i know, i know. it's been quite a hiatus these last few weeks. day after day of transcribing documents has evoked little of interest and certainly nothing worth sharing. by the light of this photo, you'll see that i've returned to my library carrel at UNC. i had planned to be here only briefly and then depart again for new england, but life's complications -- involving a degenerating arlo and a friend who has inexplicably decided to renege on his dog-sitting promise -- mean that my plans have had to shift. i'm still hoping to get to the american antiquarian society in november, but my departure will necessarily be delayed. so in the meantime, i'm plugging away on my work on the society to encourage studies at home. i've reached that awkward (though if i were a better person i would say "exciting") stage of needing to figure out how to assimilate all that i've gathered into a chapter that in any way jives with the project as a whole. i think i'm always hopeful that i may be struck by some relatively benign form of lightning. i'm also having to face serious alcott revisions. i don't think i need to say any more about that...though it has meant that i'm finally engaging with reader-response criticism, which i'm sad to say, i somehow escaped during my course work. i worry that it often feels like i'm most compelled by that which is hopelessly passe, but who can resist it?

you know you've been away from home too long when the season starts to change and you're without autumn clothes. northern michigan turns chilly in september, often starts snowing in october, and is truly disgusting until april. so i'm on the cusp of real change. the leaves can be incredible here, though, and i've already noticed small bursts of red and yellow behind the asylum where arlo and i go walking. but i have only one sweater and its holes are growing -- so much so that i'm currently feeling sheepish about wearing it to visit my 89 year old grandfather tonight.

i've been starring at the computer screening for almost a week, transcribing hundreds of digital photographs of text that i took in the Boston Public Library archives in the summer of '06. most of them are quite good, but others are miserable -- poor photography compounding poor nineteenth-century handwriting. i'm nearly done transcribing (one more day!) and will then get to plot out my chapter on this correspondence society.


I'm maybe headed back to the chap in two weeks...in time to catch the end of summer in the South but after the extreme heat passes. not looking forward to another long drive...

p.s. Maura -- you can get Whitman's Brooklyn Eagle pieces in his The Gathering of the Forces. It's two volumes and I picked them up a few years ago at the Bookshop on Franklin St for less than $20.00. Back then they had another set as well.

I've got the spots. Perhaps you can see them, perhaps not, but they're all over my face. Little bumps everywhere. I was getting ready to chalk this up to the blended salad that I've been eating (drinking) for lunch (it's a really very vile meal, but one by which I manage to consume 4 cups of greenery). In any case, I think I've ruled out the blended salad (and the peach pie I made yesterday) and am now debating between excessive indoor sweating from the treadmill in my mother's basement (i should be clear: i sweat profusely on it; the machine itself doesn't sweat) or reading Whitman. While the former would seem the more obvious choice, I'm going with the latter. I've been feeling that overwhelming sense that thinking about Whitman is often like thinking about vomit -- it just pours and pours and pours out, and in all the pouring, it flattens itself. I also have had no access to the prose from my childhood hamlet of Traverse City, Michigan. What does it mean to be in a place where a girl can't even get her hand on Whitman's letters? So instead of pulling out my hair, I've ordered a couple of volumes of prose and correspondence (NYU has recently released all their Whitman texts -- Daybooks, Notebooks, Unpublished Prose, Letters, etc. in paperback). In the meantime, I've been transcribing all of my notes from the records of a cool homeschooling society that was fascinating and will be another chapter. In fear of jinxing myself, I don't want to talk too much about it. But suffice it to say, in 1880 their American history and American literature curriculum (mind you, almost no other school or college would teach anything called "American Literature" for almost another two decades) included the likes of Harriet Beecher Stowe, George Washington Cable, Catherine Maria Sedgwick...and the expected Longfellow, Bryant, et. al.

turning to whitman...

See that hint of pleasure? I sent off my Alcott chapter yesterday. The ending is still unclear and I'm a bit confused about how to tie it all up, but for now I'm putting it aside (that is until I get some feedback). So for the first time in 11 months, I get to turn to something other than that damned Little Woman.

It feels exciting, actually exciting to begin on the Whitman chapter. Part of this comes from my almost complete lack of experience with Whitman. Sure, I've taught him and read him, but unlike my lovely friend Maura, I did not have a picture of him taped to my locker in high school -- which, by the way, is a sure sign that she is doing the right thing in life. I don't know the field or the major criticism, but it feels so fantastic to have it ahead of me. For all you Am. Lit folks, what great Whitman work do I have to read? I'm delighted to report that I have yet to locate any work on Whitman and education -- which may suggest the failure of my search terms, the irrelevance of the topic, or luck for the first time.

p.s. working today in the converted asylum in my hometown... perhaps I'll post my writings about it at some point.

i've escaped the angel! just as i was starting to feel antsy about finding a place to work away from the angel -- and eager to find one damn place with a good cup of tea in michigan -- i realized that there's a new and strangely perfect tea house six blocks from my mother's house. so now i sip on a lovely oolong and read through the chapter, which is nearly complete (maybe 2 or 3 more days) and prepared to send it off to my wonderful adviser who is likely ready to fire me for all my ridiculous delays. but it's coming along and i'm in the process of finalizing my boston research plans...a good day indeed.

What does it mean when you think you've been doing better work -- you've been feeling oddly good and content in the process -- and then you go back and read that work that you thought was so improved and you want to poke your eyes out because it's really no better than the other crap you were writing? Does it mean that you're simply a malcontent who will never feel satisfied? Is it the gods trying to tell you that even at your best you should hang it up? Is it that you've lost all perspective? Is it that damned dissertation demon whose strategic torture has simply gotten the better of you?
Whatever it is, this morning i felt like driving to a coffee shop, "accidentally" leaving my computer on a table, and waiting for a thief to relieve me of the burden. That way i could throw up my hands and say "well, there's no going back to it now." But instead, i sit at my mother's dining room table, with arlo at my feet, and the strange pastel angel looking down at me as i type. Come on Christian symbols, work your magic, save me from my writing angst.

as the semester opens in chapel hill, i find myself sitting in the public library in my hometown thinking how lovely it feels to finally -- for the first time in nine years -- have a semester free of teaching. i'm shocked by how much more i enjoy the writing and working on the dissertation when i'm not overwhelmed by preparing classes, grading papers, answering the needs of students. i supposed this must be why professors love and need sabbaticals so much. it also reminds me that my department needs to make dissertation funding a priority for students trying to finish. and while i had been really looking forward to teaching an Alcott class next spring, i'm beginning to feel like playing hookie is even better.

my time in the UP -- that's the Upper Peninsula for all you midwestern neophytes -- was wonderfully productive and i finally (after a pathetic year of pulling out my hair) came to see my project much more clearly. in fact, i think i finally reached an awareness of my work that i suspect my committee has believed that i've had all along. the easiest way to articulate this breakthrough is to say that i realized the limitations of didactic readings of 19th cen. texts (i'll ultimately argue that in didactic texts the content of the lessons trumps the form of teaching) and realized that alcott (along with my other figures) is far less interested in lessons as such and much more invested in methodology or pedagogy. After all, method can be translated broadly whereas particularized right feelings cannot be. I'm now working through this process of reading Little Men against the sentimental, didactic grain, which means concentrating my attention on its trope of reading lessons. It has meant that I needed to entirely rewrite my chapter (and ultimately toss out 95% of my year's research), but this seems like the right decision. so for now, the plan is to avoid chapel hill until the heat passes and until i complete this project (which i hope to do in the next week). and then make a quick trip to north carolina to drop off the pooch, meet with the adviser, and finalize plans for a research trip to boston in october.

more from the UP

freedom of the open road
the neighborhood:

public transportation

beach-side reveries

up north

Arlo and I have settled into our quarters in Jacobsville, MI (pop. 30).

I've come into Houghton for the morning...to check email, search out a fax machine (that seems rather impossible to find at the moment), track down some veggie burgers, and remind myself that the world does continue.

I’ve tried to take a few pictures of the surroundings, to give form to the earlier descriptions. I spent yesterday morning recovering from the 400 mile drive up here from Traverse City, settling in, unloading books, and finally, writing for a couple hours. I think the total silence should do the trick -- not to mention the impetus to create that three soaring bald eagles provides.

the infamous -- and crumbling -- cliffs. the house sits atop the drop.

the main house:

fishing in chilly superior

living room:
view of me:

my view: