Historiann

Do any of you ever wish you could crawl back into the 90s again? Or is it just me and Fratguy?  We were poor for most of the ’90s–and when we were no longer poor, I had a bad job, but we always had very good friends and neighbors wherever we were–Philadelphia, Baltimore, Hartford, Somerville/Cambridge, Washington D.C., Providence, R.I., and “Winesburg,” Ohio.  I’m probably just nostalgic for the first decade of adulthood, when the possibilities seemed endless.  (I will say that it’s nice not to have moved at all for 8 years in a row!  It seems like I spent half of my 20s in a U-Haul, driving up and down I-95 and figuring out how to avoid the New Jersey Turnpike.)

(Aside:  Does anyone know if there have been any articles or dissertations written about all of the babies, baby dolls, fetuses, and allusions to reproduction that populate both Nirvana and Hole songs and videos?  Does anyone want to offer an analysis in the comments below?) 

Although this video of “Malibu” might suggest that we’re going to the beach for Spring Break, we’re not.  More details later–but I think I’m going to stay off-line and just live in the meat world on my vacation. Continue Reading »

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He’s mad as hell, and he’s not going to take it any more!  (WARNING:  the language is NSFW or children.  Just sayin’.)  Via The Daily Beast:

How many of us can relate to the “expert” in this video?  “I spent my entire life attending the nation’s most prestigious schools to talk about bull$h!t like this.  I’m really just happy to be on TV.”  Awesome! Continue Reading »

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All the world is waiting for you, and the power you possess

In your satin tights, fighing for your rights, and the old red, white, and blue! Continue Reading »

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Today we have in a letter from the mailbag at Historiann HQ some interesting questions about finding appropriate publication outlets for interdisciplinary work.  We all say we support interdisciplinarity and admire it–and yet, scholars whose work is truly interdisciplinary have a damnably hard time finding jobs and appropriate outlets for their publication.  Here, a young scholar wonders about the politics of attempting to publish an article in one field when she’ll one day be looking for a job in another discipline

Hi Historiann,

I’m a long time reader and lurker.  I’m a history grad student with one toe in [a Closely Related Discipline, or CRD for short].  I did an intensive study of an unpublished collection [in CRD], which my committee is suggesting I publish separately from the dissertation because it’s heavy on details appreciated more by practitioners of CRD than history, and because getting an article out in grad school looks good. 

The problem is, while “interdisciplinarity” is all the rage, I don’t know where to publish.  I wanted to throw this out to someone outside my department and committee, because they’re starting to sound like an echo chamber.  CRD journals seem like a good fit, but I’m worried that history department hiring committees won’t know what to make of an article that’s not published in a history journal.  What kind of audience should a first article be aimed at?  Do interdisciplinary journals really live up to their goals?  Would it be better to go with a full on CRD journal and hope some historians read it, or try to pitch it to a history journal with interdisciplinary aspirations?  How does one measure the “prestige” of the journal and their readership?  (This is something my committee keeps telling me to keep in mind, but I have no idea what it means!)  How does interdisciplinary work look to hiring committees?  Will publishing in a CRD journal mark me as a bad fit for a history department hire, even if I have history conference CV lines? 

Thanks for your help,

Interdisciplinary Eileen

Dear Eileen,

First of all, congratulations on having written something that your committee believes should be published.  That is quite an achievement for a graduate student, and you should feel proud of your committee’s confidence in your work.  Secondly, I think you’re worrying yourself unnecessarily about hypothetical problems.  Continue Reading »

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Here’s hoping you’re not working “on spec” today.

“Let’s get into trouble, baby!”  Continue Reading »

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UPDATED BELOW

It’s Presidents’ Day!  Everyone, bust out your favorite Presidents’ Day songs and party hats! 

(Just kidding.)  We’re not big on Presidents’ Day around here.  A six-year old of my acquaintance has recently learned that George Washington was a slaveowner, and has enjoyed letting hir friends know, with a disapproving hiss, “he owned slaves!” whenever he has come up in conversation this month.  (Contrary to movement conservatives and right-wing Know Nothings, George Washington gets a hell of a lot of play in elementary school curricula nationwide.) Continue Reading »

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Oh, look–a pony!  (The best kind, too–one that doesn’t poop.)

We’re in Steamboat Springs, and it’s a powder day, friends, so I’m hitting the slopes.  Happy Valentine’s Day to all, and thanks for your thoughtful readership and comments.

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Why watch the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics on the teevee, when you can participate in winter sports yourself?  (Well, those of us near the snowy mountains have a bitof an advantage!)  No, I’m not going to Mt. Tremblant or anything near Quebec–we in Colorado can ski on lovely, fresh powder much more conveniently.  Easterners:  how do you ski on all of that ice?  How is it any fun?  I’ve only tried it once, in Vermont in 1994, and it was the antithesis of fun, unless your definition of fun includes adjectives like “terrifying,” “damp,” “cold,” and “miserable.”  (Well, I suppose the definition of “fun” for most New Englanders might include one or more of these terms.  But, they fetishize discomfort and view it as a sign of moral rectitude.)

Here’s a fun, if slightly creepy, fact about this blog:  every day, dozens of people click here because they’re searching “women athletes,” “hot women athletes,” “athletic women,” “olympic women,” or some other similar phrases.  And as you regular readers know, this is a blog that only very rarely comments on sports or athletic affairs, if ever.  So, enjoy the images of women on vintage ski posters here! Continue Reading »

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Maybe procrastination has saved me again?  I was going to buy a brand-new, decked-out Prius this winter until the news broke that the 2010 Priuses are going all HAL on people.  Creepy.  Maybe it’s not such a good idea to make machines that think they’re smarter than us?  Every time I get a new computer, I have to spend hours deselecting everything that Microsoft has automatically preselected for me without my consent, from the damned “grammar check” to the display of my folders, etc.  (I miss my Macs!)

Maybe I’ll go ahead and give my old car that oil change that’s 3 months and 1,500 miles overdue, and wash it for the first time in 10 months, since it looks like I’ll be driving it for a little while longer.  (I’ve been known to go for oil changes just once a year, or every 8 or 9,000 miles!)  Its tires are worse than bald, it looks like someone must be living in it, and it smells like a fart, but aside from the driver’s side front and rear windows not going up and down as they should, the thing has really given me zero mechanical trouble in the eight years I’ve owned it.  (And it was 4 years old when I bought it–so it owes me nothing, not even windows that go up and down when I press the button, especially considering my chronic neglect and/or abuse.) Continue Reading »

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This is the Sesame Street short film from back in the day that was immediately called to my mind by Flavia’s recent post on book covers, more specifically, by the book cover she nominates as the freakiest of all time:  “the original cover art for Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature (1972),” which she calls “hideous and compelling at the same time.”  (Go over to her place to see it, and the full-size blowup when you click on it.  It is impressively weird.)  Incidentally, “Rolling Ball 1, 2, 3 (rare ending)” is the only one I remember–I never saw the version with the cherry sundae ending until last night.

When I was over at YouTube researching this short film, the film below came up as a related video.  Continue Reading »

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