Each time I have this sort of intense grad school meltdown, I feel like I’ll never be able to read again. And sometimes, it’s true. Between my first and second years, I spent a whole summer not reading because I couldn’t bear to look at books. After orals, sci-fi saved me. It wasn’t reading, it was consumption. Inhaling books so quickly, I hardly ( Read more... )

So, I finally checked out LJ Aqua on the recommendation of cowpops and was utterly engrossed for half an hour or more. I will also date myself by admitting it reminded me of my favorite computer game when I was little. My parents had bought their first computer--I was 8 or 9--and it was this huge clunky IBM with that blue screen. It, like most computers ( Read more... )

I'm not even sure what I mean by that, but I've gotten very maudlin and sentimental over the blizzards this year, remembering college, remembering elementary school, remembering highschool ( Read more... )

Yesterday, the university server was down so I had to beg for a flashdrive from one of the other instructors to print out my handouts for teaching and then the photocopier was displaying everything in French and for a moment, I stared at the display wondering if I had lost my tenuous grip on reality ( Read more... )

Some interesting excerpts from Greetham's very dry Textual Scholarship:

On Medieval scriptoriums (and I wonder if the same was true in Renaissance scriptoriums as well), where clerks and monks copied books before the advent of print:

“Silence was demanded in the monastic scriptorium, not just for reasons of piety, but to ensure concentration. Once ( Read more... )

Working on a paper, but had to stop mid-research to share this find (I don't know what possessed me to write about the use of French in Henry V when I only have 1 semester of French!) Also, this paper should have been done last Tuesday. But I'll stop with the whining and get to the interesting point.

Excerpted from the OED

adieu -  [a. Fr. adieu, f ( Read more... )

The Great Vowel Shift

You are thinking, “Was there one? When did this happen? Why was I not informed?” And the startling answer is, yes, there was one, and that was the brilliant scholarly name it was given. Sometime between the 13th and 16th the English language changed so drastically that its vowels lost all resemblance to the Romance ( Read more... )

Again, only supplying the entertaining pieces. You should all be grateful that I wade through excess verbiage and pages and pages of boredom-inducing texts to provide you with the most interesting fragments.

This time, I’m reading a chapter from a book called Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and ( Read more... )

Participating in

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Nothing like some good science-fiction when you want to take a break from medieval lit because it allows you use just the right amount of intellectual activity-meaning very little but enough to keep my attention. I love Asimov for the intriguing science of his science-fiction, for the mystery/detective-science-fiction that he has down to an art. I ( Read more... )