the stack

lichama

skg — Thu, 17 May 2012 06:39:50 +0000

I’ve been thinking about the fitness of words, as one does, incessantly, right? but about some in particular: Reason’s recent and ongoing outburst (today’s unprompted events include a request for “bupi” = blueberries, pointing identification of a picture of “alla” = alligator, and a brandished “baila” = umbrella), plus ravens and crows. (It took me a few tries to decipher bupi, of which none are here at the moment. Successful guesses are rewarded by visible toddler relief, excitement, nodding.) My lichama—my corpus, the home for my physicality which is also home to my mind—has been ill but is finally mending. Reason had the same cold virus, starting four days before me; her cough lingers. We’ve been free of baby/toddler projectile vomit to date, for which I am very grateful, though having been asked four times a night for water, eight nights running, has its woes; kicking a cold out of one’s home is thus the harder. “The harder”—funny in modern English, perfectly fine instrumental dative in the period that goes with lic and lichama. We have it now only for comparatives.

And tomorrow, we’ll make an offer on a home in the more conventional sense, our second during the current bout of looking and considering. Lots of paperwork goes into an offer, so it’s pleasant to find things slightly easier the second time. Our first go was binned—too low—but then, the asking price is too high; no one else has wanted that other house at list price or anything near it, either.

And the day after, I will return to the office instead of working from home.

It feels a bit as though my figurative joints are tobrast. Not the real ones that hold me together indifferently at best, anyway, but the ones that keep interior thoughts inside and permit full sentences out.

eighteen months and change

skg — Wed, 09 May 2012 23:12:56 +0000

And nickels and dimes, I was thinking, but during the past 3-5 weeks we began having a different little person, one who tells me to sit, and goes down the little slide at the park after climbing all the steps herself (though we still need occasionally to catch her at slide’s end so that she doesn’t land on her face), and asks me for water (or picks up and puts down the cup herself) when she’s thirsty, and points out/names a variety of animals, colors, and shapes while we’re reading her books together.

She’s gained only one pound in six months. Her food goes towards height: still at ninety-somethingth percentile for height, currently 33.5 in (85 cm). Somehow, the nurse has measured her head at 1 cm circumference smaller than last time.

One quirk: she hasn’t quite figured out the shape sorter yet (our version is a box with removable lid; the lid has six holes, one for each shape of plastic block). OTOH, she knows to nudge blocks into a tighter column if her first placement of a block is too far from the invisible vertical line of the column’s center; she builds columns five or six high without anyone’s participation or request; she’s been putting her blocks away (into the box, a bag, or her plastic storage drawer), sometimes unbidden, for weeks. If she hasn’t figured out the shape sorter by a year hence, then I’ll worry.

And she’s had a nasty cold since Saturday night, whose ensuing naps have contributed to my ability to work on my stuff and whose coughing has knocked my neck out (too little me-sleep). Poor kid will probably have to accompany me to the chiropractor tomorrow, an hour-plus in the car each way, instead of chilling at home—and she still dislikes sleeping in the car. The alternative would be for me to miss precious office time while darkforge stays home with her on Friday, and to have an extra day of pain….

go go gadget momentum

skg — Wed, 09 May 2012 18:13:18 +0000

I am noting it here for accountability for the month’s remaining three weeks: I’ve not only blog-published a few sharable parts of my dissertation but (beyond that) spent time on my own work on three separate days during the past ten. The sharable bits are things no one would publish formally on their own yet useful for laying claim in a web-search-visible way; my diss focus involved some obscure stuff, and blog release is one straightforward way to attach my legal name to it. Though the bits of work have been somewhat administrative—slicing up descriptions of textual relationships so that I can refine and add to them more easily, frex, as a way of reacquainting myself with what I used to think—it is useful to believe that they count. So does beginning to read and think my way through a recent edition of a text that’s a cousin to mine.

There is beneficial distance from a major, formerly hag-riding project, and then there is the distance that makes it seem as though one is no longer smart enough to argue with one’s former self. Well, get smarter, current self, because it’s on.

I have stacked the deck a bit. A query has been sent to discover whether a particular archive has, or can be encouraged to have, scans/photos/film of a few manuscripts of interest. The answer may well be no, but I’ve read there before and have offered to help fund the imaging if necessary. (Full funding of it would be cheaper than traveling to the repository and engaging a place to sleep nearby for the length of time I’d need, and I can’t travel there in the near future anyway.) A second e-mail has gone to one of my teachers, someone who wasn’t on my diss committee but knows my work somewhat; that one has had a generous reply already, offering to “help expedite” my return to this sort of work.

*tunes accountability* *plucks string gently* *retunes*

I have to say, I picked up that cousin-edition (printed) on a day when my phone could not be convinced to display my legally purchased .epub of Sherwood Smith’s Banner of the Damned, following a two-week hiatus. The file opens on my laptop, but something about the combination of Adobe DRM, my phone’s reader app, and the epub file no longer succeeds—and I pretty much never read at novel length on my laptop. I’m on page 41 (of nearly 800)! Something must be done! But technological failure has had its use, this once.

mitten update of mild triumph

skg — Fri, 04 May 2012 15:40:19 +0000

My hat’s off to everyone who knits “western” style and holds the yarn in the left hand to “pick” stitches as their usual mode. I’ve now trained my left hand into doing it, clumsily, while leaving the right hand in “throw” mode, in order to carry one strand of yarn in each hand and make my cousin’s mittens in the manner recommended by knitting designers. Picking feels rather like crocheting, in which case why isn’t there a hook on the end of the right-hand needle, eh? (One can get them thus, but it isn’t conventional for most of the European usages that go with that manner of holding the yarn.) Good thing I’m not in a hurry, because two-handed/stranded knitting is perhaps thrice as slow as my default mode, and it whets mild joint-ache in half the time. *rests* But it’s nice to conquer a mode I thought I’d never be able to do: achievement unlocked despite invisible disability.

Good thing (?) too that I have a mad passion for learning things All the Time, or I’d never have felt determined enough to figure this out, even in its clumsy, reduced form: though I’ve pretty good dexterity and hand strength, cocking a finger and moving it such that yarn moves with it is impossible for me. Instead, the finger that would be cocked lies cozily against its fellows to help hold one needle in place, and the other needle scoops yarn off it. :P Knitting, more so than crochet (which I also hold funny), is one way for me to whisper at entropy, “Fairest and Fallen, greetings and defiance!”

Things I’ve learned from the prior mitten attempt: though double-pointed needles are better (for me) for single-stranded socks, and though socks and mittens are basically the same thing, I’m using two circs because it means fewer places where I’m tempted to pull the yarn too tightly. Thanks to oyceter for warning me about that, and to seryn for reminding me about wrapping floats. The knitting tension seems okay (not that I could change it much!), such that there may even be room for the knitted lining suggested by the pattern. I’ll have a chance in a few weeks to try mitten #1 on my cousin.

Two pictures of the mitten in progress are on my Ravelry account; as of last night, mitten #1 is at 60%, more than twice the height pictured there. Speak up if you’d prefer to see pics here.

thinking cross-culturally

skg — Tue, 01 May 2012 18:13:19 +0000

Not comparatively, mind you, though the distinction is slight in this case.

This medieval Slovene glory referred, on the one hand, to the notion that the Slovene ethnic territory of the 9th century was three times bigger than it is today, extending to the north as far as the Danube between Vienna and Linz and even across the river. This belief has survived into the present and until recently nobody has thought of questioning it and consigning it the place where it really belongs—the dustbin of historical myths. (Štih 2010, p. 17)

I cannot help thinking of Korean assertions about Koguryŏ (Goguryeo) and especially Gojoseon in this vein, regarding the extreme difficulty of discerning not only the linguistic landscape of the region before the tenth century (and especially before the seventh), but also the political and socioeconomic landscapes. If speakers of a Korean language held part of what’s now Manchuria, that is, as seems likely, it doesn’t mean that Silla’s ultimately failed attempt to subsume that area was a thwarted reunion, nor does the subsequent translatio imperii to the Khitans indicate that they caused a Korean state to vanish. And we know already that premodern Korean-speakers comprised multiple ethnic groups; it’s a common nationalizing fallacy to pretend that one language == one gens == one shared history. [ETA There's a flip side to these musings: given how subjectively the fragments of evidence may be interpreted, if it really were the case that an ethnic Korean-in-the-narrow-sense polity existed from the peninsula's tip to a considerable stretch north, how could it be proven? The Slovene versus Slavic distinction pertains, in particular---there were Slavs by the Danube and north of it, but not Slovenes, in Štih's example.]

And, as ever, I wonder how scholars writing in East Asian languages treat these issues, because I cannot read their work. Štih’s volume is itself a translation into English of eighteen essays he’s published across his career, and I am reading it after seeing its TMR review because we scholars of the Western European Middle Ages know dangerously little about anything Slavic. (I have UCLA’s copy via inter-library loan, FWIW.)

Štih, Peter. The Middle Ages between the Eastern Alps and the Northern Adriatic: Select Papers on Slovene Historiography and Medieval History. Leiden: Brill, 2010.

signal boost

skg — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 22:20:58 +0000

Programming for Sirens—which sinks or swims based upon individual submissions—closes in a week, on 6 May. If you’ve been considering something, now’s the time! Their programming posts on LJ may also be of interest.

2012-apr consuming

skg — Sun, 29 Apr 2012 19:52:44 +0000

I don’t care how excited some bloggers become about The King 2 Hearts; I’m sticking to reading recaps. Their excitement got me to start watching Secret Garden, and though parts of it are good, I ended up loathing the way the principal characters were written, so much that I couldn’t watch the final episodes. Haven’t time to watch anything right now, anyway, and if I did I’d be returning to Bloody Monday or BOSS to cross them off my list. Three eps into one show, one ep into the other, interrupted by then-imminence of baby and then-massive workload? Something like that.

Have begun playing Persona 3 Portable, the PSP version, on the PSVita, because if I don’t play it before attempting the forthcoming Persona 4: The Golden, I probably never will. I’ve peeked at a few walkthroughs, and the version of P3P currently in the online PlayStation store seems to partake of Persona 3: FES (PlayStation 2). There’s word that P3: FES will be ported to PSP. I don’t even know.

Reading: flattened this month due to combined whammy of the “producing” post’s items. It’s only Gary Schmidt’s Trouble, which I’ve blogged.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Touch My Katamari fills the same twitchy-idle gap that a hidden-object game does, and Persona 3 wipes out both of them as well as my next library-lent novel. I’ve barely begun the novel, a book many of you like. It’s not that P3P‘s storyline is more compelling; it’s that it comes with a time-consuming dungeon crawl, where Death—the allegorical personification thereof, not only the result of too few hit points—may appear at any time. If I want to see more of P3P‘s story—and I do—I have to keep crawling. (If I wanna kiss the sky, better learn how to kneel?) That said, I can’t have spent more than three hours with P3P so far, and as anyone who’s met a Shin Megami Tensei title knows, the game’s likely to run 60-100. I logged 63 hours with Persona 4 on the full-sized PS3 before trailing off and didn’t even reach the excitement of December (both games follow the Japanese school year, which begins in April). Note that I wouldn’t be embarking upon a 40+ hour game if it weren’t on a mobile platform; more on that and P3P‘s content/gameplay are for another post.

2012-apr producing

skg — Sat, 28 Apr 2012 18:37:21 +0000

I wrote a conference talk, deliberately limiting the writing to two weeks so that it wouldn’t consume my life (I kind of hate conference papers), then delivered it. First one in four years. Went fairly well; got some wider attention online afterwards. By the night before, I’d squashed stress by determining that I could lose nothing, so perhaps my assessment of relative success is flawed—but it does achieve one thing that may look crucial in retrospect: repositions me in the world after a long absence due partly to having had a child. You know, that thing that many women are instructed by their older colleagues to obsess about—how time off for “family” is like the guillotine for one’s career. *ticks box* One talk isn’t a cure-all, but then, I’m not on the professorial track(s) and separately, to be honest, don’t have much interest in being Known.

That said, I’ve begun thinking again about blogging publicly (legal name, professional focus). At least once a month, perhaps. The blog itself exists already.

I’ve done some…it’s halfway between proofreading and copy-editing, since I’ve rephrased a few things that’re correct and sound clumsy, but haven’t fact-checked or spent time pondering continuity (someone else is responsible for continuity). Copy-editing lite? Anyway, clue one: after you and your collaborators agree upon a style standard, follow it or waste money paying me to fix all the places where you forgot. Clue two: if you’re writing a branching game that reuses snippets between branches, copy and paste accurately—don’t retype—because introducing different errors in three out of five identical versions of a single paragraph makes you look bad. And it wastes your money.

Take two of my cousin’s mitten proceeds apace, though the pace has been hobbled somewhat by, like, needing to sleep at night. Reason’s molars, on the move, have hobbled my ability to sleep in the early morning; she wakes up from the pain, asks for reassurance (“Mama?” quietly), then dozes off. Do I doze? Mostly not. But I lie there for the sake of my spine, which complains if I don’t get enough sleep, in case lying awake is better for it than being upright.

but of course

skg — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 20:53:17 +0000

Gary D. Schmidt, Trouble (2008): indirect rec from a locked post. This is one of those “of course it is” stories, where of course this happens and of course that happens and of course the only way past is through—except that in Trouble‘s case, such tidy inevitability is imbricated, part and parcel of the subject matter, and the result of quite a bit of skillful writing. Good job, Mr. Schmidt. Though my thirtysomething self could see everything (everything, gah) coming from the third or fourth chapter, for once I was glad to pretend I couldn’t and to keep reading as my ten-year-old self would have done.

My twelve-year-old self, which is probably the sweet-spot age for this novel, would’ve been a noisy, angry ass. Why? Because of stuff like page 164, where one teenager asks what chowder is and the waitress says, instead of answering at first, “Hey, Willy, we got a customer out here wants to know what a chowder is.” My thirtysomething self is still angry but can recognize that Schmidt and the narrator are telling truth, not contributing to the problem. *fistbumps truth* Friends who raise an eyebrow silently at my occasional plaints on locked Twitter, plaints about how strangers seem to feel a pressing need to tell me my business or obstruct simple quotidian activities, could do worse than read this book—and my complaints have much smaller cause or effect, especially at my current age, than what this teenaged character experiences. I wonder whether it’s Schmidt’s choice or his editor’s to keep the temporal setting a bit vague, sans gadgetry that’d assign it a decade. One is permitted to imagine that the story takes place any time from the late 1970s on, and thus that it’s in the reader’s past. I prefer to imagine that it’s set next year, to jar the unwary into introspection.

This library copy had a hand-inked bookmark, a scrap of lined notebook paper, with the name “Diego” on it. I hope Diego enjoyed reading it. The bookmark remains in place. Oh, and don’t read the Goodreads “reviews.”

Capsule: Henry, youngest of three in an upper middle-class family, becomes determined to hike up Mt. Katahdin after his older brother is knocked down by his schoolmate’s car. Connecting the capsule summary with this post’s longest paragraph is left as an exercise; after all, Henry learns how to do it, too.

defelinization

skg — Tue, 24 Apr 2012 20:04:52 +0000

If you’d inherited some yarn from a friend which had lived in a house with a cat, and if you found upon handling the yarn for literally twenty seconds (on two separate occasions) that something about it kicked your otherwise minimal cat allergies into high gear, sniffle sniffle achoo: how would you go about cleaning the yarn? It’s not machine washable. It’s also not vexing in any visible way: it doesn’t look dusty or dander-y, frex.

Failing cleansing, would anyone not allergic to cats or wool like three skeins (tweedy green, brown, dark grey) of Rowanspun 4 Ply, for the cost of shipping? I’ll probably put them up on Ravelry for sale/trade otherwise, but that hasn’t worked well for me in the past. Fingering weight, suitable for handwarmers of some kind if you mean to use more than one color per hand. That’s the friend’s original purpose for these skeins, IIRC.