and stereotypes about the differences between men and women. So do commercials. But all this seems to me to work towards a hardening of stereotypes. Even the commercials that show bumbling men and strong women seem to me to convey a deep uneasiness about such role reversals.

On the other hand, black athletes and musicians are celebrated in popular culture. Racial stereotypes still exist, but somehow they seem more often to be consciously empowering (except for those insidious Arabs and lazy Indians). And don't underestimate the role of guilt here. It's understandably easier to recognize guilty feelings about an identifiable period (four hundred years long, say) of racial oppression and genocide than it is to feel guilty about an indeterminate and far less blatant process of gender oppression. It's a matter of course for Republican pundits to call Hillary Clinton a "pushy bitch," but they could never get away with calling Barack Obama an "uppity nigger."

That's kind of why I feel like, if the candidates were otherwise similar, it would be more useful to American society (symbolically and culturally) to have a white woman as president than a black man. Not only because women are a larger "minority," but because it would require a greater shift of perspective.

I consider my grandmother in Orange County a good barometer of these things. She absolutely despises Hillary Clinton (in startlingly misogynistic terms), but would be perfectly cordial about Barack Obama the "black gentleman" -- all this in spite of the fact that my grandmother's politics are closer to Clinton's than to Obama's. I expect we could relate this to my grandmother's television viewing habits... She's a born-again Lakers fan, for one thing.

So my answer is "yes." Voters in the primaries will overlook race before they will overlook gender. I also think this is a terrible position to be in, any way you look at it.

A German publisher has plans to print an abridged version of Wikipedia.

They'll be choosing the "most-searched-for" articles of the past year so that, as the article suggests here, it's going to be rather more like a yearbook than an encyclopedia. And yet, how do they decide which state to print for each article?

&c.

Thanks to all for the cheering along with my last post. My favourite thing about this time is the way my friends are all happy about it, too...

I submitted my dissertation yesterday!

Bring on the defence, and the post-partum depression. For now, though, I'm the happiest fucker alive.

I am really pleased with some of this dissertation. But my god, the broad subject matter, its neither-fish-nor-fowl transhistorical nature, and the sheer number of books involved (most of the primary sources require that they be cited in multiple editions) is turning it into a bibliographical swamp.

And then I scored 100% on the "Artist or Ape?" test.

Today, I am snowed in. Well, I could have gone to campus, but my committee member postponed our meeting yet again (he's always very busy, and anyway last night I waited for an hour in ten-degrees-below-zero-plus-wind-chill weather for a bus that never came, so I'm quite okay with this). So I'm making bread; maybe tonight I'll brave the snowbanks and go down the street for hot spicy Korean soup with rice and kimchi at the Buk Chang Dong Soon Tofu.

I used to make bread a lot; when I lived in St. John's, I did not buy bread for a year and a half. It struck me a little while ago that, while most people go to the bakery (or, worse, the supermarket) because they cannot be bothered to make bread, I make bread because I'm too lazy to go to the bakery...

The Atlas of Early Printing (1450-1500) is a nice teaching tool and fun toy. It could be a little more comprehensive with more links about the various books published by each printer, but it's nice to have the cities and the name of the first book published in each of them, and to be able to watch the spread of printing across Europe, starting of course with a single workshop in Mainz in 1454.

Some of the trivial information was interesting. For instance, there was a printer in Bonderno before there was one in Subiaco, and one in Pilsen before any showed up in Prague.

Someone entered Thomas Jefferson's library into LibraryThing (the story is also there of how Congress grumbled at purchasing Jefferson's library, in part because it was full of the kind of godless books that started the French Revolution. Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme shit).

The discussion there shows that the exercise led to some useful conclusions. Makes me wonder if perhaps I might do the same with William Morris's library.

Man, I'm procrastinating. Reminded recently of Obelix's classic line "These Romans are crazy" (don't ask), I groan with utter delight to find that in the Italian translation of Asterix, it runs "Sono Pazzi Questi Romani" (i.e., "SPQR"). That's just awesome.

I've never read Asterix in French, but the English translations are absolutely superb.

Other favourite Asterixian moments:

The drunken Roman soldiers hiccuping "hic, haec, hoc."

Or, the running gag "I can't remember where Alesia is! Nobody remembers where Alesia is."

The part in Asterix in Switzerland where Obelix gets totally hammered on fondue and they have to carry him over the Alps. At the final banquet someone asks, "So how was Helvetia, Obelix?" to which he responds nonchalantly, "Flat."

Also, of course the names: the Egyptian "Ptenisnet" (heh), complete with the appropriate hieroglyphic of a tennis net. Or the chief, "Vitalstatistix." And it took me forever to figure out the Viking "Timandahaf" (i.e. time-and-a-half).

You, there. What's your favourite Asterix moment?

A student of mine wrote an essay on "RPGs." One of the weaknesses of his essay was that it took quite some time before I realized that he was actually talking about online games (MMORPGS) rather than tabletop games of the D&D type.

I'm getting old. I ain't so much into computer games anymore, and when I was, it was mostly of the immense strategy type, like Civilization, which I have played out in its first two versions about a million times. I tried the third edition recently, though, and found it was just too much work. Based on my known preference for these kinds of games, I have a feeling that Spore is going to be the holy grail of gaming for me; my only wish is that it comes out before I completely lose interest in computer games.

And yet. The intended finish date of my dissertation happens to coincide more or less with the release of a rather bloody but beautiful online game based on Robert E. Howard's Hyborea. It sure is tempting.

Based on what you know of me, no doubt you would expect me to assume some kind of Stygian wizard-type character, or a stylish Aquilonian general or something. Not at all: I'm going to be a monstrous Cimmerian barbarian, and I'm going to cut your head off with a gigantic fuckin' axe. Be there to meet me, or be a puny, sniveling coward.

Praise Crom!

Roleplaying games have gotten a lot more sophisticated, and managed to cut back on a lot of the weird physics and dice-determinisms. Nowadays you can roll as much as you want to.

In fact, my friend Piers, who loves a game with as much collaboration and improvisation as possible (as opposed to our friend Stuart, for whom the payoff is in the world-building, solving of puzzles, and unfolding of complex narrative strands) played a game with us that had its conflict resolution and character development entirely based on a kind of tarot-like set of cards. Not unlike Calvino's Castle of Crossed Destinies. Can't remember the name, but I think quining, kellista, and certainly msvf were there for it. It wasn't as good, I thought, as the game we played where we all had daemons and lived in a brothel.

Anyway, Suzanne even played that game (the one with the cards) with us. It was kind of fun to have her involved in my occasional geeky pursuits. I thought for sure she'd like that game, since it was rather touchy-feely and very improvisational. In fact, she rather objected to the way it played out. Having got really into playing Magic: the Gathering, and being of a rather competitive nature, she wanted a more deterministic environment. Weirdly, she even might've liked D&D better, as long as somebody else did the math for her.

I was never serious about roleplaying games, mostly because there were not enough geeks in my end of the woods. Similar to the reason I never got into skateboarding: not enough pavement. But I tried.

Some friends of mine are getting me back into it again. We've started a game of Spirit of the Century, which is a charming game based on 1920s pulp fiction, in which one's character aspects and traits are at least partly determined by the novels in which he or she appears. My character's a kind of T. E. Lawrence/Richard Burton type, hero of such orientalist fantasies as Hajji Allenby and the Treasure of the Templars.

sizztheseed comments (among other, more interesting things) on the excessive calculations involved in D&D. And rightly so, an aspect of the game memorably parodied several times in what is really one of the greatest webcomics ever: DM of the Rings. The running satire on endless die-rolling is almost as hilarious as the running gag about "loot".

I am sometimes really shocked to find how insular my students can be. Yeah, they haven't all been brought up on this continent and many of them have never left the urban environment, but they are well-read enough, and some of them are science students. So when dealing with comma-separated lists the other day ("local foods like elk, fiddleheads, and saskatoon berries"), I was flabbergasted when a student asked:

What's "elk"?

Boy, did I ever feel like the primitive bush-man at that moment. Drawing fiddleheads on the board (ignoring the followup question "What's a fern?") was kind of fun, though, I s'pose.

I suppose it's a measure of how comfortable this particular classroom feels that students don't mind asking these kinds of questions. But my satisfaction with that is tempered by a kind of trepidation about the future of people whose idea of wildlife is the inbred squirrels in Queen's Park.

Today's writing class featured an impassioned fifteen-minute discussion of "Rhetorical Questions," with many opinions pro and con, examples and counter-examples, students disagreeing cordially with each other and with me, a student asking "What's a rhetorical question?" and after we all flounder about for a good definition she herself comes up with the best one, effectively answering her own query.

My kind of class!

Wow, I was at this concert (the Orb at Graceland in Vancouver, back in 1995). I am not visible in the audience, when the camera sweeps across it; really, no one is, 'cause we were packed in like sardines in that small venue. The crowd is a little more visible in the "Part 2" video.

Great visuals; the video here captures the experience pretty well, with the difference that the camera is up on a catwalk looking down at the stage, and none of us on the floor had that angle. Quite the contrary, the stage was so high up our focus was on the lights and lasers and sound and we could hardly see the crew at all. It was only about halfway through the show that I even realized they had a drummer.

I was high as a kite on mushrooms and marijuana, and it was so awesome. One of my favourite concert experiences.

So speaking of documenting live shows, I provided a setlist for a show someone shared on Dime of NoMeansNo in Rome on my birthday. The show, however, was awkwardly split; someone who (like me) was unsure where the instrumentals and new tracks began and ended had lumped a few of them together. So, borrowing from the shorthand that has sort of organically grown among the trading community, I put together a setlist:

( Set List: NoMeansNo at the Circolo degli artisti, Roma, Italy, 2007-11-28 )

There was an interesting process here.

Note that the [-] denotes a full break, and a [->] a segue (the latter originates with Deadheads; the former is something that the original taper poster adopted in this particular instance when adding my setlist to the file. The bits in quotation marks are stage chatter, which some people like to fill in as a kind of footprint of the show. It's like the distinguishing marks of a manuscript or incunable: a coffee stain, a bit of marginalia, a missing page, a library bookplate.

Seizing upon that [-], and listening to track 8, which someone had helped me fill in as "Victim's Choice," I realized that as a matter of fact there was a full break between songs; "Victim's Choice" goes into "Amazing Grace" (with some amusing alternate lyrics), back into "VC", which ends almost immediately with some choppy punk notes, then Rob barks "New Song!" and they rip into "Faith." So really the best way to note it is like this:

8. Victim's Choice -> Amazing Grace ("I draaaank tooo muuuuch / And now I have to pee") -> Victim's Choice - ("New Song!") - Faith

Note the elegance of this, and the way that it covers so much of the experience: the sometimes hard-to-define distinction between segues and full stops, the stage chatter, the improvisation. I also love the way this system of notation has arisen organically over time. Its formalism reminds me in an amusing way of Vladimir Propp's very weird formulaic notation system for The Morphology of the Folktale

You'll be fine, she said. You've just got to get through these next two weeks of repairs to the dissertation, and then you can hand it to your committee, then do whatever revisions they require, and then you can submit and then defend it. And you'll be done!

Maybe, said I, But then I've got to find a job. And then I've got to work my ass off to get tenure. And then I've got to play the game 'til I can become a respected full professor. And then I've got to think about retirement. And shortly after that I'm going to die.

It's okay, she said cheerfully. There'll still be lots of sex and food in between now and then.

Here's me, grading my Victorian Novel exams.

A student, writing on the significance of Mr. Slope's name in Barchester Towers, writes that it has to do with the course of Slope's career following an "angel." From the context, I realised that she meant "angle," which gave me a great opportunity to comment, "non angeli, sed angli."

That one's for you, angevin2!

One of these Monday nights (as the msvf once suggested to me) we've got to go out to London to see the Nihilist Spasm Band. I was reminded of them by a show of theirs up on Dimeadozen; I also just came across this footage of them jamming with Alexander Hacke.

I've spent the last while looking up the environment of Watership Down on google maps. Turns out that if you look up Overton, Basingstoke, Hampshire, you can get your bearings all right. But it's hard to make out the landmarks. The lack of elevations and depth perspective flattens everything out, and there are a lot of fields there now. They can't have cut that many trees in forty-odd years, can they? However, starting at Overton you can make out the River Test sort of, and the railway, and moving north from there, I'm pretty sure I found Nuthanger Farm and the escarpment at Watership Down.

As well, this section of satellite photo doesn't zoom in quite as far as it might; when looking at Enderby, for instance, I can see my father's cleaning truck parked out back of the office.

I have also been following the Led Zeppelin reunion with some interest, as part of my recent fixation with documenting live music. I've always thought they were a band with remarkable chemistry, and was interested to see how the mix would work thirty years on, with a new drummer (even one with the right genes). I have seen a few videos now (beginning with the opener "Good Times Bad Times," and it looks like they've still got it together.

Plant seems to know his limitations; his voice has mellowed quite nicely. All those people who say he can't sing any more are quite wrong. He wasn't a screamer after his illness in (what was it? 1972 or something) anyhow. But he looks awful self-conscious about it (I'll bet that is why, rumour has it, he's not interested in touring). I think he should be more self-conscious about his weirdass new facial hair. Anyway, by the closer, "Kashmir," he seemed to be a lot more comfortable.

Speaking of hair -- and since this is a 70s band we're talking about, we really must speak of hair --, somewhere along the line (prob'ly in the last couple of years, since his hair was still dark when he played with the Black Crowes) Jimmy Page has gotten this snow-white head of aging-English-eccentric hair. Looking at him onstage, he was having the time of his life last night, practically shitting himself with happiness. He's the one who's really excited about the reunion.

John Paul Jones looks happy with it, too, though as cool as ever; I liked the way he pushed the keyboard to the forefront of "Stairway to Heaven" (yes, I listened to it all the way through! Are you proud of me?). Jones's solo shows are pretty decent, by the way; and anybody who sits in with Robyn Hitchcock has got to be the Right Sort (you have got to hear their cover of the Dead's "Candyman" at this Robyn show in Nashville with Jones on mandolin).

Jason Bonham was your average solid drummer, and it was here that you really missed that old chemistry. Don't you remember those videos of John Bonham smashing away at the drums? There's this "Dazed and Confused" from England in 1969, for instance, where you can see Bonzo mouthing "Faster! Faster" through the smoke at Jones. Anyway, Jason certainly starts "Kashmir" in too much of a hurry, though he corrects himself, slowing it down and pounding a little harder a few minutes in.

And they busted out "For Your Life," which they'd never played before and seems from the fragmentary extant video to have been a monster. Somewhere, that's somebody's favourite song and that person rejoiced to hear that it had been in the setlist. Led Zeppelin are like that: still much beloved even now. I love 'em, too.

My last post was inspired in part by my memory of a couple I met and wandered around Mycenae with (wow, that was, like, almost a dozen years ago now). They were archaeologists, working on a dig excavating an archbishop's palace in Trondheim, and turned me on to the difference between the archaeology of that period and of a place like Mycenae. The former deals a lot in really ephemeral materials like leather and wood, and that made them chuckle over the stone solidity of the dig at Mycenae.

I've just been reading some reviews of books about the seventeenth-century Virginia colonies. One of the reviewed books makes an interesting point about the connection between the way the English perceived the Irish were seen (as half-clothed, un-"civilized" savages) and the way they saw the Powhatan and other North American tribes. The reviewer then makes the related point that the European conception of "civilization" had a lot to do with the material accoutrements of everyday life: solid houses, extravagant clothes, and that one of the reasons they had had an historical yen for the Romans and Greeks was precisely because they saw them as "civilized" in this sense.

Always looking to tie this in with my own research, I think that this might speak to the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century historiographical disdain for the so-called "Dark Ages." Since there wasn't much left of the domestic architecture of the early middle ages (as opposed to that of Greece and Rome, which had plenty of extant houses and other buildings, of rock), it was easy to suggest that those times weren't "civilized." The notion of a nomadic "era of migration" helps to underline that idea, too.

As for the later middle ages, it's hard to say; it would be great if I could prove that the lack of extant domestic architecture (it had either decayed or was looking mighty run-down) from that period helps to underline this theory (well, it's not so much a theory as a metaphor or a broad pattern). Under this interpretation, the cathedral buildings (even including the Parthenon!) don't count: it's the wealth of private citizens that you use to measure the level of civilization of a society. See? Private wealth, material acquisitiveness. It's starting to look awful familiar as a pattern.