Progeny-less Update (Life in Austin)

It's been awhile since we've had a personal update that didn't involve offspring. Here goes.

I am currently (this week) finishing up my last semester of course work. Beginning this summer, I will be working full-time on developing my prospectus and composing that magical document, the dissertation. I may have more to say about this later, but, for now, in short, I will be writing about the troubled relationships between seemingly mimetic works of art and "unrepresentable" historical violence (World War, Holocaust, the Bomb, the WTC attacks).

I spent the last four days at the 2008 International Narrative Conference. I have been working off and on for about a year as conference staff, and I chaired a couple of panels over the weekend (and attended what seems like hundreds). I heard some great panels, met some academic heros (and got a couple of business cards), but what was most impressive was seeing the "invisible acadamy" made at least temporarily visible. It made the direction of my life seem less obscure and evanescent.

I continue to teach, and am looking forward to teaching a course of my own creation in the fall. It will be, perhaps unsurprisingly, a course on violence.

I've been watching a lot of Top Chef on Bravo (my one televised guilty pleasure) and cooking quasi-elaborate meals whenever time and budget allow (and sometimes when they don't). My exercise regimine has slacked off, but I'm hoping to change that with the return of Friday basketball over the summer. Hopefully I can get back to regular running as well (I can feel my legs crying out for a good run even as I type).

The life-long pursuit of good coffee and good beer continues, as does a very rewarding playing at domestic bliss. The heat and humidity of an Austin summer are beginning to creep into the background of the everyday, and I'm trying (not terribly sucessfully) to ignore the democratic primary. I'm still at the same parish, doing the same sorts of parish-y things.

Alright. Back to writing about Civil War photography. Be well, my friends.

FYI

Just so you guys know this is out there:

Options

Zotero

A quick caveat: those of you who do research online may find this as interesting as I do. Those of you who don't will not care (but then again, you're not even reading this anymore, so I guess this disclaimer is unnecessary).

I am auditing a seminar on the digital humanities this semester, and coming into contact with a bunch of tools and other technical wizardry that I never knew existed. Some of them are quite useful. A case in point: Zotero. From their website:

Zotero is an easy-to-use yet powerful research tool that helps you gather, organize, and analyze sources (citations, full texts, web pages, images, and other objects), and lets you share the results of your research in a variety of ways. An extension to the popular open-source web browser Firefox, Zotero includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store author, title, and publication fields and to export that information as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software and web applications (like iTunes and del.icio.us), such as the ability to interact, tag, and search in advanced ways. Zotero integrates tightly with online resources; it can sense when users are viewing a book, article, or other object on the web, and—on many major research and library sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for the item in the correct fields. Since it lives in the web browser, it can effortlessly transmit information to, and receive information from, other web services and applications; since it runs on one’s personal computer, it can also communicate with software running there (such as Microsoft Word). And it can be used offline as well (e.g., on a plane, in an archive without WiFi).

Enjoy.

On this day in history...

In 1960 the Ohio Art Company took Arthur Granjean's invention--which consisted of a couple knobs, some aluminium, and a plastic screen--and turned it into the Etch-A-Sketch. Suffice it to say that the guy that drew this puts the sad little doodles of my childhood to shame.