on my plate: year three

Today is the first official day of classes for me at Simmons, where I am entering my third year as a dual-degree student in the History and Archives Management Master's program. So what does that mean in terms of the shape of my daily life?

Well, for starters, I continue to work four days a week at the Massachusetts Historical Society, with a great team of librarians and archivists who have been unfailingly supportive of my studies and given me the chance to learn the (shall we say) trade secrets of providing archival reference service. If you're interested in the work that goes on at a place like the MHS (oldest historical society in the Western Hemisphere), check out my colleague & friend Jeremy Dibbell's blog, the Beehive, hosted by the MHS website. I will also put in another plug for following John Quincy Adams on twitter, where he is tweeting posthumously his line-a-day diary entries from an 1809 voyage to Russia.

In addition, I have a very part-time job at Northeastern's Archives and Special Collections, where I spend four hours a week slowly constructing a database of images from the scrapbooks of Marjorie Bouve, the founder of Northeastern's Bouve School of Physical Education. Nothing has gone live online yet, but I can promise links when (fingers crossed!) the images are web-published. Lots of great early-twentieth-century snapshots of young women (and occasionally men) engaged in such activities as cycling, sailing, sight-seeing, and amateur theatricals.

As a graduate student, my work this year turns decisively toward my thesis research on the creation of the Oregon Extension program during the mid-1970s. I will be exploring the various cultural and educational threads that came together to shape the way in which the OE was developed as an educational program and a particular communal space. To that end, one of my two classes this fall is an independent study, which provides me with dedicated time to prepare logistically and theoretically for my oral history field work. If I can find ways to share this on-going project on the blog without a lot of additional time and mental strain, I will . . . if not, you should be seeing the fruits of my labors sometime in December of 2010 (again, fingers crossed!).

I am also in Archives, History, and Collective Memory, the dual-degree capstone course, of sorts. Since it focuses on "the relationship between historical events, the creation and maintenance of archival records, and the construction of collective memory" I look forward to applying the concepts we discuss in class to my own research: what is oral history, after all, but the creation of archival records and a collective construction of historically-minded personal narratives?

And finally, of course, come all of the continued pleasures and duties of domestic life: the morning and evening commute, leisure reading, movie watching, shopping and meal preparation, laundry, cleaning, weekend outings, keeping up with far-flung family members, and (above all) regularly-scheduled time with Hanna.

Given all of this real-world activity, I'm sure how much I'll be blogging during the coming months. Obviously, home life, work, and school commitments come first. For those of you who follow my blog as a way of keeping up long-distance with what's going on in my life, I'll definitely try to post pictures and piffle as the opportunity arises. For those of you who check in from elsewhere in the blogosphere, I'm still reading your blogs, even if I lack the time to join in the conversation!

As always, shoot me an email or (gasp) put pen to paper and write me a letter and I will respond, later if not sooner (but hopefully sooner). You know where to find me! In the meantime, I do think of you all and hope your fall projects are getting underway with creativity, productivity, and pleasure. Don't forget to enjoy the autumn weather, wherever you may be.

*photograph of the T crossing the intersection of Harvard and Beacon at Coolidge Corner by scleroplex @ Flickr.

labor day puppy blogging

It's been a while since I posted any pictures from Michigan of Addie -- quite simply because there weren't any coming my way! But that has been remedied by the latest batch of pics from my father, circa August 15th, when Addie went to stay at the house of family friends while my uncle Tim and (now) aunt Linda held their wedding reception at my grandmother's house (congrats to both of you!). The older golden retriever in the pictures is our friends' dog, Josie.



Hope you're all enjoying the Labor Day weekend.

second anniversary: am I a bostonian yet?

I realized a couple of weeks ago that Labor Day weekend would mark the second-year anniversary of my arrival in Boston to begin graduate school. The moment (so often the case in these situations) feels both much more recent than two years ago and also as if it happened in some far distant past-life. Not that the experience has been radically different from what I expected in any way, but it has felt like a more decisive, and more permanent, break from previous my previous existence than other relocations have been. So now that I've reached the 24-month mark, I think it's appropriate to pause and reflect on whether or not I've made peace with my new place in the world.

I use the phrase "made peace with" deliberately, as I have never felt quite at home, full stop, in any one geographic place I've lived. I often react intensely to the landscape of a geographic place: the semester I lived in southern Oregon, for example, I fell in love with the contours of the Cascade mountains, but missed the vast openness of the great lakes acutely; during my year abroad at the University of Aberdeen, I chafed at the (to me) claustrophobia of big-city life, while I fell in love with the North Sea, just a stone's throw from my room. When I am away from West Michigan, I feel the temporal displacement in my bones even though when I am there for long periods of time I grow restless and increasingly ready to depart again on the next adventure.

I knew when I left Michigan for Massachusetts in 2007 that I would miss my family grievously. Yet returning home is no longer possible in the way it once was, as the people of my generation scatter across the country and (myself among them) set up new homes, in new spaces. In short, it is no longer so easy to identify one single place as "home.

After two years here in Boston, I still find it difficult to think of myself as a Bostonian-with-a-capital-B, yet I do feel I have made peace with the city and with my graduate program (perhaps to a lesser extent than Boston itself -- but then again, that's how I always feel about educational programs). I am embarking upon my self-directed thesis work about which I feel passionate and am content with my work daylighting as a library assistant. My neighborhood feels like my neighborhood, and I have tentatively started to imagine what it would be like to live here for more than my student years. I have the sense that, when or if we leave, I will only then realize how fond I have become of its particular shops, parks, sidewalks, trees, sights, sounds, and smells.

Above all, I am fiercely protective of this life Hanna and I have forged together; a life that I hope with my entire being we will take with us regardless of where in time or space we eventually wash ashore. Meanwhile, Boston has been a damn good place to live, all things considered. School and work -- along with the used bookstores and awesome coffee shops -- keep me here for the time being. But life with Hanna is what makes it home.

*photograph by Hanna Clutterbuck, March 2008, Salem, MA.

back to blogging: august notes

So what happened in August while I wasn't blogging? Lots of things here in the real world.

First, we have the personal beauty update: I got three new holes in my earlobes (first new piercings since I was thirteen and got dragged to the jewelery store by a friend for the original set). They're nearly healed now, and I'm ready to go shopping for some hoops . . . but in the meantime, here's the new look.

Hanna's lobbying for a nose stud or a belly ring next, but I remain unpersuaded. Ouch! But I do continue to ponder possibilities for a graduation tattoo . . .

Reading and film-watching are two time-honored ways of spending leisure time, and I did much of both this August. I read Melissa Marr's somewhat disappointing sequel to Wicked Lovely, Fragile Eternity, and Umberto Eco's confusing bibliographic thriller The Name of the Rose. At the Boston Public Library, I picked up Charles de Lint's low-key supernatural love story, The Mystery of Grace, and from Borders a copy of Furious Improvisation, a history of the WPA theatre project. For thesis background came Todd Gitlin's The Sixties and Stewart Burns' Social Movements of the 1960s.

When it came to film, we tilted toward the summery fluff, enjoying (to my surprise, at least) G.I. Joe in the theater, Sophia Myles in both Tristan & Isolde and Outlander, and many episodes of Bones. I also recently made up for the gaping hole in my Kevin Smith filmography by watching Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back (and won bonus points by correctly identifying the moment at which Hanna began to applaud in the theater because, as she said, "There really was no other appropriate response.") And, between pledge breaking, came the British comedies on Tuesday and Saturday nights. We're looking forward this fall to welcoming the new kid on the block: My Family, starring (among others) "Colin the sex god" from Love Actually.

Hanna and I once again find ourselves running out of space for books (the everlasting logistical challenge of cohabiting bibliophiliacs -- and neither of us have the bulk of our libraries here in Boston yet!) and managed to forestall the inevitable by purchasing a little wooden bookcase at the Goodwill.

We have a dedicated shelf for library books, shelved by lending institution (three at my last count, not including inter-library loans!): yes, we really are that hopeless.

We've grown two new pots of inch plants to join our creeping greenery: the ood and heero & duo have joined jack, ianto, mona, an as-yet-to-be-named swedish ivy, and an african violet that prefers the solitude and shadow of my room to the sunshine and company of Hanna's windowsills (perhaps I should name it septimus hodge).



My mother also sent us a set of knitted vegetables made from recycled clothing, which Hanna and I improvised into a hanging mobile for the dining room, made from a set of chopsticks and box string left over from mike's pastry boxes. Hanna says if hunters have the heads of their kill hanging in trophy rooms, it makes a certain amount of sense for vegetarians to have the heads of dead vegetables instead.

Watch later this week for notes on the coming semester and meanwhile, I hope y'all are having a great Labor Day weekend. The weather in Boston (not to brag) is pretty much perfect.

friday fun: mhs mailbag edition

This piece of unsolicited mail arrived today at the Massachusetts Historical Society and was spotted by my friend and colleague Jeremy Dibbell.


(click on the image for larger view)

The address reads:

Jeremy Belknap
Founder
Massachusetts Historical Society
1154 Boylston St. Boston MA 02215

The only problem is that the MHS was founded in 1791 and our dear departed Reverend Belknap -- now being solicited by Google -- died shortly thereafter in 1798.

links list: stuff that made the cut

Welcome back to the Future Feminist Librarian-Activist, year three (dear gods and goddesses of all shapes and sizes, I can't believe it's true, but it is). More posts to come over the Labor Day weekend, catching y'all up on the state of my Future Feminist life, but meanwhile I'm taking the poor woman's route out of blogging silence and offering a links list of August internet reads. Because, predictably, while I took a break from blogging during the month of August, I didn't take a break from blog-reading. Lots of interesting stuff came across GoogleReader in the past four weeks, and I offer here a selection of those that I particularly enjoyed.

p.s. pirro composed a haiku poem about taking time off from blogging.

Simon Callow wrote a witty and surprisingly moving piece in the Guardian about the awkwardness of on-screen sex.

One of my favorite authors has a new biography out, and I'm itching to read it!

Guest-blogging at feministing, Jos wrote a piece about the folly of trying to make spaces 'safe'.

indexed provides a succinct diagram of the relationship between cultural standards of 'beauty' and the real world.

Which brings me to the next link: we are all 'plus-sized' now. As Hanna pointed out, this proves we aren't crazy when nothing in the clothing store seems made to fit real women's real bodies.

News flash from the UK: teenagers love sex. whodathunkit?

This has been out there for a while, but Bonk author Mary Roach gave a great talk at TED: ideas worth spreading called 10 things you didn't know about orgasm.

Thank you, Senator Barney Frank.

Via Adventures of a Young Feminist, I really like this post about the way the word 'privilege' has evolved into a cavalier way to shut down discussion about issues important to us all.

Via Amanda Marcotte's podcast at RhRealityCheck, I give you Deflowered Memoirs, an ongoing project collecting personal narratives of sexual awakening.

One of my alma maters, the University of Aberdeen, has just received £600,000 in donations toward the funding of a new university library. As a librarian-in-training, may I say there are few ways in which money can be better spent than on libraries.

Melissa McEwan of Shakesville has a piece up at the Guardian about her experience dealing with misogyny in personal relationships.

via Amanda Marcotte (whose analysis of the original post is worth the read) comes a piece by Will Wilkinson on one common conservative gripe with the left: "liberal equality is just too confusing!"

And finally, second image, third definition down: an 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue finds it necessary to use no less than three foreign languages, two asterisks, and self-referentially vague phrases to define a certain word for female genitalia. The reader is left wondering whether the compiler of the dictionary knew what, in fact, the word meant! (thanks to Hanna for the link)

image above by dakokichidekalb @ Flickr.

summer book review: the strain

While I'm enjoying the last few days of summer (I'll be back blogging after the Labor Day weekend!) I thought I'd put up this little book blurb my father, manager of the Hope-Geneva Bookstore, wrote for the Michigan Association of College Stores newsletter when they called to ask what he'd been reading. The Strain was a novel that Hanna read and passed along to me earlier in the summer; I recommended it to my father who read it and passed it to my mother, who emailed me last week to tell me about this vampire novel she was reading . . . such is the, er, viral nature of good reads in a family of bibliophiliacs.

Without further ado, here's Mark:

If you are looking for a summer read that will keep you turning pages (or refreshing screens) late into the night you could do worse than, The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan. The first of a promised trilogy of vampire novels (forget the Twilight series), this worthy addition to the genre reads like a cross between Stephen King and Michael Crichton. While Spanish film maker del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) is not known as a novelist his storytelling ability is clearly on display. The novel starts out with a routine jumbo jet landing at New York’s JFK. The plane suddenly rolls to a stop and the lights go out. All communication with the tower cease. An investigation of the mystery reveals that everyone on board is dead including the pilot and co-pilot. The creepy action ramps up from there.

In a radio interview earlier this year del Torro described his effort in the book as wanting to take the modern romance and “sexiness” out the vampire legend and return to the concept of pure evil inherent in the blood-sucking parasites. I think he does a good job of honoring our core understanding of the mythology while combining it with the threat of a modern viral epidemic. His characters are familiar types but engagingly articulated and the close of the novel leaves us waiting for the next installments.