just jen

the diary samuel pepys

The Park Bench--which bills itself as "the gathering place for nerdy young women...and discerning nerdy men of taste" has a cute entry on The Diary of Samuel Pepys, a long time favorite of Nerdy Historians, as the Primariest of Primary Sources.  

Writes clever Liz:

"I know I'll never finish these diaries, but what a treat it's been to dive into the past with such an able guide as Samuel Pepys. And yes, if he were alive today, I'd hang out at the water cooler with him any time. If he could manage to keep his hands to himself..."

geek girls, vampires, and pain

Log Jam by *tfavretto

The felled tree that led to my husband breaking his back (yes that is what happened--he broke his back, though there is no permanent damage, and he is rapidly on the mend) has created the metaphoric log jam.  I've got a lot of linky love to share, here, and being that circumstances for writing what Sean Scott Maguire calls "brain melting" posts (though he is the original brain melter, I'm just being a poser) are not what they could be, I thought I'd do a linkity, linkity, link post today.  

------------------

Geek Girl by ~anndrii

Attention Nerd and Geek Parents:  here is a great post on raising your girl geek written by Natania Barron.  She covers five major points in raising your girl geek and simultaneously uncovers some quirky anomalies across the geek gender divide.  I saw myself feelingly impersonated therein, and some of you will, too, I imagine.  

Vampire by ~Forget666

Director of the upcoming movies of The Hobbit, Guillermo del Toro, and some other guy folks say is cool, wrote an Op-Ed piece about why vampires never die.  Here's a juicy little paragraph to sink your teeth into:

Herein lies an important clue: in contrast to timeless creatures like the dragon, the vampire does not seek to obliterate us, but instead offers a peculiar brand of blood alchemy. For as his contagion bestows its nocturnal gift, the vampire transforms our vile, mortal selves into the gold of eternal youth, and instills in us something that every social construct seeks to quash: primal lust. If youth is desire married with unending possibility, then vampire lust creates within us a delicious void, one we long to fulfill.

For those of you who share my love of all things brainage, here is a bit of research that demonstrates that social and physical pain might be activated in similar ways neuranatomically.  Explaining why this might be so from an evolutionary perspective, PhD candidate Meghan Myer writes:

Why might the human brain rely on one region, the dACC, to compute the felt unpleasantness associated with both physical injury and social distress? One explanation relies on the observation that humans, and other mammals, rely on social bonds for survival. The unpleasantness associated with physical injury acts like an alarm notifying the animal of ensuing threat to survival. Through the course of evolution, the same alarm system may have been hijacked to also notify the mammal of threat to their social bond, and hence survival.

beauty and horror in urine

I've been thinking a lot lately about Faith Philosophy and Art and how this feeds into Aesthetics.  We no longer have a developed sense of Aesthetics in America--or in Europe for that matter.  The increasing pluralism--that is the growing sense of diversity in thought, belief, and political conviction--has destroyed our ability to receive art, interpret it, and cope with it in any real matter.  People of Faith and political conviction, choose art and artists like captains choosing sides on the playground for dodge ball, which is, to say the very least, a bit troublesome.  

I almost didn't do this post because of its explosive quality, in the immediate potential for misinterpretation--but, Jason Goroncy, who I've linked to several times before, made this almost irresistible to me.  I invite you to read what he posted over there to inform your reading of this post.  

The above image is eerie and strangely glowing--it seems reverent at first glance and moving.  Yet, when you realize that what you are looking at is actually the 1987 piece "Piss Christ" by Andreas Serranos, it moves the context of what you are looking at into something that seems, to some, blasphemous.  

I wrote about "Piss Christ" extensively while in college--I took several courses on the Philosophy of Art and in the early 90s and amidst the Newt Gignrich climate of arts funding, "Piss Christ" was like the touchstone of all the potential for controversy in the arts.  As an undergrad I was only an okay researcher--and remember we did not have the Internet then.  But I did a fair amount of reading and heard at least 8 lectures on "Piss Christ".  My ultimate conclusion on "Piss Christ," a piece, if you are not familiar, made from a jar of Serrano's own urine and a plastic gift store crucifix, was that is was repulsive to me, but that I would defend to the death Serranos' right to do it.  That was the key issue of the day, you see, was whether or not someone like Serranos should be allowed to do art like that and ultimately, whether or not the public should pay for it.  The issues are really separate, but the heat of the controversy pushed these two ideas together rather uncomfortably.  I never understood the deeper expression of the piece because that became a troubling side issue--almost irrelevant--because of the pressure on me to come to a political conclusion on the matter.  Either pro-Piss Christ, or anti-Piss Christ.  

Consequently, for all I was taught, and all the periodical research I did on the piece it is only this morning that I realize something crucial about Serranos' piece.  Serranos is a faithful Catholic--and that this is a depiction of deeply Augustinian philosophy: that we are born amidst feces and urine (that is what Augustine said) and that Christ, in all of his splendiferous sacrifice was born into human flesh and bodily fluids, fluids that seeped from him just as surely as they seep from us.  Suddenly this piece took on grand and humbling significance for me.  

I was taught by secular and deeply anti-Catholic professors, so it is no surprise that this escaped my notice, since not only did they co-opt this image as fodder for their political agenda, they were likely completely ignorant of the medieval philosophy from which Serranos is working.  But it wasn't until this morning that I realized what I lacked was an authentic voice of Faith that received and understood Serranos' work on its own terms and could interpret this through authentic Theology, rather than irrational reaction to culturally constructed biases against the body and its fluids.  That the piece--which I would actually argue is performance art more than a work of art itself--became an emblem of the Left in the 80's and the 90s automatically muffled the voice of Belief inside the work.  

It may have been my own limitation as a young student, but that this was anything but an angry attack on religion never once occurred to me and I read periodicals on the matter for what would have been considered, as a pre-Internet undergraduate, exhaustively.  It was being lauded as if it was an angry attack on religion, but we come to realize that the intention of the artist was anything BUT that.  There are problems with receiving art only through the intention of the artist, as the artists cannot fully intend all that may be received in his work.  And I should add that my own relationship to Belief at the time was very muddled--and I had a sort of awe for people who allowed themselves to voice anger at organized religion.  You know, late adolescent rebellion.  Yadda yadda. 

Again, I'm not saying whether or not I like this piece ultimately--I think it stands more as a piece of performance art than an actual work of Art.  What I will say my new revelation on this this morning is: 

As a final note--the cultural main-stream has homogenized Christianity into an awkward monolith--what was actually a Catholic point of resistance against Protestantism, was co-opted as a uniformly anti-Christian voice.  That Catholics and Christians had no authentic tool of interpreting it and analyzing it is exactly why the piece was alienated and alienating.  Which is exactly what I have been thinking about in Philosophy, Theology, Art, and Aesthetics--we, as a culture, have arrived at a place where art is both alien and alienating, because we lack a unifying conversation about the Good in art which is not the same thing as the Good in social and political discourse.   At all. 

The Protestant Reformation as anti-Body and pro-Reason--Cartesian Dualism brought to religious expression, actually--took the whole of horror and beauty (read Goroncy on this, to understand) and partitioned them from each other, which, as the Goroncy article pointed out, leaves us with a sterile beauty that is "useless".  So Serranos, here, has made material a splinter of Horror as it dangles in free fall from Beauty.  

Before the Reformation beauty and horror did exist together not unproblematically but certainly not as problematically as it did post-Reformation, as an example I give you this: 

subterranean/subcreation: making the lord of the rings

In this post here, I confessed to ignorance of the term "subcreation"--and more than a few people have teased me about my lack of true fangirl status, if I never encountered that term.  And that is true.  I have since seen how ubiquitous this term is amongst true Tolkien fans.  

But the reason for this gap in my knowledge is quite simple, really: I first began my love affair with the world of JRR Tolkien in 1979 on a 24 hour car ride to Canada to visit my mother's family.  I was five years old, I hadn't even begun school yet.  And my mother had brought along a read-along tape and book for me to listen to in the card of the Rankin Bass movie version of The Hobbit.  I'm not sure how many times I listened to the story and looked at the Rankin Bass pictures.  A lot.  A whole lot a lot.  

When I returned home, my uncle, a Tolkien fan, and always refusing to acknowledge that as a child I had a reduced intellectual stature, said, "Don't read that baby stuff, here, take this."  He handed me a plain covered book (I think I remember that it was white with a green border?  I'm going to look for this edition and will post if I can find) and I began reading the original Tolkien.  I'm always thankful to my uncle for ignoring my mother and aunt as they told him I was too young to read it--because that also marked the beginning of my journey into the difficult.  His belief in my ability to read the original and therefore, I could.  

My love of the books never ceased and up until now, I have avoided reading anything ABOUT the Lord of the Rings.  Only The Lord of the Rings itself.  For one thing, as I got older and entered the humanities as a specialist--I recoiled form turning my longest standing fiction pleasure into work.  If I began thinking of the Lord of the Rings, the way I think about, say, Hamlet, I feared it would destroy something pure for me.  An escape into pure pleasure.  

Le sigh.  (@marbenais wrote this the other day, and it made me laugh really hard.)  

But here I am on the precipice of beginning a journey into Tolkien as an object of academic study.  But I'm not as much interested in interpretations of the stories and their creative elements as I am about the process that went into making them.  When I was pregnant with Mena Bug, I began a series of fantasy novels that I've just brought to the next level of development.  It's something I save for moments of relaxation and peace, when I think I can afford a break from writing tier 1 (the dissertation) and writing tier 2 (professional paying or potentially paying work) and lounge around in the subterranean hang out of my fantasy novels and my short stories.  And while I'm there sub-creation has really begun to embed itself in my process and that of course leads to a desire to Know More About It.  

I have to be careful though--a desire to Know More About It can quickly become and All Consuming Obsession and I can't afford to off-load the energy there.  But I've begun to casually mark off territory to read as time and energy permits.  I'll let out a call for intervention here if it becomes a dangerous endeavor.  ;)

That I literally think of my time with my fantasy novels as subterranean should be no surprise given the fact that I feel like I'm hanging out with Tolkien as I write.  

And it also doesn't surprise me that the special world of my books are beginning in a very crypty-and subterranean subworld that exists beneath the flora and fauna of the ancient world above it.  

The above link is an interesting article on the Holey-ness of the Hobbit world and how holes and underground spaces operate in Tolkien's Middle Earth.  It is an article more about reading Middle Earth than making it--so I'm already treading the borders of what it is I've marked out to read.  But I happened across it and my eyes started skating it, and I thought I'd share it with you here since it presented some interesting thoughts.  

A good friend has given me some suggestions for books about the forging of Middle Earth.  If you have any, I'd be glad to hear them.  I'll eventually post my bibliography here.  For now.  Timer has gone off. 

And by the way.  The artist for the above is John Howe. 

happy father nerd's day

I found this great blog called:

The Park Bench: a gather place for nerdy women, and nerdy men of discerning taste

In honor of Father's Day the blog hostess reposted the greatest fictional dads and I have to tell you Rupert Giles is one of my faves (and Charles Ingalls--but that knocks me down through the Nerd Hierarchy, through Nerd and Geek to DORK.)  

I have a wicked Nerd Girl crush on Anthony Head as Giles--and it is a Nerd Girl fantasy extraordinaire.  A bookish, wise, and humble paternal force who intimately knows your special gifts and power but also your vulnerabilities and flaws. He is able to serve both sides of your Nerd Girl Super Powers with his completely avuncular, nonsexual love for you.  He is tough and stern but compassionate and forgiving.  He calls you on your immaturity and praises you when you rise to the occasion.  He might get mad at you when, oh I don't know, your bad choice boyfriend without a soul kills the love of your life, but he forgives easily.  He is your biggest fan and allows his hand in your victories to quietly disappear, never needing credit, never feeling jealous.  He honors your strength and nurtures your weakness.  And when you don't know where to go or what to do he is always there for you.  Guiding, directing, with a strong but tender hand.  Except when he knows that doing so would be standing in your way.  Then he steps aside.  (With a song in his heart and on his lips, no less. Sigh.)

We all need Watchers, don't you think?  Particularly ones who can sing, play guitar, and speak in a sexy British accent.  

linkity, linkity, link

Just cleaning out my Google Reader.  

*My young friend Miriel Margaret has started a new blog.  She is using the 15 minute technique for blogging.  I had planned to let her get her rhythm a litte before linking to her but well, the chick hit her stride after only about three or four posts.  She writes here about Sotomayor and the concept of empathy and the law with clarity and insight.  Miriel is controversial and provoking to be sure--but you can't argue with this: she can kill you with her brain.  Like River Tam but not so um, well, friggin' nuts.

*Read Print is free electronic books.  What part of free and books is unclear?  'Nuff said. (Oh and PS those of you who requested books for review--they're coming.  I'm slow but I nearly always eventually get around to what I say I'm going to do.  I got more requests than I thought so.  Ech--whatever.  You've been heard and books will arrive at some point in the not so distant future.)  

*Remember this blog?  I'm really, really liking this blog lately.  Like okay--the latest post discusses the current state of detatchment between philosophers and their philosophies and compares this state of affairs to philosophers of the past, who were more mindful of making life choices consistent with their philosophies.  Here is a little juicy quotage, the last sentence of which made me snarf coffee out of my nose in the early morning dark of my writing hours: 

There is something noble about John Stuart Mill’s feminist preoccupation that the world recognize his partner, Harriet Taylor, as a full co-author of his works. There is something noble about Ludwig Wittgenstein renouncing his enormous inheritance and teaching in a one room school in remote rural Norway village. There is something noble about Nietzsche, unable to live up to his own ideas, having a nervous breakdown.

And I sent one of their authors an old piece of mine, and he was kind enough to actually write a full post-length response to it.  (It's an academic article that I wrote about 6 years ago and which saw print about four years ago.  It's an earlier form of thinking I'm doing now.)

That's all for this edition of "cleaning out my Google Reader and Bookmarks"  

linkity linkity link

Linky love for you all. 

Brokeass Gourmet is a great site for foodies and wine lovers.  Inexpensive treats and accesible notes on affordable wines and cocktails.  It provides great eating and drinking, or if you are the midst of reducing efforts (as I am--perpetually) it's great reading and looking.  

On Fiction is a great little site for those interested in the psychology of fictions--novels, films, theatre.   (The book pictured above is by Bill Benzon on music, mind, and culture.  He writes at another Blog Nerd favorite, The Valve.)

Longtime friend of this blog/blogger is Arwen/Elizabeth who is writing her son Blaise's birthstory 15 minutes at a time.  

Happy clicking!

attention: medieval philosophy nerds

Sometimes I feel rage about the impoverishment of my education.  

But then, I think, ech?  Why not just watch Lost and have a few cashews, instead?  

For fans: this past week's episode?  Oh. My. Sweet. Gosh.  That was a good one. Jeremy Davies is a really good actor. His face isn't a face.  It's a painting of a face.  A painting of a comic of a face.  I think Roy Lichtenstein cut off Davies' face and put several Royesque drafts in its place.  So somewhere the executor of the Lichtenstein estate has Jeremy Davies' actual face in storage. And the executor's name?  Charles Friggin' Widomre.  Natch.  

Anyhoo.  About the impoverishment of my education--I spent, what? 13 years in Catholic education and I never was given any training in medieval philosophy.  I got a little in college as my undergrad is in philosophy--but no where near anything that I now find I desperately need.  It has mostly been self-study--I read a lot of Augustine when I was 19 because, well, I was 19.  The stuff he thinks about is the stuff you are doing.  I've read Aquinas on and off since my mid 20s.  

Right now I'm doing some thinking (for diss and and extra-diss pursuits) about Plato and the mind body split.  In my travels, I've come across two really cool sites for you medieval philosophy nerds.  

Taylor Marshall is an Episcopal priest who has converted to Catholicism and is now studying for a PhD in Theology.  He's blogging about all that he is studying which is really cool for someone like me who is trying to fill pernicious gaps in 15 minute web searches between diapers and jars of purreed sweet potatoes and chicken. 

David T. on Life's Private Book is, like our friend Chestertonian, a Marine, a Chesterton fan, a lover of the Catholic Art of Drinking.  He is also a computer programmer and Engineer so, natch, I think he is peachy. AND a trad Irish musician.  (How does the internet DO this?  I mean, REALLY?  Would I have ever found anyone as cool as this--or as cool as YOU--in a pre-Internet world?  I mean REALLY.)  In his spare time he scours used book stores for books on philosophy and blogs on what he finds.  I found a couple of his posts very illuminating.  

And I think the generosity of bloggers who blog about what they are thinking about and what they are reading is really something rather humbling.  By sharing their time they've made more time for me.  And its so social and intimate.  It's like having the local pub around the corner from campus right in your house.  Without the shared beers, and carved up tables, and sexed-up undergrads.  It doesn't quite take the place of sitting in front of someone whose eyes light up when you tell them something interesting, or watching how someone else breathes quicker when he talks about Romanticism, or seeing how someone else plays with her red hair when she describes the sci-fi novel she's reading.  And how they all laugh at you when you knock your beer over during an argument and then you all go home smelling like stout. 

But its better than nothing.  And you aren't throwing away six bucks a pint. 

Happy Friday!  TGIF.  I have a decadent weekend of carousing ahead of me as it is the First Annual Laurajennapalooza.  Laura is my BFF since kindergarten.  Our birthdays are the same month so we have decided to commemorate this annually with some big high stakes event.  This year we are going to Mohegan Sun with a bunch of family and friends.  WOO HOO!  

Hamlet, Get Thy Reeboks Laced

Takemybreathaway1191

Exercise and Depression

Posted using ShareThis

I recently posted this on Facebook:

sometimes i think the whole existential atheist movement wouldn't have started if Jean-Paul Sartre had merely gone for a run and had a good night's sleep.

Because honestly, I know the nausea of existence of which he writes.  And it usually happens when I'm not exercising and staying up too late.  Really all Sartre needed was a good mommy to tell him to eat his pain au chocolat, get some fresh air, and go to bed at a decent hour.  Note: existential atheism=no mommy?  And Simone was too busy writing to help him at all--wifely slacker.  Putting her writing before her lover and family (Bonny B: PUT THAT KNIFE DOWN!  Can't you see Mommy is WRITING?). 

Anyhoo.

Dr.ShockMD, one of my new bloggy crushes, posted the link above on exercise and depression which I'd heard before.  There was also another study, of small power, done some time ago in which the people who exercised actually had MORE improvement than people who took antidepressants.  If I were a good blogger I'd research it and get you the link to that study but, frankly, Gentle Blog Readers, I'm EXHAUSTED this AM and behind schedule so JUST TAKE MY WORD FOR IT.  ;) 

I posted this because I started back running this week--and my good, sweet GOSH what a difference it makes in my mood and mental well-being.  Also, because, you know everything gets filtered through my dissertation, it made me think of this:

"How weary, stale, flat, and unprofitable, seem to me all the uses of this world."
--Hamlet, Act I Scene ii.

You can't be down with Hamlet without getting jiggy with Renaissance medicine and, in particular, the Renaissance fascination with melancholia, or depression.  The most famous example of Renaissance scholarship, and the one most frequently associated, with Hamlet is Bright's Treatise on Melancholoy. 
Both correlate melancholy to a popular stereotype of scholars, who are identified as being highly prone.  And interestingly enough--they suggest exercise and outdoor activity as a cure. 

I'm always floored how much the common sense parts of medicine persist through the centuries.  As if we know ourselve intuitively, even before dissection, experimentation, and randomized, double-blind, controlled studies. 

So then--wondering again, in Act I maybe Hamlet should have just taken a run in a pretty spot in Denmark, come back and happily put a dagger in his murderous uncle's heart with a clear conscience and a pleasing endorphin afterglow.  Gertrude and Ophelia would have lived longer, that's for sure.  And see, they fell down on the job, too, just like Simone: "Hamlet, button up that doublet, go take a walk, and then GET SOME SLEEP!  It will all seem better in the morning." 

And back to our post on Tristan/Depresso and Isolde--I wonder also what we lose when we lose our capacity for grief?  I mean, really:

Hamlet:
What a piece of work is a man, how noble in reason, how
infinite in faculties, in form and moving how express and
admirable, in action how like an angel, in apprehension how like
a god! the beauty of the world, the paragon of animals—and yet,
to me, what is this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me—
nor woman neither, though by your smiling you seem to say so.

Rosencrantz:
My lord, there was no such stuff in my thoughts.

(This is why I'd always make Rosencrantz really annoyingly CHEERFUL all the time, if I were directing.  He's making a joke about Hamlet getting down with the ladies as opposed to the men--but he's also missing the beauty of the preceding speech.  Likely because he doesn't have enough melancholy in him to identify with it.  Nope.  Hey--isn't this apple delcious.  Crunch. and,  what's that sex?  sex?  No.  Crunch.)

Also interesting--reading up on Democritus Junior above, he wrote that he wrote his Anatomy of Melancholy so that he could cure himself of it.  Which brings me to my favorite Antonin Artaud quote:

"No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell." 

So which comes first---the melancholy and the writing?  or the writing and the melancholy?  I know this--I have existential crises regularly after writing too much.  Neediness.  That's when I snap the laptop closed and slap on the running shoes. 

I also know that writing has often saved me from sheer despair. 

Point being--when I'm writing I'm not moving and methinks that is stale, flat, and unprofitable. 

Thank God for running and endorphins. 

mmm--a nice video, and linkity linkity link

 

Have I mentioned how much I love Wired Magazine? For your Friday viewing pleasure. And also:

 for more on the presence of New Media in the (crumbling) Ivory Tower, ht to @MattKopans for this link to Mickey Baines' blog.

How's your Friday going?  Mine--not as planned but blessed just the same.  Spring can make Mr. Grumpy Grumpersons grumpy grandpa grin.