Hello from London!

     
     I remember a cold day in June in Chicago. It's memorable enough that it was cold in June in Chicago, but also because it was, all in all, a lovely month.  I was on a cushy fellowship, living in a fantastic city, learning incredible things, looking at incredible pictures, and reading incredible books.  On that particular cold Sunday, I was sitting in a Caribou Coffee, reading a book I had picked up in one of the many used bookstores that I haunted in that city, happy to be living-- for once-- in a place where there is the choice of not one, not two, but frankly uncountable bookstores to visit, all within reasonable walking distance.**  While I know that I should not take advice from plastic cups that hold sparkling green tea lemonade, the message printed on it has (for good or for ill) stuck with me. 

Life is waking up an hour earlier 

to live an hour more. 

     While I know that by now, my sleep debt could probably be better measured in months rather than days, or even weeks,  there is something lovely about being out and about before the daily grind begins.  No matter how tired I am, or how little I've slept, I know that if I roll from bed straight to work I will feel terrible-- like life is nothing more than workworkworksleepworkwork. This goes double now. I've been in London for the week (happy Spring Break to me!), trying vainly to finish my first chapter, something I told myself I would finish back in January. But then the doldrums set in. Then the writers block set in. Then a conference paper set in.  Then the post-conference paper writing anxiety set in. And now the 'how is it that I've been seriously working this for more than three months and I'm not done' anxiety set in, along with the looming reenrollment deadline anxiety.  So I've been at the British Library from opening time to closing time-- 10 and a half hours-- trying to read the letters I want to read, and write write write.  I have just shy of 10,000 words, but it is simultaneously too long and too short, and my argument is not so good.... and I tend to get carried away with all this worry.   
     So, it is all the more important for me to wake up an hour early and take the tube to a neighborhood I've not yet been to, and take the time to see the city before it fully wakes up. The subway is still blessedly empty, and I emerge to quiet streets, perhaps with a dog walker or two, depending on the neighborhood.  Then, sleepy employees begin to trickle in to cafes and coffee shops. Slowly, doors open, and the dog walkers give way to young mums and dads taking their kids to school, only to be replaced with brisk-walking black-suited businessmen and women, and other harried workers.  Eyes are on smartphones or the metro newspapers.  Hoards pour into the tube stops in neat, ordered lines.  The air is full of quietly stamping feet and the beeps from validated Oyster cards.  Stand on the right. Hustle on the left. Wait for descending passengers to leave the train. Mind the gap.  My mind turns once again to the things I must read, the chapter I must right.  But that hour has made a world of difference. And of course, there is coffee along the way.  

** I have been told that I tend to walk unreasonably much.  I don't think this is true; in fact, I don't always meet my fitbit step goal of 11,000 steps

It has been almost two years

And it's amazing to see just how little has changed in my life.  There is still coffee though. There is always coffee.

This week's non-related reading: One of Our Thursdays is Missing

It's been too long since I read a books didn't have footnotes in it.  Ever since the semester ended, I've been trying something new-- instead of working on school-related stuff until I pretty much pass out from lack of sleep, this week, I've been spending my late evenings with Jasper Fforde's One of Our Thursdays is Missing. 


It's a book that probably will not be terribly enjoyable for people who haven't read the other works in the series (which I urge everyone to do.  Go on, I'll wait. *surfs the Internet.  Makes a cake. Writes the next great American novel.  Does dishes.* OK, all done?  Good).  It's also a bit slower than the other books in the series, and the jokes seem a bit more forced this time around, but Fforde is a wonderful author, so even on a less-than-stellar book, the result is chuckle-worthy, even if it's not the same ohmygodicannotgotosleepuntilifinishthisbook that The Eyre Affair was.


The premise is, not terribly surprising, that Thursday Next, or, rather, a Thursday Next has gone missing, and another Thursday has to go and both find her, and find out why she's missing (though not in that order).  In the mean time, written Thursday meets up with a clockwork butler, an elephant with a long memory, a Designated Love Interest, and Unrequited Love Interest, and others.  Hijinks (formulaically) ensue.  Lessons are told, consequences are suffered, and everyone who was meant to lives happily ever after.


Not the best book in the world, and I doubt that I would have finished it if I hadn't had the great love of Fforde that I do.  But it did provide a nice counterbalance to reading about sodomy in early modern Italy, which was today's related reading.  I think I giggled more at the latter, but that's just because I am immature.

I just made a strange realization-- I date my childhood by Harry Potter books. I was just trying to remember the summer I spent at a creative writing program in some far-off fancy university.  I was in high school, but when?  All I could remember was that it was the summer that The Order of the Phoenix came out.  Dang, that was a long time ago.

when the doctor

gives you a prescription, tells you to get plenty of rest, and drink fluids that are not coffee, and you do only one of the three for a few days, the result is not a great one.

So. very. sick.

The best part about Easter?

Easter candy is 50% off pretty much everywhere.

The bad part about Easter?  Easter candy is 50% off pretty much everywhere.

Cadbury eggs - real food + coffee + all day sitting in a chair reading + stress = upset stomach + diabetes

Freaky Fauna Friday: Succarath

This little beast comes from Francisco Núñez de Cepeda's Idea de el buen pastor copiada por los SS. Doctores representada en empresas sacras: con avisos espirituales, morales, politicos y economicos para el govierno de un principe ecclesiastico, though it takes as the source for the animal information the Spanish Jesuit Juan Eusebio Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae, 1635.  

I believe that Nieremberg's work also has an image of this little beastie, but since the work doesn't seem to have ever been scanned, I can't be sure.  

At any rate, this fearsome beast, (with a rather fetching plumed tail) was called a succarath, and Núñez de Cepeda writes that it lived in the southernmost reaches of America, and its skin is used by the natives as a covering.  Núñez de Cepeda goes on to call attention to the way in which this fearsome beast cares for its young, for even while chased by hunters, it still takes its young upon its back to try and carry them to safety.  

"Mira con tan singular afecto la propagacion de su descendencia, que perseguida de los caçadores, toma sobre su espalda los hijos, y por asegurarlos la vida, aventura la propia: Tanto es el amor con que atiende à su posteridad aun la fiereça de los brutos mas indomitos!"

Núñez de Cepeda's work gives a snippet of the original information from Nieremberg's book, where he calls the animal a ferocious and wild beast ("Succarath apud Patagonas bellua rapax, & torva est.")  And it does seem fierce indeed-- it looks a bit like an overgrown dog, but it's bearded (seen more clearly in other images), though most of its hair outside of the beard and the tail isn't terribly long.  Nieremberg also mentions its love for its young, and in that, his description seems almost Aesopian.  

Nieremberg's Historia naturae, maxime peregrinae was one of the two works on natural philosophy/history that he published (the other being the 1649 Curiosa y oculta filosofía), and it was a curious book chock full of really, really strange arcana (to our modern eyes, at least), interspersed with descriptions of natural history, much of it from the new world. Our imaginative Jesuit, it should be noted, never left Spain.  He was simply a compiler of information, and his sources for the new world were works by new world historians like Francisco Hernández, Peter Martyr d’Anghiera, José de Acosta, Cieza de León, Fernández de Oviedo, and others.*  This highly detailed drawing of a creature that neither Núñez de Cepeda, Nieremberg, nor the illustrators of their books had ever seen is to me, what's so cool about these illustrations and their descriptions.  How do you describe an animal you don't know?  

* Juan Pimentel, “Baroque Natures: Juan Nieremberg, American Wonders, and Preterimperial Natural History,” in Bleichmar, Daniela and Paula de Vos, eds. Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, 1500-1800. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2009.