This was not a good year for reading for me. I read a lot, but it was almost every time hard to settle on a book to read, to find something that fit my mood even though I didn’t know what my mood was, to choose a book that wasn’t too heavy to get through but wasn’t too frivolous. What a luxury it is to be able to set aside time to read, when other people are facing the horrors of not being able to get into this country to be reunited with their families or to be safe from persecution and poverty and illness, when others are here but cannot leave and are scared to open their doors for fear of being dragged away from their homes, when others are reliving sexual assault and harassment and humiliation from yesterday or decades ago. But what a necessity it is to…
Category: In other words
Everything else I write, including Shakespeare and performance, and personal stuff
books won’t save you
In the wake of what has been for many in my circles a devastating election repudiating all sorts of values we hold dear—diversity, inclusion, equity, feminism, respect, coherent sentences—there have been a lot of statements along the lines of “if people read more books, this wouldn’t happen!” This is obviously such bunk I can hardly be bothered to deal with it. There’s nothing inherently good about reading; the act of reading books doesn’t make you a better person. Shouldn’t that be obvious? It’s not reading that saves you, but the doors that reading can open and your willingness to walk through them. If you only read books that reinforce what you already believe, you won’t learn anything new. If you only read books to pass the time between being awake and being asleep, you won’t engage with new ideas. If you only read because you think you’re supposed to, if…
researching while unaffiliated
It’s been just over a year since I left my job to become an independent scholar/freelance writer/humanist at large/wow this terminology is bad. I’ve been thinking a lot about what’s possible and not possible in this gig. One huge shift was rethinking how I got access to all those library databases that make my research possible. I’ve really been pretty fortunate, given that I could easily not have access to anything I need (more on that after the break). But it’s a bit of a hodge-podge and there are still things I don’t have access to. So for the curious, here’s a list of what resources I use and how/if I have access to them. The specifics of the list come from my particular research interests (at the moment, early modern printing practices), but the general strategies and obstacles should resonate well beyond my particular niche. One point before I get started. This…
more than seven jobs
There’s been a meme going around Twitter of listing your first seven jobs. It started with Marian Call, but of course spread across all sorts of folks, including academics. It’s been interesting—some folks have jobs that in retrospect lead exactly to the job they have now; others have a range of early jobs that I never would have guessed. But the academic ones often depress me. Many of the ones I saw seemed to quickly lead to being teachers, a few noted things like, “I haven’t even had seven jobs!” It wasn’t until smart woman and fellow scholar Kirsty Rolfe tweeted something about this that it occurred to me that maybe I was reacting to something more systemic than my individual annoyances. Thinking about #firstsevenjobs and what its use by academics says about academia and class (think it’s a bit more complex than it appears) — Kirsty Rolfe (@avoiding_bears) August…
new! digital facsimiles, Shakespeare apps & performance, close reading Othello & theater
Greetings! If you are, like me, waiting for the big blizzard to come and bury us all, might you like something else to read? Or if you are far away from the panic and are sick of everyone talking about it, might you like something else to read? I have you covered! Here are 3 relatively recent pieces I wrote—I hope you enjoy them and share them. “When Is A Source Not A Source?” (link) This past November, I gave a presentation at the Stanford Primary Source Symposium, the theme of which was “The Phenomenology of the Source.” My talk focused on a question that has been bothering me for a while now: how do we treat digital facsimiles of early print as source material? I’ll give you a preview of my rousing conclusion: So, when is a source not a source? If we go by what we see evidenced in…