It turns out that if one forgets to update one’s Wordpress installation, saucy little link-farmers running exploit scripts will look upon one’s mostly-dormant blog as fertile ground. I’ve just gone back and peeled hidden links out of half my old posts. Feh. (If you read this blog via RSS, you might still be able to see the “hidden” links at the bottom of the post that appeared earlier this morning, which was also generated by the link-farmers, not by me. I’ve deleted that post on the blog.) All should be fixed and safe now, I hope.
I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade Wordpress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.
By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.
Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.
Friday I looked at a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Divine Comedy, with marginal notes in Latin. Tiny, spidery, beautiful pale blocks of notes, accompanied by sketched “manicules” — also known as digits, hands, fists, or indices, apparently — pointing out important passages in the main text. At least two different annotators had worked on the text; I’m sure there were more, but I could see two definite unique scripts (and drawing styles). Some of the manicules had sweet petal-like sleeves. Some had wrists like pretzels.
For another class, I pulled several copies of Friedrich Rehberg’s Drawings faithfully copied from Nature, at Naples (1794) — Piroli’s engravings of Rehberg’s drawings of Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes, that is. They’re more striking than they were in the modern reprint I first saw, and I still can’t understand why so many modern critics call them “failed” drawings. (More on that whenever I get my paper on visual representations of Emma worked up as an article.) Two of the copies are printed entirely on bright orange paper, which is odd.
I looked at The Waste Land, ostensibly to study its notes & glosses — but, being a stereotypical literature geek, I’ve been obsessed with that poem since my freshman year of high school, and those notes are so familiar that I can hardly see them as paratext any longer. They’re like a little friendly murmur under the melody. A professor I TA’d for several years ago called the tone and apparatus of the poem elitist, and, while my students seemed to sympathize with his complaint, I couldn’t. Whatever Eliot meant to impart, those notes were a promise, when I read them first. This is how much I know, how much I’ve read and understood of the world; you can read and know and understand this much, too.
Apologies for the 404 error messages that have been popping up today — T. and I were playing around with the stats admin stuff yesterday and goofed something up. But we have fixed it now. Carry on!
More posting later, when I am not stricken with post-migraine fragility. Bah.