NYC day 9, with some thoughts on online seminar logistics

Moving forward with preparation for my first real online class on Monday. I'd been procrastinating on putting together the packet, but now that I've figured out a down-and-dirty technique (I am certain there is some more streamlined way to do it, but really this will work very well for now, one of these times when the fact that I'm lazy is really to my advantage!).

If you read my teaching logistics post yesterday, you already know that I'm offering a stripped-down reading option in that seminar for those who are having a hard time concentrating. Provisos: this was easy for me to do because (a) it's a small seminar and (b) I've taught the class once before, under circumstances that were conducive to keeping an unusually detailed set of notes. Each individual class will invite its own tailored solutions - I teach by looking closely at individual passages, so this should work really well for me.

(I partly saw it because of the wonderful session I had with one of my senior essay advisees on Wednesday afternoon. If what you want to do is look very closely through comments on a draft, the share screen Zoom feature is brilliant.)

For me, making the remaining weeks of the semester feel more manageable seemed clearly depend not just on reducing the pages but reducing format obstacles - all the student in this class really do have their books with them (and the critical readings are always online as pdfs), but I thought it would make sense to put the essential pages into a single PDF that you could, say, read on your phone lying on the floor if you felt like it. Otherwise they're reading pages not just from a primary source but from a couple different PDFs.

(If you are more adept than I, you can probably snip the relevant pages right out of those PDFs, but this is clearly easier for me for now. Never have I been more relieved that I am entirely slapdash rather than being at all a perfectionist!)

I'm planning to use the Zoom share screen feature to show each page we're discussing during class so that students aren't fumbling to find the right place, especially when I can't imagine most of them have dedicated desk or private table space under the current circumstances.

Steps:

1. I upgraded CamScanner on my iPad (I've used it casually for photographing pages during archival research) to the Pro edition, which has much fuller functionality.

2. I used my beloved Brunnen book stand to prop up Gibbon and coursepack and photograph each page of reading (about twenty-five - I'm shooting to have weekly minimum reading doable in ninety minutes max).

3. I used the internal CamScanner feature to combine the page images into a single PDF.

4. I have a Windows laptop and had to fiddle a bit with easiest transfer of that file onto my laptop (Snapdrop for some reason wouldn't work for me), but emailing it to myself from iPad is simple and painless.

5. I uploaded it to Courseworks in a new folder that is basically going to be these "quarantine packets."

The goal here is to do what I can to foster highly efficient direction of intensive attention. One of the things I teach in all my classes is how to read smart rather than getting bogged down in large quantities of material (this especially matters if you're a slow reader), focusing on skills for how to know which parts of something you need to read more closely (a central question in my introduction to the major); in this case I am skipping that step altogether and taking the students straight to the parts that I consider really important and that we'll cover in class. These are the things I'd hope they might remember a year from now - it's not a time to ask them to slog through all the difficult pages and probably have limited retention of anything!

In other news, how many more days is "clean bathroom" going to stay on my secondary list of tasks before I give in and actually do it?!?

The undead transponder

Jessamyn West on managing her late father's tech.

Hemanalia

At the Atlantic, Alexis Madrigal on Andrew Stauffer's BookTraces project:

A woman named Ellen received a book by the sentimental poet Felicia Hemans. Years later, her seven-year-old daughter died, and she adapted lines from Hemans to create a memorial inside the book. Mary, Mary, Mary.

Moved by this, Stauffer looked at another edition of Hemans in the UVA library and found a similar tribute to a lost child. "This really tells us something about how people were using Hemans and this book to refract their own grief," he said.

A short piece, but full of interesting bits.

In other news, I am what can only be described as thoroughly discombobulated! I have two meetings tomorrow (plus an allergy doc appointment), then a day off before flying to Israel on Saturday night to give two lectures at Tel Aviv University; but I woke up this morning to the news that B.'s father died early this morning in Ottawa. I will fly up there tomorrow evening so that I can keep the bereaved company and help out with practical stuff for a day and a half; then I'll fly back to NYC and go straight from one airport to another for my Saturday evening flight. Head about to explode from complexity of packing requirements, compression of preparation and packing time, etc.!

(Chuck was a very dear man, kind and thoughtful; he had been suffering from Alzheimer's for almost a decade, and it had begun to really get the better of him, even as his hearing and vision had almost completely deserted him: not a good combination. That said, he and Brent and I had one particularly lovely day out together two years ago - I don't seem to have the photos on my computer, but I will retrieve one from B.'s fridge door and post later on.)

Tom Jones and two cats

It has been very beneficial to have a few evenings at home, but I am still suffering from fairly pronounced cold symptoms! I got up early and had a productive morning, including a lot of paper commenting, then got back off course when the keyboard on my laptop stopped working - I took it in to a repair place in midtown and am anxiously awaiting news (writing in the meantime on my iPad - really I have device redundancy - but I have letters of recommendation I need to submit Tuesday, I had better be able to get it back before then!).

My evening: a lot more paper comments, but also - more pleasantly - 2 cats and the first two books of Tom Jones!

Back to normal

It's amazing having my real computer again - I went and picked it up a couple hours ago, and it feels like coming home! I live a good deal of my life via email and reading things on the internet: that little tablet was a good stopgap, but still.... In particular the Columbia webmail is hopeless, very happy to be using Thunderbird again.

New Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday, and I have just ordered a replacement watch (in the meantime I am wearing my other watch, a rather nice diving one - with a bezel! - that Wendy gave me after I got my scuba certification when she came to visit for Breakfast Near Tiffany's).

Saw an odd little play last night with G., Bull at 59E59. It is more of a scenario than a fully fledged play, and I thought only the sole female character had much depth - it's watchable but feels a bit purposeless. (I wasn't that keen on its predecessor Cock either.) Delicious dinner afterwards here - I had beef carpaccio (in my opinion this is the perfect dish - the combination of arugola, parmesan and raw beef is just ridiculously good), an amazing very simple branzino with lightly sauteed vegetables and a tiramisu I ordered after dimly recalling that we had eaten here once before and I had ordered what turned out to be the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. And it still is.

MTST

The first novel ever written on a word processor?

The legendary immolation scene

I have spent the week in a strange variety of activities conducted through a haze of mild to moderate fatigue: 

• A miscellany of doctor and dentist appointments, each minor/inconsequential in its own right but cumulatively onerous (and I would say that the pharmacy at the Rite Aid on 110th and Broadway is the worst, except that I switched there a few years ago from the Duane Reade across the street because that one really and truly was the worst!); 
• a large amount of opera (about which more, perhaps, anon - final installment tomorrow); 
• and a lot of whacking of the zombie book review that would not die, though I think I have sent its final incarnation to my editor just now.  The issue closes today, so that is pretty much going to have to be it!  

Will be very glad to see the back of that one: those who review regularly know that some pieces come together beautifully in the first draft whereas others have to be monstrously hacked about and rewritten again and again.  Not for the first time, I wonder whether it really is a good idea for me to write reviews: I feel that though reviewing comes as a sort of side benefit of my main reading-and-writing skill set, it's not my true metier.  However it is likely that soon I will have forgotten the pains of this week and will accept whatever invitation next comes my way....

The activity that should loom larger on that list but that I'm very behind on: grading!  Must make some more headway today as grades for graduating seniors are due by the end of the day.

Read two very good novels around the edges, Heath Lowrance's demented and captivating The Bastard Hand and Lavie Tidhar's haunting Osama.  I can't recommend these two highly enough: really unusual and high-quality neo-noir in two quite different inflections, very good stuff.

Miscellaneous linkage:

"Glass Gem" corn.  (Via Elatia Harris.)

Charles Peterson has a long and dispiriting two-part piece at n+1 on the devastation of the research mission at the New York Public Library.

Hawkcam!  (Courtesy of Brent.)

Widely linked to already, but orangutans like iPads too...

Endurance

Replicating the Shackleton spirit.

I had a good moment in the stacks today: I'd gone in to get this so that I could check a couple of quotations in the proofs of my Shakespeare adaptation essay.  My eye wandered (it is the argument for open stacks) down the shelf and I spotted a book I have often heard about but never read, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines.  It is too fragile to pack to take with me, but I am very curious to read some of it.  (Also: disambiguation!)

I've been working steadily albeit in a small way every day on novel revisions, and it's interesting to see how it's coming together.  Confession: desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and I did have to break out the device one day to liberate myself from the internet...

My alarm's set for 5:30am, and my flight to Cayman leaves at 8:45 from JFK.  Apartment is clean and tidy for the catsitter.  Only pity is that it is currently such nice running weather here!

Stackables

I was intrigued to learn earlier today that the inventor of the Pringles can was so proud that he asked for his ashes to be interred in one; further illumination arrives via Alexis Madrigal (and a surprising sequel featuring a can of Pringles and a very young Brad Pitt).

(I well remember the first Pringles I ever encountered as a child. I was probably five years old? They were not in the can; they had been laid out, decoratively, on some sort of a platter at the house of a family we knew from Montessori school, and they struck me as so much the most sublimely delicious food that I basically couldn't believe they existed. The only other early food encounter that holds a candle to it is my first time eating meringues, at my Aunt Pauline's house. Really Pringles and meringues have a certain amount in common [lack of substantiality, simple saltiness or sweetness], and they are both still foods that I can get pretty excited about, though it happens more frequently that I encounter a Pringle than a meringue...)

Modern fiction

at the Guardian, Laura Miller on how novels deal with the internet.

Spud gun

There is a fantastic novel in this for somebody. (Not, alas, me.)

Three links

Charlie Stross bemoans the dominance of steampunk; Phil Nugent mourns the passing of the Walkman; Ed Park makes my mouth water.

Light reading catch-up (travel edition)

Too much time in airports!

It was beautiful in Portland, Maine, though - I was there for a dear old friend's wedding, the weather was perfect and the foliage is brilliantly gorgeous already. There was a girl's night out on the Friday night at Local 188 and the wedding itself was held at the appropriately named Grace.

In the meantime I had had a nice little run along the waterfront and also what was almost certainly the most delicious pizza I have ever had, a slice of mashed-potato-bacon-scallion at Enzo on Congress Street.

I didn't have time to set up my new Kindle and charge it before I left, so on the way up I read Connie Willis's absolutely delightful Blackout (and the sequel/continuation is imminent, I have pre-ordered it, this is good) and a highly mediocre novel purchased at LaGuardia which I think is exactly the sort of thing which the Kindle in future will spare me.

Once I was at my hotel (which had a quite reasonably sized rectangular swimming pool, though I did not have time to swim in it!), I charged up the device and loaded eight or nine books onto it. Preliminary report: it is excellent in many respects, it will save me all sorts of anxiety about light reading supply (especially while traveling). It was a godsend this weekend, and it's awfully nice to have something so light to carry in the bag.

The downside: all three of the books I've read so far suffered slightly from being read on the Kindle as opposed to in the format of bound book. Stephen White's The Siege might partly just be a bit disorganized and/or badly written, but it uses a multiple time scheme (several different groups of characters followed over a few days' events, but the events presented out of order - i.e. "Saturday afternoon, "Friday morning") that I found much more disorienting without the visual orientation of flipping through pages and seeing headers, etc. Terry Pratchett's I Shall Wear Midnight is as delightful as all his Tiffany Aching novels, and features a good table of contents (with titled chapters) that helped me navigate when needed, but I found it so annoying to click on the footnotes and then have to press another button to go back to the main text (I just don't like anything that slows me down, that's the honest truth!) that I ended up skipping most of them. And Kristin Hersh's Rat Girl is a wonderfully compelling and worthwhile book, only I felt I must be missing all sorts of things to do with the layout of the page (quoted song lyrics, vignettes from childhood that seemed to be marked differently i.e. with central rather than full justification but that just looked muddled in Kindle format). Also, there's a giveaway on her website of all the music alluded to in the book for which one needs a word from a specific page of the book! Will have to go to a real bookstore and consult, I suppose...

More fundamentally, I feel that the Kindle will have a dangerous potential for me to feed a bottomless-maw version of fiction-reading. If input is so undifferentiated by the traditional printer's tools (typeface, margins, layout, choices about headers and format/size of book etc.), something is lost - I will definitely prefer a future device that keeps the old-fashioned structure of the page. The Kindle is in many respects a more powerful and indispensable tool for me than my various iPods (I haven't yet worked with a PDF file, but will look forward to seeing how it plays out in terms of ease of use), but it produces none of the salivatory longing that the Apple devices do - my first iPod was a revelation in a way that this device is not.

(An associative aside - Kristin Hersh's book is a useful corrective to the rather wish-fulfilling elements that have crept into William Gibson's version of the independent artist's life...)

Les carbonisateurs

An extraordinary piece by Daniel Howden at the Independent on the attempt to preserve gorilla habitat in Virunga National Park.

Fact-checking

Correct 'alternateness' can involve making things up or finding obscure 'true' things: the Dewar bulb is what Sophie and Mikael have instead of a Thermos when they drink tea en route from Helsingborg to Stockholm!