jliedl.ca

Via a school-days chum who blogs at Behind the Bit, I chanced upon news of an upcoming book The Horse in Human History with what seems to be a truly global coverage. Prior to release, Cambridge is blogging weekly pieces from the author who’s already shared some interesting tidbits on topics such as The Mobile Culture of the Steppe Nomad.

So, let’s just say I’m excited to see the book when it’s released — I can predict that it’ll be useful for a number of courses that I teach as well as the kind of synthetic, global history that I enjoy. And about horses — a subject I’ve weighed in about both personally and professionally!

It was an extra-fun bonus point to see the subject of the first book blog entry at Cambridge, dealing with a monumental equestrian sculpture that will dominate the landscape near the A2 in southern England: The Angel of the South. Pita Kelekna, the author, gave a variety of interesting suggestions about the meaning of the sculpture, touching on the symbolism of the white horse in a global perspective. (I suspect that she overlooked or the interviewers cut out the obvious link between this image and the famous Uffington White Horse.)

Intrigued by this story, I had to click through a couple of links to see what this “Angel of the South” would actually look like once complete. What fun! This has to be the world’s biggest Breyer horse model. Now I am desperately trying to come up with a way to get myself back to the UK to see “the Angel of the South” in all its towering glory once the statue is complete.

It may come as a shock, but Regional Comprehensive University’s graduate programs aren’t waiting with open arms to admit random applicants fresh out of Big Name University’s undergraduate program. Remember, many of the faculty at RCU attended one or another of the BNUs during their academic careers and aren’t not going to be bowled over by the thought of rubbing shoulders with someone applying out of this or that ivy-covered hall. Read more »

From the Daily Mail via a former student: This just in, Henry VIII was a mummy’s boy. But even moreso!

Apparently, Henry VIII’s handwriting rather closely resembles that of his mother, Elizabeth of York in whose household he spent more time during his childhood while his elder brother, Arthur, lived in their father’s court (that is, until Arthur’s unfortunate death in 1502).

Therefore, in the words of David Starkey (who’s promoting his revised biography of the king), ‘He was the only boy and became emotionally dependent on women. Or, to put it more bluntly, he was emotionally incontinent.’

Emotionally incontinent. Of course! He was raised in some part in the company of women. Those scary girl cooties getting all over a prospective monarch — why, they might have girly-fied him or something.

Don’t mind me. I’m all agog at how quickly we can leap from “here’s evidence of a closer relationship between the young prince and his mother, also, possibly, his younger sister whose handwriting bears close resemblance to her mother’s and brother’s” to “OMG, he’s an emotional incontinent!”

Let’s not even touch on the way in which his grandmother, Margaret Beaufort, also had a major influence on his life or pretty soon we’re going to have to dismiss Henry VIII to the dustbin of history as a nancy-boy. And likely his dad, to boot!

The New York Times trumpets that fashion has given into a Tudormania. Um, not really! That’s a mish-mash of items that look as if a six-year-old played cut-out with some promo pictures from the tv show and then pasted them onto models in random places.

The fashion designer likening Henry VIII to a modern-day rock star doesn’t impress me, either. Yes, I’m a bit tetchy about dress history. It doesn’t get enough respect, as it is, and when fashion designers pluck elements from a modernized retelling and dub it historical, that rankles even more so.

I was up obscenely early to head south for a scholarship board meeting. Now I’m rushing in to use my 15 minutes free wireless at the local airport before we take off at 6:10. Back either by 5:30 or just after eight, depending on my luck.

The Toronto Star has an intriguing mapping project to document the boundaries of and name all the city’s neighbourhoods.

This includes a cool map you can address search, zoom in on and click the colour-coded neighbourhoods to see their names. If you dispute their boundaries, there’s a forum where you can leave your comments.

I don’t have any disputes, not being deeply involved in the local history. But I’ve had fun, surfing around the site. For instance, I’ve learned that I lived in Harbord Village, UofT/St. George Campus and Bedford Park during my time in the big city. The last, in particular, beats the heck out of my current neighbourhood’s lame name!

Medieval woman has started the ball rolling over at her blog for this year’s Medieval(ist) Blogger Meet-Up.

Who’s in? When, where and all that?

Or, how things get done and undone in a university, never inexpensively.

At some expense, last year, the university removed the door from the women’s bathroom immediately across the hallway from my office and slapped a “Handicap Accessible” sign above the door. This was their low-cost solution to an insufficiency of such facilities overall in the university. (They did the same for the men’s bathroom just a small way down the hall.)

An immediate uproar ensued amongst faculty and staff with offices on this floor. I contributed a few complaints, having my office literally six feet away from the now open doorway. The hall literally rang with the flushing of toilets (especially during class breaks) and offensive odors (thankfully, mostly perfume, but still!) sometime emanated. Those of us who’d prided ourselves on working with our doors open, to be accessible to students dropping in, abandoned that policy. And, sad to say, the bathrooms still weren’t especially accessible to differently-abled students since they’re right beside an automatic door to the centre stairwell and thus in a heavily trafficked and awkward part of the building. Not to mention that individuals who didn’t want to broadcast their toileting habits to the world stopped frequenting these bathrooms.

Today, two workers from physical plant came by and installed a new door at each bathroom. Immediately, faculty and staff poured out of our offices to praise them effusively. They were taken aback — usually no one comments much about their work. But, by golly, we love the fact that our hallways will no longer ring with the sound of flushing!

Right now, the doors appear very makeshift as they’re unpainted metal, liberally adorned with fingerprints and pawprints (it seems as if a Lab trotted all over the one across the hall from me!). The doors each have a small glass window so that people can see someone pushing from the other side, I presume hopefully avoid knocking down a disabled person. I expect the entire cost of this doors-off/doors-on exercise must be much more than it would have cost to install two automatic door-opening fixtures in the first place.

Soon, someone will be despatched to paint the unfinished doors at yet more cost. But at least my office will be that much more bearable, so I’m selfish enough to consider it a worthy expense, in the end, returning us, pretty much, to the status quo of a year gone by.

Special Historical Issue: “Fan Works and Fan Communities in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” Transformative Works and Cultures (Spring 2011)

Initial Abstract Submission Deadline: May 15, 2009
Guest Editors: Nancy Reagin, Pace University, and Anne Rubenstein, York University

Scholars of literature and popular culture, along with ethnographers and sociologists, have produced a rich and sophisticated body of literature about fan communities and creativity over the last twenty years, but most of this work has focused on groups of fans who have been active since the 1960s, and very little of it has been produced by historians. This special issue will focus on the rich history of fans and their engagement with a variety of objects of fandom. We seek to expand the range of topics and methodologies available to studies of fans and their communities, and we hope to understand fans better by studying them in their historical contexts.

We invite contributions that focus on fan works and/or fan communities from any place and time since the late eighteenth century. This periodization is informed by Walter Benjamin’s idea that—thanks to the invention of lithography—the original artwork, with its unique aura, came into being at that point precisely because of the availability of cheap copies. He argued that the distinctions between original and mass-produced commercial art and media created the boundary between high and popular art, and between mass and bourgeois tastes. We wonder whether the historical study of fans and fan works might modify Benjamin’s formulation of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Does the long-standing existence of fan fiction, fan art, and other forms of community-generated fan works clarify or muddy his argument? Read more »

Though I’ve always thought that was an unfair linguistic legacy for that great Trojan prince, I’m going to have to start browbeating the two most laggardly of my co-evaluators on a big service task. Of eighteen groups, theirs are the only outstanding ones remaining without any word of explanation. And the due date to get them into my hands was last Tuesday.

Harrumph. I wouldn’t mind the lateness if there was at least a word of explanation. Two other chairs were quick to inform me that they’d be a bit behind so I can at least rest assured that they’re on the way. With these last two groups, I have no idea where we stand and that’s what’s maddening as the clock rapidly ticks down on my own due date to do a lot of signing and some major, thoughtful collation of elements from the whole in, what?, less than three days, now.

*sigh*