Thanks all (old friends, new friends, and new neighbors) who could come. I had a super time.
One attendee looked around and remarked that I was the most popular girl she knows. I’m very flattered.
I must also get some more typing paper…
Concord grapes ($3.00), yellow wax beans ($2.50), Heirloom tomato ($1.00), cup of Roos coffee ($2.00), half-dozen cinnamon donuts ($3.00), and interaction with nice human beings.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by Rosalind Williams called Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. I’m a sucker for anything that involves sci fi and horror tropes, particularly 19th century sci fi, which forms the core of her thesis.
Much literature and folklore paints the underground as either hell or some sort of hidden fairy cave paradise. Much sci fi writing and film examines what it would mean to live underground, after a nuclear holocaust, for example. The book discusses the place of “the underground” as a concept in the human imagination, and how attempts to explore (physically or figuratively) the underground tends to result in some measure of technical innovation, as well as sometimes high doses of moral questioning and fear. Williams takes the idea of treating a piece of technology not as an object to manipulated, but an environment.
In college I took a class called “London Underground,” the purpose of which was to look at 19th century London, the quintessential Western modern city, through the lens of its metaphorical underground: crime, disease, immorality, etc. We read social criticism and literature that exemplified the palimpsest effect of the city—physically and figuratively. (The paper I wrote for the course ended up being on Victorian museum culture and the view that an empire is a kind of collection. The main works I used were The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Wasteland” (which was almost cheating). Lots of death and decay and tragedy.) I got a bit obsessed. If I ever go back to school, a thesis on such a topic might be an option.
Anyway, one of the works discussed in the Williams book is L’Eve future, a French novel written in the 1880s. The grad library had a couple copies, and the one that was available is a 1957 clothbound edition with a beautiful clear overlay and a good deal of historical material. The book is in French, and I’m actually looking forward to exercising that again.
The purpose of this post, before I nerded out, was to show you the overlays. I’d like to get some good quality photos of them at some point, but for now here’s the idea:
The Deuce is currently experiencing leftovers from Hurricane Ike Hannah. As far as I can tell, it’s been raining constantly since this morning. This theoretically provides perfect conditions for getting work done, because leaving the house might involve drowning.
Things I should work on today:
Things I have accomplished so far today:
In other news, I have signed up to be a correspondent for the new Ann Arbor Chronicle, a community produced site of daily local news. Look for Twitter-style updates by me and the other correspondents to appear in the left-hand column as we document interesting happenings around town.
“Hi,” by Psapp, that is.
In light of current events, I’ve decided that pretty much everything would be better if we all wore capes. All the time.
