The Missing Paragraph andOther Stuff

Yesterday, in my post, I wrote this:

Yesterday, we visited a castle. The term "castle" actually refers to the building's earliest incarnation. It's last was a Jesuit monastery, but the architecture reflects the centuries in which it was a manor house. Like any respectable manor house, it comes with a story of the macabre. Allegedly, two nobles fell in love with the same woman. At a ball, their rivalry escalated into a duel. Before they went out to draw pistols, they boarded her up in a wall. In the duel, one died from his wounds and the other drowned in the river. No one knew that the woman had been boarded up, so she died there in the wall. According to the guide books and the plagiarized piece on every website about the castle, workers discovered the skeleton during renovations in the 1880s, and estimated that the bones had been there 130 years. According to the woman working the ticket counter, the Jesuits discovered the bones there during renovations in the 1920s.

After that, I went on a little rumination about the holes gaping throughout that story. That little rumination, however, disappeared somewhere between the writing and the posting. Disappearing paragraphs are a frequent occurrence and one, I believe, connected to the mouse pad. I hate mousepads. I bought a regular mouse and attached it to my computer to avoid the mousepad, but the location of the mousepad, just on the edge of my palm, means that the mousepad continues to interfere. My palm will barely brush the pad and -- bink! -- a chunk of the paper will disappear. I can bring it back in Word, but Blogger isn't so kind.  --- Oh, what! Blogger does have an "undo" feature. Well, I'm dense. I'm also lazy, otherwise I would have taken the time to disable the mousepad. I also am inattentive, otherwise I would notice when a whole paragraph goes missing so that I could use the "undo" feature.

Clearly, one of my hobbies is complaining about silly things that I could fix easily if I were more focused on problem solving than on bitching. That will be the subtitle of my memoir.

Anyway, the rumination now seems a tad bit silly, too. The story of the duel is clearly bullshit. After all,  wouldn't someone somewhere have noticed the girl was missing? Wouldn't someone have heard her kicking and screaming, if she didn't go into the wall dead already? Wouldn't someone have noticed the smell of her decaying body, like in "A Rose for Emily"? Why put her in the wall when there were acres and acres of land on which to hide an inconvenient corpse? All very unlikely.

Also, what about the skeleton? When was it found? By who, really? What did they do with the remains? Why don't the interpreters know, since the story is in all of the guidebooks?

Perhaps most importantly, what is the documentation for all of this? Do the Jesuits have some record? Does the museum or the Office of Public Works, which owns the site, have records? When did the story originate? After all, if the incidents that it described are untrue, the story itself has a history? What are the different versions of the story? How far back can you find a record of the story? Can it only be traced, say, to the site becoming a tourist attraction? Do they not publicize the story because it is less a tourist attraction and more of a feature of the park where children play and might dampen the use of the site for receptions (because not everyone is as macabre as some of us)? What function does the story serve in the local lore?

One of the other odd features of the site is that it has not literature on the site itself. Most people were there to use the playground or the tea room. The house itself contained a new exhibit of toys and clothing (very cool). The pamphlets available at the front only dealt with the exhibit or with the other Heritage Sites of Ireland, but nothing was available to give a brief overview of the house's history and lore. You had to book a tour for a group, too, although there may be more tours available during the tourist season.

I'm sorely tempted to contact the Office of Public Works, just to see if they have any information about the story. I'm also sorely tempted to take a few moments -- or hours -- out of my next visit to the National Library to see what they have in the historic Dublin newspapers. I just might do the first, since all that would require would be an e-mail.

This is the reason that I wish I were a novelist. I would say popular historian, but I'm interested in obscure stories that would not really be very popular. A novelist could make this story interesting. I keep thinking that I should try again in my spare time -- of which I actually do have some right now. I have a file of ideas, simply because I want to write something down. When I was a kid, I used to keep a notebook with me and, when I wasn't reading a book, I was writing my own in the notebook. That's one of the things that I love about my younger self. I also told myself stories before I went to sleep at night. I suppose I still tap into that when I drift into narrative parts of my history writing. The most fun that I had writing my first book -- my dissertation, really -- was the chapter that was almost wholly narrative. I think I finished that chapter in a weekend. I wonder if I could just do that again, only out of my head, rather than out of all of the books and notes stacked around me?

Alas, this is just a distraction. I'm actually quite ready to write chapter 1 -- chapter 2 is done and ready for revision -- part of chapter 4 is done, too, but will require significant reworking before it is actually a chapter. My introduction is outlined. In fact, part of chapter 1 is done, too, from the paper that I gave, I just have to axe some of the overt historiography (trade press, you know) and move it to the notes. Then, I have to incorporate the grandmother (the paper was on the mother) and move forward with the slave mistresses. I know what I want to say, since I worked it out in the other, frustrating paper and in the big picture revelation.  Now, it's time to invoke the goddess Nike and just do it.

The Long Weekend

Thanksgiving was lovely. We went to a bar in a hotel that had Christmas trees set up and no  music and just enough light to make it cozy but not dark. I'm finding that I don't like going places that play music. Places that play music play it about a decibel too loud, placing it just within my notice, in sort of a peripheral hearing, to be distracting. I don't like that. I also hate loud music. Yes, I am too old.

I think I am actually turning into your great-granny. There's the music thing, and then there is the knitting, and then there is the preferring to read or watch t.v. and knit rather than go out in the evenings, and then there is the vague aches and pains everywhere. We aren't even getting into the desire to grab people on the street and tell them how to behave properly. For godsakes, people, when you are with a group of people on the sidewalk, with a wall on one side and busy traffic on the other, and someone is walking toward you, could at least ONE of you step aside to let that person pass?!? Also, pick up after your dog, especially if that dog is the size of a horse! And, pull up those pants! And get the hell outta my yard!

The aches and pains are all ridiculous. My hands are cramped from knitting, would you believe? As are my forearms. Then, somewhere along the line, I think I pinched a nerve in my neck because I have a feeling, somewhere between numbness and pain, running from my cheek, down through my shoulder and into my bicep. I would blame my purse, but I stopped using a purse and switched to a backpack when the pain began. Then, I switched the backpack to one strap on the other shoulder. Now, I think I just sleep on it funny. It only gets worse from here, doesn't it? Like next it will be my sciatica --actually, that happens pretty frequently -- and then I'll break my hip, and then I'll be all stooped over and then I'll get arthritis, and then I'll need a cane, and then I'll start using the can to whack those kids with their baggy pants and their loud music when they start hanging out in my yard.

Anyway, on Thanksgiving, after we went to the bar, we went to a lovely restaurant for a tasty dinner. The company that the Gentleman Caller is working for had a big "traditional" Thanksgiving dinner for its employees on Friday, but we did not go. We figured that they would serve rubber turkey, but mostly we didn't want to pay the $50 for me to attend. The dinner was free for all employees, but any family member who attended had to pay $50 each. We decided to go to the opera instead.

Actually, the opera was on Saturday night. We saw The Magic Flute  in a very tiny theater down by the river. The orchestra consisted of the conductor playing a piano, a bassoonist, a flutist, a clarinetist, and oboist and -- oh, I forget -- another instrument, I want to say violinist. The point here being that the orchestra was more of a sextet and it was set off to the side of the stage. They a cctv on the conductor so that they could put a monitor in front of the stage so that the singers could see her direction. The stage might have fit into your living room, and the audience all sat shoulder to shoulder and hip to hip on risers. The singers were maybe twenty feet away and they did not need any sort of microphone.

The opera itself is very sexist, what with the defeat of the Queen of the Night by the "manly" Masons; but the entire creative team from the conductor to the artistic director to the costume designers were all women. The lighting person might have been a man, but everyone else was female. Being aware of the sexism of the libretto, they included a feminist reading of the story in the program. In the opera itself, the costumes showed a historical progression of fashion from the late 1800s to the 1920s. That is, unless you take in the Queen of the Night and her three attendants. They included the Viking (the Gentleman Caller leaned over to me and said, "that's how you can tell it is an opera: women in hats with horns"), ancient Greek, ancient Egypt, and Elizabethan eras. In the final scene, the women all wore "Votes for Women" sashes, Pamina stripped Tamino's masonic apron off, the Queen of the Night ripped off her muzzle, and, as the company sang something about glory coming down from above, a banner rolled down saying "Votes for Women," while a battle of the sexes broke out on stage. You don't see that every day at the opera.

Yesterday, we visited a castle. The term "castle" actually refers to the building's earliest incarnation. It's last was a Jesuit monastery, but the architecture reflects the centuries in which it was a manor house. Like any respectable manor house, it comes with a story of the macabre. Allegedly, two nobles fell in love with the same woman. At a ball, their rivalry escalated into a duel. Before they went out to draw pistols, they boarded her up in a wall. In the duel, one died from his wounds and the other drowned in the river. No one knew that the woman had been boarded up, so she died there in the wall. According to the guide books and the plagiarized piece on every website about the castle, workers discovered the skeleton during renovations in the 1880s, and estimated that the bones had been there 130 years. According to the woman working the ticket counter, the Jesuits discovered the bones there during renovations in the 1920s.

I've been struggling with the Big Guy for a few weeks, trying to find the balance between the brush strokes and the whole museum. Yesterday, I finally found the heart of the story that I'm trying to tell. The whole time I thought I was trying to tell the story of a particular conflict having to do with women, and I was having the worst time trying to fit all of the chapters and characters together to tell that story, but the story lacked something that made it sound authentic, that made all of those chapters and characters fit together into something coherent. I kept reading, and re-reading, and thinking, and hating on myself for being so inadequate, and then reading and, re-reading, and thinking some more.

Then, a quote shook loose. The quote tied together the end with the beginning, and the sentiment of the quote -- the big picture that it described -- ran all through his life. The conflict of the story was about something slightly different than I had originally thought. I had thought it was simply a conflict about gender, with race and class incorporated. I see now that I was trying too hard to separate out gender and make it the center of the story, since most other biographies talk only about race with either very dated or very cursory inclusions of gender; but, you really cannot separate them as much as I was attempting to do -- or the way that those other biographies tended to do.

So, I placed race at the center of the story along with gender -- and then class naturally followed. Now the story has greater tension, greater conflict, greater drama, and more coherence. I'm not just charging ahead. I actually have something like an introduction. Sure, it will be revised, but I think I'm a person who does need to start with something like an introduction, otherwise, I will wander all over and never get to the point. Then, I will get distracted by something -- anything -- else.

The introduction sets up the conflict. I had a method, now I know what that method will draw me toward. I know the conflict that I am describing. The conclusion will bring it all home. I actually did a happy Snoopy dance when I figured it all out!

Thanksgiving?

It's Thanksgiving? Again, being in a land where they do not celebrate holidays that have always been a part of my calendar's cycle is quite odd. But, then, my whole internal calendar is off these days. I kinda like it.

I've got nothing to write about today. In fact, another odd thing about my life these days is that I seem to be out of conversational material. I'm not complaining, trust me! The reason that I have no conversational material is that my days go kinda like this: coffee, write, run, wine. My head is somewhere in the nineteenth century most of the time, either with the Big Guy and his ilk, or with the characters in whatever novel I'm listening to or reading. I get the 21st century in the morning, when I read headline news, or at the end of the day, when I read blogs. I get the 20th century after dinner, when I watch t.v. -- usually Friends reruns, because that's really really popular here -- and knit and drink wine. All in all, not bad; but if you try to hold a conversation with me, I will either sound like an undergraduate English major with no life (which, actually, I was in the late 1980s) or one like I'm having some sort of break with reality.  I tend to call the latter my Big Guy Band Camp mode, like that girl in those horrible movies who started every conversation with, "this one time, at band camp," except I say, "this one time, the Big Guy said..."

Mostly, I have odds and ends rattling about my brain. These bits of thoughts have no connection to anything and are the sorts of things that shut down conversations -- and I'm really good at shutting down conversations. I am the Conversation Cooler.

One of the odds and ends has to do with the Kennedy assassination. Yeah, I know: huh? While I only vaguely follow news, I am also vaguely aware of certain bits, and the fact that Tuesday was the fifty-somethingith (I can't do math right now) anniversary of the Kennedy assasination was one of those bits. Back during the twentieth anniversary of the assasination -- give or take a year -- one of the networks aired a miniseries about JFK and Jackie. Blair Brown played Jackie. My mom cried and cried like a little baby at the end, and my dad, for once, had sympathy for her "girly" response. (Women's emotions were mocked in our family -- hence, I am fucked up.)

At the time, I didn't get it. Kennedy? Plus, that was a million years ago, wasn't it? Now, I realize that, at that moment, to my parents, who were younger than I am now, twenty years was just yesterday. That moment is now thirty years ago.

On Tuesday, too, I was listening to some old Bonnie Raitt, and what I consider a more recent song came up from her album Luck of the Draw. That album is now twenty years old. I listened to it incessantly when I first got it. In one of the songs, "Nick of Time," she says something about watching her parents age, but they also watch her age, and none of them know how to respond to that. At the time, I understood what she sang about; but I understood it as a description, as if you described to me a house that was two stories tall, brick, with four windows and a door. Now, I understand it as an experience, like standing in front of the house, or even inside of it.

They are spending Thanksgiving alone today. My first instinct was to think of them with pity, as if they were lonely, not being with their grandbabies. My dad in particular is very big on the Norman Rockwell image of family, no matter how fucked up the actual situation is in front of him. Then, I realized that this was probably the first Thanksgiving that they have had alone, as a couple, since before my birth. I try to imagine them as twenty-two year olds, newly married, out in west Texas. They are such babies, and they don't even know it yet. None of us ever do.

Thanksgiving Week Already? How'd That Happen?

Is Thanksgiving really this week? Living, for now, in a place that has a different history means that such American holidays sneak up on you. Throw in the rapidity with which time seems to slip away and the fact that, despite my initial bitching, the temperate weather, and you lose your place in the calendar.

Generally, I count the days to Thanksgiving because the holiday is a much needed break in the semester. Not an issue right now. In fact, I feel a sense of panic in that I feel so far behind on my writing because I kept taking time to do papers and write a review. Perhaps I should stop that?

Also, perhaps I should adjust my sense of accomplishment to something more realistic. Some little gremlin in my head keeps whispering, "you should have the whole book done by now, you lazy bum!" That little gremlin is a bit like a gossip monger who takes in one little scrap of information and then blows it all out of proportion. It's like this woman whom I knew in grad school who told me that, in our overcrowded, collective t.a. office, another of the t.a.s thought my desk was too much in his way, got furious, and shoved my desk way across the room. You could see the gleam in her eye as she stirred the shit. I confronted the other t.a. to apologize and he said, "no, I just moved it about an inch to get around. I wasn't mad at all." My little gremlin is the shit-stirrer. It takes in the information that I want to be moving faster on my writing, and it takes all of the times I was told that I was lazy in my life, then mixes them all together and produces a potion that I, of course, willingly drink because I have to do everything the gremlins say (right?). Next think you know, I'm in some fatalist fetal position on the couch, wondering how I ever found the will to get up in the morning because I am just that lazy and worthless. I end up sitting on the edge of some precipice, thinking I might as well jump over because I'm going to fall anyway and the anticipation of falling -- of failing -- is far to enervating.

This is why I drink. The gremlins can't handle the alcohol and pass out after a few sips. Then, they shut up and I can fell o.k. for a bit.

Meanwhile, to write, I have called in the big guns: the Monks. Remember Chant? Some years ago -- jeez, over ten, now that I think about it -- I discovered that the Monks buzz something in my head that shakes loose the words. Actually, I think they mesmerize the gremlins, who sit down in a trance and listen. Then, the rest of my head can devote its energies to getting shit done.

Today, I must wrangle the last paper. I finished the book review over the weekend. The book review was a struggle between frustration that it should be so short and gratitude that it should be so short. I'll give it a clean up later in the week, probably next week. On the paper, I have to keep reminding myself that I'm speaking to people who are not going to judge me for my failure to grasp academic language or to address every theorist on gender or to directly engage with the full body of historiography. It ain't that kind of paper or audience. Thank goodness!

I really have to get over this feeling of going into a paper or a panel or even a casual conversation feeling as if I'm going into an oral comprehensive exam in which the odds are against me because the design of the exam is so dreadful: you have to know everything about everything that ever happened and who said what about it and if you don't you FAIL! LIFE! FOREVER! Eleventy.

Yeep! I just had a flashback to grad school! Guess how our comprehensive exams went? I don't have to be that person anymore.

Anyway, I think the thing that will help me revise this paper the best will be Powerpoint. Yeah, scoff if you will, but I've found that, with Powerpoint, I can fill in some of the blanks for an audience who has no familiarity with the basic subject. I can put up a picture of the Big Guy. I can put up a map showing the location of some of the places I mention. I can put up a brief description of different schools of thought to help the audience keep the differences in mind. Visual aids, plus pretty pictures! Doing that sometimes helps group ideas and events together better, too. It's how I do my lectures when I teach.

Another thing that will help will be when I figure out what the grand big statement is. I am so terrible at that because I do have a tendency to get lost somewhere between the details and the Grand Theory of All History. It's a bit like going into a museum to see a Monet and either standing with your note an inch from the canvas to see only the brushstrokes, or standing across the street to see the whole museum, when I really need to stand about half-way across the room and see the painting. I can never see the painting. I'm either looking at brushstrokes or the museum; and I find the brushstrokes more comforting and interesting.

Onward!

Vistas

For some reason, much like my Asperger's nephew, I love going to the highest spot and getting a bird's eye view of the world.

In Belfast, in a shopping center in the middle of the city, you can go up to this observation tower:

From there,  you can see a near 360 degree view of the city. Here is one third:

Here is another third:

The problem with my need for a bird's eye view is that, in my old age, I've seemed to develop a touch of vertigo. I am drawn to these places and yet also completely terrified of them.  I had to have something to hold, something solid that would overcome my illusion of swaying and falling, and then I had to take a minute and a number of deep, yoga breaths, so that I could find my balance and my reason. That this platform did, in fact, vibrate, did not help in finding that reason.

The Guinness bar at the top of the Guinness "factory tour" (really, just a museum to making Guinness -- not nearly as cool as going to the Bushmills distillery where they take you into the actual distillery) did not vibrate. The number of people there were annoying, but the floor felt solid. I think knowing that the bar was on a solid base and not a pole helped in that regard.

This is the elevator shaft up. The building is in a warehouse, and the architects seemed to have cut a hole through the floors "in the shape of a Guinness glass," according to the welcome "guide" who also doubled as a gift shop attendant.

This is the view of Dublin from the bar:

That's Christ Church -- Or St.  Patrick's -- no, Christ Church, with Hill of Howth in the distance behind it.:

I would have used the panorama feature on my camera, but there were too damn many people in the place. Generally, I don't like crowds, and my blood sugar was too low to deal with them. Fortunately, our Lovely Houseguest, who was with us, was hungry, so we stopped at the bakery a few floors down on our way out. You know what they had there? Bailey's Biscuit Cake.  Oh, but that is yummy! It's chocolate, Bailey's Irish Cream, and broken up digestive biscuits (which are a bit like Graham crackers, but not as sweet), with an interesting consistency that is not quite cookie but not quite cake. I have fantasies about it and will try to make it because -- ahhhh, yum!

Clearly, I need breakfast.

I've gotten out of my writing groove in the past couple of weeks,  writing sporadically and without focus. Partly, I blame knitting. I can read and knit at the same time, and had a book to review, so I read and knit, and finished the book. Yet, I became obsessed with knitting, so I started reading lots of secondary literature in the form of articles or whatever I could get through Google Books so I could knit at the same time. While this is all work, and necessary work, this reading, it also is not moving the writing forward.

I did finish a shitty first draft of the next paper that I'm giving. This is a supremely shitty first draft, and I knew it was going to be all along, which was the reason that writing it was so challenging. The talk is supposed to be 40 minutes long, and I'm trying not only to familiarize my audience with the Big Guy but also the role of women in his life. That's an intricate task. Yet, the paper has essentially become a summary of the whole book. In writing the other papers, which are all parts of chapters, I became so focused on the details, the smaller narratives, and the holes in those discrete parts of the book, that I rather lost sight of the big picture. Writing this paper has forced me backwards to take, well, a bird's eye view of the project. I started to locate the massive holes in my project and see what I would have to read to fill in those holes. Now, I have to fix the paper. Oh, and write the book review, but the book also helped me identify the holes.

I also have another irrational fear: that I will be unveiled as a fraud -- but that's another post for another time, and actually quite the cliche of a fear. Right now, I must turn to the book review and the paper.

Onward!

Occupations

Our crack team at the consulate sent registered ex-patriates this travel advisory:

The United States Embassy informs U.S. citizens of reports of a protest to be held in the City Center area of Dublin starting at 1230 hours on November 16, 2011. The protest is anticipated to start in the vicinity of O’Connell Street and march to other locations. United States citizens should avoid any large gatherings and use caution in the following areas: O’Connell Street/Bridge; College Green; Central Bank; Dame Street; Trinity College leading onto Kildare Street; and Merrion Square.

Note the time at which we are supposed to be wary? 12:30. This message arrived at 12:15. Also, I saw fliers for this protest all week long and the U.S. Embassy only just this morning figured it out?

To show solidarity with those kicked out of Zucotti Park while occupying Wall Street, I show the occupations as I have seen them here on the Emerald Isle.

This is what they looked like in late August and early September:

This is a poster from the college across town, not Trinity:

Here is what they looked like in mid-October:

Up in Belfast:

This was in London, across the street from Parliament:

The consulate warns us about violence. These occupiers are pissed at the IMF and their own government, not ours. The violence in the U.S. doesn't seem to be coming from the occupiers themselves, so who might they be warning us about?

I'm just ticked at myself that I forgot what day it was and didn't get down there to take pictures for you.

ETA: Live blog coverage from the Irish Times.

Odds and Ends

In an effort to push the last post down a bit, I am posting odds and ends -- mostly odds -- from the past autumn

This is a statue of Molly Malone, subject of a music hall song, standing outside of Trinity University in central Dublin.:

I will have my feminist credentials revoked for calling her "Tits Malone" every time I pass. The guidebook said that there was some uproar over the decolletage, but the artists insisted that women breastfed in public all the time back in the 18th and 19th centuries so, "boobs were popping out all over the place." Yeah. I'm not too sure that hers are going to be popping out to feed a child.

Needless to say, everyone and their brother wanted a picture next to her. Especially their brother.

This I found in the entry to Trinity College:

I have nothing to add to that.

In the vault of Christ Church Cathedral -- have I show you this before? -- you can find this exhibit of a cat and a mouse who got caught in the organ pipes probably back in the 1850s, died and were mummified. Even the little whiskers were preserved.:

Hari Krishnas in St. Stephen's Green:

Also, sun!

The U.S. is not the only one with a problem in the trade of "nostalgic" racist images:

On Grafton Street, Dublin, they also sell American racist "nostalgia." We asked an Irish friend why someone would sell or buy this in the middle of Dublin. He said that the youth here connect it with rock-in-roll rebellion. Lynard Skynard is popular in Ireland? It made sense is a sort of reverse Cracker Culture way (yes, I know the thesis has been discredited).

Later, as part of the American employee orientation for the Gentleman Caller's work, the company took us to a Riverdance Vegas type of dinner and show. The band kept insisting that we shout out with a loud, high pitched "yeeeeaaah" or "yipyip" during the music. The Gentleman Caller, another employee, and I -- all from the American south -- looked at one another and whispered, "Rebel Yell."

And now for something completely different, yet also trading in ethnic stereotypes:

I'm half tempted to visit this, just out of curiosity.

I had to shoot this picture from a moving bus. It was part of an outdoor art exhibit across the city. The wall is painted with chalkboard material, and passers by are encouraged to finish the sentence, "I am afraid____":

"Facebook," "Americans," and "McDonald's" -- yeah, me, too.

In the coffee shop at the Chester Beatty Museum:

Ever since I read The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, I wondered what Turkish Delight was like. Sadly, I did not get any. I'm a little disturbed by the way that some things are unpackaged here. They also sell eggs unrefrigerated. Apparently that's common in most of the world, but it is difficult to get used to when you grew up thinking that eggs should be refrigerated, and candy and bread should be packaged.

This was our t.v. in our hotel in Bushmills, Northern Ireland. We had to move it across the room because the volume would not go above a whisper. Yes, that is an antenna, and the t.v. had only three channels:

It was like travelling back in time. To 1975.

Also at Bushmills, we saw this sign. In fact, we saw this sign in a lot of places in Northern Ireland, but haven't yet seen it in Dublin.:

The punch line to that picture is in the background. This sign is set up in the parking lot of the Bushmills Whiskey distillery.

Across the street, at the convenience store, they sell Tim Horton's coffee.:

Why, for the love of all that is holy about coffee, why?

In front of the post office in Belfast.:

Look closely and you will see that some gang graffiti artist has tagged his crotch. "Because it is important to be an ass," explained the Gentleman Caller.

In a pub in Dunluce, across the street from a castle that dates to the Norman era, we found a tribute to John Paul Jones and Andrew Jackson.:

Jones actually fought and won a naval battle offshore, but Jackson goes back to that Cracker Culture thing. His parents were from somewhere south of there.

Having dated a smoker and been subjected to his incessant smoke, even while suffering from a respiratory infection, I must confess that I get a lot of evil glee in seeing that both the Republic and Northern Ireland have cigarette packaging that says this:

This one is from Northern Ireland. Those in the Republic would say "Smoking Kills" in both English and Gaelic. None of that namby-pamby, "may be harmful to your health" in tiny tiny print on the side of the box. Know what you are getting into right up front, dammit!

Actually, I wonder about the differences in the anti-smoking campaigns in the U.S. and Ireland, because many more people smoke here than they do in the U.S., and the laws about going outside are only observed to the letter. That means that you have to wade through a cloud of smoke to get to a door, and then you have the back draft of the smoke once you get into the door. I also wonder if there are age or class or occupational (which could be connected to class) differences in smokers, because the smokers seem to be either really old or college-aged. The older smokers seem to be working class, maybe because, if they are plumbers or road workers, they can smoke at work while office workers may face the pressure of their bosses not wanting them to take frequent breaks through the day.

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Anyway, I'm now procrastinating on my frustrating paper. I'm also trying to decide how to deal with a figure in the Big Guy's life who has had a book written on her, but I'm thinking that the book is not only wrong, but potentially either sloppily researched or academically dishonest. I don't think the figure is as important as the book makes her out to be, and that she may, in fact, have been ultimately inconsequential. The problem is, the book was written on her and said a lot of provocative things, but if you look at the sources -- even just the English language sources -- and how the author uses those sources, you see enormous problems. The whole thing reads as if the author had a foregone conclusion and twisted everything to fit that conclusion without considering other interpretations or even considering if the sources themselves suggested that conclusion. The author doesn't even show evidence or prove the author's own thesis. I'm puzzling through the implications of this, what the sources actually do say, and how I fit this figure -- who, again, I'm realizing was probably inconsequential -- into my own work. But, that's a post for not-Clio or for another time.

Must. Stop. Procratinating. Shitty first drafts don't write themselves!

What is WRONG with People?

This week, I must confess, has been slow going in writing. Part of the problem is that I don't really like the paper that I'm writing. It's a paper for an undergraduate audience and is very broad. I, of course, like the subject, it being my own and a boiled down version of my book -- very boiled down. Still, trying to take complicated and detailed arguments and make them very very short and coherent with one another is much more challenging that you would expect. At some point, I get them so short that I myself start to lose interest in them and then I get easily distracted. Still, this is a good exercise because eventually I will have to do the same thing when I try to get people to read the final product, right?

I'm also trying not to read the news. The news in general upsets me, but this shit with Cain and Penn State has turned into a trigger.  The stories about Herman Cain's history of sexual harassment came on the heels of the 20th anniversary of the Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas case. Historiann wrote a post pondering the effects of the case, and I was going to comment, but the comment turned into a post, and the post was abandoned because I was working on something that I was enjoying writing. Then, the Cain stories emerged and his response to them, and then the attacks on the women, and that all put me back to the mid-1990s when I was sexually harassed.

That the women were barred from commenting, but he could say anything he wanted in his own defense pissed me off the most. In my case, I had gone in to make the report, talked with the affirmative action officer for about two hours in which she took copious notes filling about half a tablet. Then, she had to boil those notes down to a single page. One page. Including all of the headings and my signature. The report went to the accused and his department head, and he was allowed a rebuttal.

How many pages did he get for his rebuttal? As many as he wanted. He took fourteen. Fourteen pages in which he tried to establish me as someone who serially accused people of sexual harassment, who had entered graduate school with the mission of ending his career, and who was part of a conspiracy involving a job search at another college. This was all on top of a whole set of abject lies that turned me into something akin to a stalker and not someone who was constantly summoned to his office and to locations off campus under peril of being dismissed as his student or losing what little funding the department actually provided. I'm not joking. I'm able to laugh at how ludicrous his version was now; but, at the time, I took every fiber of my being and concentrated them into a steel rod down my center in order to keep from collapsing. I can still feel that rod right now.

After his 14 page rebuttal, the affirmative action office -- going through a completely fucked up scandal of its own at the time -- decided that, between the two versions, there really wasn't anything to investigate and dismissed the case.  The woman to whom I had originally reported the case had been interim in her position, and replaced by the time the rebuttal came in. She had already had been looking into some of the things that I had said. She had also contacted some of the women whom I had heard has similar experiences in order to establish a pattern of behavior for this guy, and found that they were true. All of her investigation and evidence was dismissed by her replacement because she had not followed proper protocol. Proper protocol involved the accuser issuing a one page accusation, the accused responding in as much detail as he liked, the office deciding if this was worth investigating, and then investigation beginning.

I wondered what a complaint worthy of investigation would look like. The accuser making a statement and the accused saying, "yeah, I did it"?

After the office decided that I had no grounds, they filed the case. Under my name. That's right, the cases were always filed under the accuser's name and not cross-filed or referenced under the accused's name. I was livid. This meant that they could track serial accusers -- which I get -- but it meant that they could not identify serial harassers. Unfortunately, I got that, too. The whole process from the one page complaint to the "he said/she said" form of investigation for a case to the filing system using the accuser's name did nothing to deal with the problem of sexual harassment. The process was designed to protect the institution. Heck, even the accused was only favored because he was part of the institution. Had I filed a lawsuit against the university in order to pursue the case, they could just say, "this is our procedure and according to procedure, we found nothing wrong." Had I filed a lawsuit against the professor, the university probably would have cut him loose, too.

My cynical lesson from this was that the office of affirmative action was there to ferret out the problems and cover the university's ass from liability, not to deal with the problem. My other cynical lesson from the response to the Anita Hill case was that the victim, if she makes an accusation, will be attacked harder and with less ability to defend herself than the person who did the harassing. My third cynical lesson, in my observations of all of the men who I had encountered who did the sort of things that would be harassment -- you know, the dating students, the sexual comments, the smacking-on-the-ass, and so forth -- they became bitter, and the truly insidious ones just learned where the legal line was so that they could get away with what they were doing. The guy who harassed me could quote you chapter and verse on the university's sexual harassment policy, and would be seen eating lunch with the head of the affirmative action office.

So, the Cain story, with the women silenced through the court order and he and his supporters saying what they want, really pissed me off not just because they were harassed but also because the agreement not to discuss the details of the case was rigged to work against them and open them up to this sort of victimization by the same creep yet again, except this time he has minions.

Then, the Penn State case broke. That was upsetting alone. I began to think about how many people I have know who were molested as children: both of my brothers, a former boyfriend, a friend from college, another friend from grade school, yet another friend from grade school, the child of a former friend. In that last case, the friend became former after her child was molested -- and she walked in on the molesting -- because the molester was the teen aged son of the former friend's boyfriend and she didn't want to piss off the boyfriend. She did tell her sister, who reported her to the authorities, but the former friend told the authorities that nothing happened, and they did not investigate. They said that, if the parent said nothing happened, then they can't investigate. WTF? That's not even true. If the authorities won't investigate, what do you do?

In my brother's case, when he decided to deal with what happened to him through official channels, he had passed the statute of limitations on his case -- it was five years after the last incident in the state at the time. The state later raised it to ten. Had it been ten when my brother made the first report, he could have sued. As it was, he found out where the teacher was working and reported him to the school district. What did the superintendent do? He went to the teacher and asked if there was any basis for the allegations. The teacher denied, and that ended it.

The teacher was later caught, but was not fired. He was asked to leave that school. He went to another school district, where (with help from my mom -- and I will always love and admire her for her role) he was busted by four different parents. How did the state respond? They suspended his teaching license (with help from my brother's testimony -- and I admire the hell out of his courage in putting everything on paper like that). He moved to another state and, last I heard, was getting certified there. My brother reported him to that state, but, last that I heard, to no avail there. The teacher's license was eventually revoked in the original state due to some house cleaning in their department of education.

Again, I see a pattern of the institutions not wanting to deal with the problem, just wanting to make it go away and protect themselves from any legal repercussions. They follow the letter of the procedures, but the procedures are fucked up and made up by the very people who are trying to protect themselves from liability. The fact that a crime was committed is, quite often, ignored simply by not having the police come in at any stage of the procedure.

So, as I thought about all of the children that I have known who have been molested -- and added to that the victims of rape that I have known -- I became very very sad about all of the ways that people are exploited because of who they are and how they are disempowered by the law and the way that society considers their concerns unimportant, be they children or grown women in vulnerable positions. I became very very sad about the ways that, in being victimized, they are considered expendable and then, because they were victimized, more expendable, a problem to be "taken care of" not a person requiring justice.

Then, the students started rioting and I became furious. I remember the sinister energy of the crowds on the Boston streets after the Red Sox won the World Series back in 2004, and all of the ways that energy was stupidly out of proportion to the occasion. I remember how fanatical people in my college became over football. Otherwise smart, rational, even compassionate people cut off friendships over such stupid things as the friend saying, "maybe the football team does take up an inequitable proportion of the university's resources" or even -- and I am not making this up -- "maybe the university shouldn't replace the recently deceased live animal mascot." These are the same people who, today, decades after graduation, used their undergraduate's university logo as their Facebook avatar. THAT is the "society" that I am  afraid of, that victimizes victims, and has a seriously fucked up moral compass.

Considering all of the people that I alone know who have been molested, raped, or harassed, I know that there must be hundreds of people -- students, staff, faculty, administrators, neighbors -- at Penn State who have experienced the same. How must they feel in the middle of that mess knowing that a rioting crowd supports a systematic cover-up, an institutionalized passing of the buck, to protect a child rapist? I want to riot against the rioters.

The comments of E. Goldman in response to Historiann's post on the subject made me think, if those were my students, I couldn't go into class because my rage at them would prevent me from seeing them as individuals who need some serious education on the sickness of their thinking. I couldn't go onto campus because I would be afraid of what I might say or do and I would feel somehow unsafe among people who were so baldly and violently dismissive of rape all in defense of fucking football. I wonder how the professors there are managing to work amid this. I wonder how the victims must be dealing with this disgusting dismissal of their victimization.

Tenured Radical put the pieces together much more succinctly, looking at the Penn State case and at the rape-culture climate encouraged at other colleges. "Every time one of these things happens," she writes, "what it exposes is the way social power is expressed through sexual power, and it requires a feminist response." Exactly. The details may change, but the general interaction does not.

Good Gawd, We are Nerds!

Aside from being Beatles fans (we did go to the Cavern Club last year,  after all), we had gone to see an intersection because it was a nice walk from our original destination. Our original destination proves that we are huge nerds.:

We are such nerds that we know that he never smoked that sort of pipe nor wore that sort of hat (unless he was in the country, because that is a hat for the outdoors, not the city).

We are such nerds that,  not only were we thrilled by that  mosaic, but that the bits of the mosaic were also silhouettes of the same image:

We were clearly not alone in our nerdom. When you exit the Baker Street Station, the Great Detective himself greets you:

I couldn't get a picture without a tour bus in the background because, as soon as one pulled away, another took its place.

Here was our destination (after finding a coffee shop, of course. The morning was still  young and instant in the hotel room is crap).:

That's 221b Baker Street, home of Sherlock Holmes and sometimes home of Dr. Watson!

Enter through the gift shop:

As more than one person has pointed out to us, Sherlock Holmes was, of course not a REAL person. We KNOW that. This is not a historical museum at all. In fact, it isn't even a literary museum or a museum to detecting. If they incorporated that into the museum, that would make it even more awesome! As it was, it was more of a tourist attraction about Holmes. Cool unto itself.

The premise is that this was, in fact, Mrs. Hudson's home, where Holmes and sometimes Watson, rented rooms. The rooms are set up in accordance with the details offered in the stories. Fortunately, I was with a bigger Holmes nerd than myself who had read the stories more recently than myself and could, therefore, point out those neat little details such as the mail nailed to the mantle with a knife, or the shoe filled with tobacco, or Victoria's initials shot into the wall.

They also included other details that I am not certain appeared in the book, such as Watson's toilet:

 Mrs.  Hudson's carpet sweeper:

The sweeper and the toilet, I thought, brought notes of reality in this virtual reality game. After all, Mrs. Hudson would clean and, as the children's story says, everyone poops. Plus, they add a touch of insight into some of the daily life of a Victorian home. The whole museum is all rather cool. Who hasn't wanted to walk into a story and look around for themselves? Imagine some of your favorite books come to life in this way, like, say, Wuthering Heights or Northanger Abbey or Hill House (ahhh! the Halloween potential for the last!).

Plus, I was looking for decorating ideas (I do that in house museums quite often). Can you imagine a cold, wet,  wintry day -- much like the one that we had on the day of our visit -- sitting in one of these chairs, the fire crackling at your feet, with a nice warm cup of coffee and a good book in hand? That sounds like a lovely day, to me. Heck, I wanted to shoo everyone out and kick back for a bit; or, at least return at the end of the day and offer myself up to watch the place overnight.

 Also, I like the bookshelves too, with the books all near at hand. I could use that for my own desk, and rotate the books that I'm using for whatever particular project occupies my computer at that particular time.

Yes, you can  sit in the chairs, put on the hats and hold the pipe and magnifying glass. C'mon! What Holmes nerd could resist? We couldn't!

The most interesting thing about the museum, however,  was the other visitors. People spoke several different languages, and were there in groups that were not on tour buses. Asian, Eastern European, French, American, English. This reminded me of visiting Stratford-upon-Avon last year. So many people wanted to visit landmarks of stories, even when those stories were not told originally in their native tongue and even when those stories are 100 years old.

The Nebulous Creature

I wasn't going to say anything on this because I am between institutions and because I am soooo much happier not thinking about this sort of thing right now when I don't have to. Shoot, I don't even read Inside Higher Ed or the Chronicle of Higher Education, and skip anyone's blog posting about the State of the Profession these days. It's like that old joke about the guy who goes into the doctor and says, "doctor, it hurts when I do this," and the doctor says, "well, don't do that." I just don't do that. Nonetheless, so many bloggers that I read are writing on this that, even as I tried to look away quickly, my own thoughts began to obsess on them. So, I decided to say something just to get those thoughts out of my head and go back to not being all knotty and fatalist and frustrated -- which is how I get when I think about most things related to teaching.

I used to work at a community college in the near suburbs of a major city. That is not work for the weak of heart, and I am very weak of heart. Despite what the administrations say, and despite what professors try, and even despite what many of the students seek, it is very much like teaching Grade 13.

That's not the endemic problem, however. That's just the nature of the beast, for the most part, especially in an urban area where the public school system is notoriously bad, and especially in an area in which the immigrant population had other things to worry about in the past ten years, like fleeing civil war, learning another language and culture, and seeking political asylum. That sort of stuff. These are the students who then appear in our classes, all woefully ill-prepared for grade school, much less college.

In my years at the community college, I found three insidious concepts that pointed toward the endemic problem of the college. All three were the sort of things that, on the face of it, seem like they could maybe be good ideas; but, when you looked a little beyond the surface, you could see that the ideas were concocted outside of the reality of the institution, of the needs of the institution, and of the needs of everyone associated with the institution, including the students. These three things were outcomes assessment, online instruction, and "completion."

Outcomes assessment -- that is, ensuring that students are learning what they need to learn in order to advance to the next level or in order to have mastered basics of a subject -- is generally a good idea. Some oversight on the process is good, too, especially if it is meant to improve performance not punish the performer. All fine and good, except that we, the instructors and the departments, tend to already do this. It's called "a test" or "a quiz," and "peer evaluation" and "department evaluation" through classroom observation. What seems to be demanded, however, seems to be not what the instructors and department have determined is a good means of evaluation, but what someone somewhere else had determined is a good means -- even if their means has proven to be a patented failure in actually assessing mastery of a subject. The result becomes a huge waste of time in which the whole official "outcomes assessment" becomes a cynical exercise to produce numbers, while the actual assessing of learning and instruction becomes this renegade shadow activity addressing the actual problems we see in our classrooms -- the ones that take time and money to actually fix.

Online instruction -- to serve the needs of students with busy schedules, also seems like a grand and democratizing idea. It can, in fact, be done well, with tiny classes of motivated students and good, experienced, on-site technical support for both student and instructor. The problem is that the dictum seems to not seriously care if it is done well. The dictum is to serve more students and this is an easy and cheap solution. Doing it well will require more staff and therefore more money. As it is, online education is becoming the same as those 600 student survey courses with 3 t.a.s that I was part of as an undergraduate and grad student (except online classes have the added bonus of constant technical problems). If anyone walked into that, they would say "my god, this is NOT education." Community colleges pride themselves on not having those large classes. Put it online, however, and the idea becomes the Next Big Thing because the problems are all hidden.

Completion -- the number of students to graduate, diploma in hand, within a reasonable period of time also sounds like a good idea, and makes sense at universities and four-year institutions. At a community college, especially in an urban area with hundreds of other colleges and universities? Nonsense. Students go to a cc, especially in an urban area, for a thousand different reasons, none of which involve the completion of a cc degree. On top of that, the demands made from this particular "agenda" in no way addressed the reasons that those who do pursue a diploma do not do so in two years. They are always careful to remind instructors that we must have compassion and understand the problems facing students with full-time work, full-time family, and full-time course loads; yet, they do not look at that very fact of the students' lives as an obstacle to advancement. You want completion? Address the real reasons that students don't complete.

Who is "they" in my rantings here? Who comes up with these ideas, thinks they are grand, and demands their implementation in the face of overall opposition from the people who have to do the implementing? Well, I wish I knew. Anyone can be part of "they" at any point on any issue, I suppose, but the main "they" is the real, endemic problem of the college where I worked. The endemic problem went above and beyond the college itself to the people who the decision makers at the college seemed to want to serve. Those people were not the students but this nebulous creature called "businesses" or "the business community." Sometimes this nebulous creature was not even that well-defined. "It's the wave of the future" or "it's the way things are" or some other passively voiced "it," outside, over there, not within the college itself, all demanding "excellence without money," and often capable of providing money, but not really wanting to unless the college did X, Y, or Z.

This nebulous creature and its handlers, however, had very very little knowledge of how education works or the purpose of education. Very few people connected to this nebulous creature had any experience in education beyond their last college course; and this nebulous creature had obviously failed itself in its own education because it could not conceive of anything as being useful unless there was a point-to-point correlation between something in a classroom and a specific skill that might be demanded by an employer. Anything going on in the classroom must directly translate into a student's ability to profit and the line had to be direct.  Any questioning of the nebulous creature's demands was met with "if we don't do what it wants ourselves, then it will come in and do it for us."

Now, I don't think it is a bad idea to explain how the Humanities are useful to society or even to individuals who are just in college to get a better job. That's most of the students in a c.c. anyway. It is the reason that college is connected to upward mobility. Humanities exposes people to a variety of ideas, expands their way of thinking, hones their analytical skills (or exposes them to the concept of analysis), and requires verbal expression and communication most often in written form. Sometimes this may not seem so obvious as one tries to wade through the causes of the American Civil War or the intricacies of Hamlet.

Sadly, the nebulous creature seemed not particularly interested in those explanations. It understands "business writing" or Elizabeth I, CEO. It understands, "student will be able to demonstrate the ability to use a comma" or "student will be able to identify George Washington." It understands "history" as "dates and facts and wars  and politicians who have no connection to anything happening now." It understands "literature" as "that boring shit in which everything meant something when really the  white whale was just a whale and who gives a damn anyway?" This nebulous creature is simplistic and does not take into consideration that education is a complex endeavor that is bigger than the numbers that they want to production -- sometimes even more subjective and not apparent for years. It can sometimes be as traumatic as it is enlightening, if done right, which is why it should not be a series of hoops to jump through or numbers to generate in order to do it right.

The biggest problem in the face of this nebulous creature was the way that it was able -- despite its nebulous nature -- to force complete capitulation and compliance, to draw so many into its thrall. I kept asking, as everyone complained about the "outcomes assessment," and online "learning," and "completion" -- at every level in some cases -- "at what point do we just say 'NO'?" Seriously, at what point do we, those of us actually IN the college, say "WE are the professionals here, we actually ARE competent, and we actually DO know what we are doing." When do we -- and I mean faculty, staff, librarians, counselors, administrators, everyone at the college who increasingly sees these measures as futile, if not cynical wastes of time -- when does that we seize control of our own business as professionals?

Indeed, what would happen if we did? What if we said, "we will decide our own 'outcomes' and how best to determine if they are being met," rather than going through the farce of the current system in place at the college? What if we said, "these are the terms on which we will offer and implement online courses in our departments according to our department's needs"? What if we said, "your definition of 'completion' has no meaning at our institution, so here is our varied means of determining 'completion' at our college"? Seriously, what would happen? I doubt students would stop flooding into our classes. I doubt employees of the college would quit.

Of course, the state and the county might not fund because they are in thrall to their own nebulous creature.
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I'm about to go to a smaller, private institution that encourages research. I have no idea what problems I will see there. I'm hoping that the lighter class load of smaller classes -- none of which are online -- will allow me to be the better teacher that I am when I do have fewer students pecking away at me, as it often felt at the cc. Oddly enough, I believe that the research component of the job will also make me a better teacher not because there is a point-to-point connection between the research and the teaching, but because having that sort of variety in my work makes me happier and more effective, even in the parts of the work that are not my favorite.

As my mother used to say, "you have your putting in and your taking out." That is, what you do for yourself -- putting into yourself --and what you do for others -- taking out of yourself. For me, teaching is for others and research and writing is for myself. Too much teaching means too much is being taken out of myself and not enough is being put in. That's how I felt most of the time there and it made me knotty, fatalist, and frustrated and, ultimately, not the best of teachers in my own estimation -- although I gave it my all everyday. I'm hoping my all will be better and have a longer temper when I can also do research. Get back to me in a year, and see if this is the case -- as it most probably will not. I'm sort of a glass is half-empty girl.

Rock-n-Roll!

"I staggered back to Underground and the breeze blew back my hair..."

Yes, we were on our way to the brief rock-n-roll part of our day visit. Guess where?

How about now?

Whoops! Wrong angle.

How about now?:

Not exactly the right angle -- I would have had to get to the island in the middle of the traffic circle for that and I was too busy laughing like a cartoon dog at all of the people trying to reenact this:

Not just trying to reenact this, but trying to do it while the people who actually use the road tried to, you know, use the road. I read once somewhere that there is a camera set up, recording everyone who does this, and that this is one of the most cliched vacation photos of all time -- up there with holding up the Tower of Pisa. I did not reenact myself doing this -- again,  laughing too hard; but several others did.

I felt as if I should have worn a t-shirt with "TOURIST!!!" written all over it...as if being at this intersection with a camera didn't accomplish the same thing. Then again, I AM a tourist and this it was rather fun. I would have felt like I had misssed something if we hadn't gone, what with it being in walking distance of our actual, Big Nerd destination.

We were there in the middle of the week in the off season. I can't begin to imagine what this must have looked like in the middle of July -- or during the Royal Wedding.

London, Baby!

I've been a bit behind on blogging -- if there is a "behind" to be had in a hobby. For the most part, I've realized that you can live life or write about it. You have to have discipline to do both, and I only have so much capacity for discipline in my old age. I have to use it wisely.

For the past near month, I've travelled quite a bit, and the travel has been marvellous. Here are some pictures from the first trip.

Since I was giving a paper at a conference in southern England and had to fly into Heathrow, we decided to take a day and see some sights in London. I have always always always wanted to see London and I will have to go back a million times, for a long time each, to approach anything like satisfaction with visiting. What a huge and amazing city! Much like New York City, but with an entirely different feel and personality of its own. Like in New York City, you feel like you are at the center of the world, in a vital organ of human habitation on the planet. What energy!

Having only a day, we each chose a place that we wanted to see -- and fortunately we have similar nerdy and historical tastes -- and anything else we saw was just lagniappe.

The lagniappe included the bridge that I (and about everyone else in the U.S.) cannot stop calling "London Bridge" but is actually the iconic Tower Bridge:

We walked from one side to the other and back. I tried to imagine what the city looked like from that vantage at various points in history, especially with the Tower looming right where I am standing to take this picture.

When we came up from the Underground to see the Tower (and the Tower is its own post), this was right next door. This is supposed to be one of the original Roman walls of the city. Some men cleaned and preserved it that day -- at least that seemed to be their job. Still, this was one of the reasons that I have always wanted to see a European city.

I grew up in a city that was the definition of "urban sprawl." Seriously! I once turned on PBS to find that city being featured on a show about "urban sprawl." Nothing was over 50 years old; and then we lived way out in the ugly and sterile suburbs, isolated from even seeing those relics of 50 years ago. So, I am always fascinated by places that have their history preserved and embedded in their landscapes; and European cities have so much more of that history going so much further back as it does. Coming out of a subway station to see a building dating to a time before  monarchs knew there was a western (to them) hemisphere, a wall going back to the time of Christ, and a modern structure that looked a bit like an egg all in one sweeping view? Well, that is, to me, overwhelming.

After the Tower and after the Tower Bridge, we decided that we should think about dinner and then go see Big Ben and Parliament at night.:

That's the postcard, right? Not literally, just everyone always takes the same pictures that are much like the postcard pictures. I had a photographer friend who, when giving a lesson on how to take interesting vacation photos, said that you have to take all of the usual angles first and get them out of your system. Then, you will start to see different angles that will make your photos look less like postcards. My camera is not very good, and made more for daytime snapshots -- I'm cheap, what can I say? Also, there aren't too many different ways to take this picture, so I'm sticking with the postcard shot on this.

I had the bright idea to try to combine our plan to see Big Ben and eat dinner by going to Big Ben and finding somewhere to eat around there. I think I envisioned exiting the Underground to see "Big Ben's Bistro" or "Parliament Pub." Sadly, that is not the case.  So, we wandered around, walking past Parliament, past a small park, across a bridge, and along a river walkway (where I took the postcard picture) and finally found a place to eat near another bridge. Then, we crossed that bridge heading back to the Underground Station.

As we began to cross the bridge, I noticed a big, noble statue of a lion:

I want one for our front yard. Don't you think that would be impressive? I will also be using this guy as my Facebook avatar (yes, not-Clio is on Facebook -- she hates it but she has her reasons). In any case, the Gentleman Caller said that there was a door on the back of the base of this statue and that, in one of the 007 films, James Bond went through that door to find Q (or Y or one of those guys) and his shop of gadgets. Sure enough, we wandered around and found the door. It was locked. No gadgets.

On the other side of the bridge, unlighted unfortunately, I found this statue:

I like when women are commemorated in the landscape. My camera flash was not nearly powerful enough to compensate for the lack of light. Ah well, must go back, right?

Then, we headed back to our very tiny but very comfy hotel room. I must add that this tiny hotel room had the tiniest shower. Had I forty more pounds on my frame, I doubt I could have used it. I couldn't bend over in it to pick up my shampoo (no shelf or even soap dish). I had to do deep knee bends and even then bumped both my head and my knees. That also reminds me that I have yet to see a washcloth anywhere in Ireland or in England. Is a washcloth an American thing?

Anyway, the next morning we had to head off to the conference location via train. I do like trains because you can knit, listen to an audiobook, and watch the countryside go by. Very relaxing for me.

Guess which station we left from?:

Now, off to write -- although probably after a run since we have sun right now, but it seems to want to take a nap very shortly.