Flag Bearing, The Whirling Dervishes, and A Birthday. Research goes on.

This is the latest I've written so far, and it's because I've forced myself to stay off of the internet and get many other things done. This turned into me taking an extra walk along Lake Michigan's coast. I found a concrete peninsula. And I sat on that peninsula, with my feet hanging off. And I wrote. For about two hours.

Two days ago, eight of us went over to the World Music Festival at Millennium Park to see the Whirling Dervishes perform. It was so nice. Also, one of my colleagues and I ended up being flag bearers for the World Peace Flag Ceremony that opened the event. They were missing eleven people, and since we were there early, the director asked if we would volunteer. And two of us did. Seriously! I carried Iceland's flag.

To celebrate my birthday, about ten of us went to the Grand Lux Cafe on Michigan Avenue for dinner. Enjoy these few pictures from the past two nights.

 

There is not much happening on my end this next week, except for gearing into my research paper. I've narrowed my research even more. I've decided to work with the slave narratives of Josiah Henson. He is supposedly the "Uncle Tom" that Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her novel about. He wrote four different autobiographies himself. The first was written in 1849, the last in 1879 or 1881. I would give you more information on this, except I pretty much researched for eight hours today, and I'd like to take a break from thinking about him. But soon, I'll give you a more detailed project description. We seal the deal on our topics this Friday with two or three sentences stating our intentions. The Josiah Henson topic is the one that everyone (including myself) is especially excited about. I'm excited to tell you about the topic some time soon.

This is how it works.

I'm sort of scatter-brained today. I was at the library from 7:30am until 4pm today, so my brain is sort of fed up with me. I am going to head out to Lake Michigan (only two blocks away!) and take some pictures. For now, feast on the picture of the Bean-Mirror Thingy that I photographed just before Andrew Bird's free concert at Millenium Park a week (or two?) ago. The sculpture is actually called Cloud Gate.

 

Kenyon in Chicago!

What a coincidence that the semester that I'm away from Kenyon, Kenyon comes to Chicago? Earlier today, Kenyon beat the University of Chicago in football. My Kenyon advisor told me once that if you walk around downtown Chicago with a Kenyon t-shirt on, there is a good chance that someone will approach you telling you that they are an alum, or something along those lines. I think that at today's football game there were more Kenyon supporters than U of C supporters! I ended up sitting close to the fabulous President Nugent, the chair of Kenyon's board of trustees, Dean Gocial and their loved ones. In good Kenyon fashion, I made fast friends with some alumni that ended up on the same bus as me. Our connection was, of course, our Kenyon t-shirts. 

The best part about this was seeing some of my friends. Everyone in the Newberry program is cool, but that doesn't mean that I don't miss my friends like crazy.

The Book as a World Rocker.

Today, in Chicago, I cannot find a single cloud in the sky. This would make the average person super excited. But me? It scares me a little. I have no idea why it scares me, but it does. At any rate, I will confess that I think that a cloudless sky is extraordinarily beautiful. Especially when the western sun swipes the side of an off-white brick high-rise against the sky, while crows circle the top of the building. That is what I see right now, when I look to the northeast, from my left window.

The past week has been intense here at the Newberry. I can already sense that I won't be writing here every two days, as I had planned. We handed in our second papers at noon today. Tomorrow, we will discuss the introduction and opening chapter of our third book! (Third book! And classes just started, really, last Tuesday.) It is nothing short of fantastic. The seminar that I'm taking is Community and Memory: Texts, Images, and Monuments. I will generally approach the seminar from the themes of Memory and Text, while being sure to dive into issues of Community, I suspect. I am being consumed by the awesomeness of the texts we are reading already.  I definitely appreciate how loaded words like "community," "text," and "memory" are these days. I thought that I appreciated them before, but now I see them in an entirely different light.

I start my job in Special Collections at the Newberry Library tomorrow. It is a closed-stacks library, but one of the perks of my job is being one the people that goes into the stacks (all five floors of them!) and handles the manuscripts, books, and maps that can date all the way back to the thirteenth century. The stacks look a bit like the Department (or Hall? I cannot remember.) of Mysteries in the Harry Potter movies. I am utterly amazed by what goes on in this research library. In the best of ways. For this program, we were able to take a look at different job descriptions and "interview" for those jobs. I am so happy that I am going to be working for special collections! I can't wait!

My project? I have a new development in that area, and after reading this section you will be the first to know besides the professor that I had to meet with today. We went to a presentation today on the "Book as Object" and it ROCKED MY WORLD. I had never thought very much about books as objects, and about the issues and decisions that go into the printing, publishing, and distributing of them. For the past few hours, that has been all I have been able to think about. I could not even force myself to take a nap because my brain would not turn off. That is the kind of learning that I love. But I also love to take naps, so I hope that I learn to control my thoughts. I will be working with slave narratives, and for the first time I will approach them from a history of print, or history of the book point of view, I think. I want to figure out who published slave narratives, and under what circumstances. What types of people were these publishers? What kinds of audiences might they attract? How much did this complicate what the slaves were able to write? Where slave narratives bound, and taken care of? And, if so, with how much detail? Did these publishers face any opposition? Did they stick to the manuscripts they were given? Or were there stipulations? Right now, I am full of questions, but this idea should develop more fully by Thursday. It actually *has* to develop by Thursday. We have to present three proposals to our professors this Thursday for feedback. We basically have to convince them that what we want to pursue is worthy. It should be interesting.

Seminar!

We had our first seminar today. It was quite an interesting meeting, too. They handed out the syllabus, and we went through it as a group. This is going to be a fun group of people to get to know. We have four people from Lawrence University, two from Beloit, two from Kenyon, one from Macalester, one from Colorado College, one from Grinnell, and one person from Knox College. Although Lawrence's numbers dominate, they didn't seem like a faction, which is good. 

Our seminar is team taught by two very cool profesoras. They are appropriately nerdy in their habits and interactions, so I am very much looking forward to working with them. The professor from Beloit is a Medievalist, and the professor from Monmouth teaches Religion and Philosophy.

I am not yet wired in my apartment, so today I write surrounded by stack after stack of reference books at the Newberry Library. I am sitting in the Eliphalet W. Blatchford Reference and Bibliographical Center on the library's third floor. Even that name intimidates me.

Speaking of being intimidated, yesterday we turned in our first papers on St. Augustine's Confessions. Because this was our summer assignment, I am a bit nervous about the outcome, seeing as how I do not really know what the professors are looking for in our writing. I guess we will have to wait and see! We have started our first round of Library Orientations. From the looks of the schedule, it seems that we will have orientations for at least the next four weeks! We'll see how that goes!

For now, I will just go back to my apartment to refresh my reading of the Confessions to prepare for tomorrow's discussion. And you can check out the way the sunlight shines through my windows in the mornings.

 

First Days, First Days.

It's Labor Day. And instead of being at home, attending the annual family picnic, I'm in Chicago settling into my new apartment. The Canterbury Court apartments are pretty nice. These studio apartments sure beat the dorm rooms I've lived in. I live on the sixth floor, with windows that face the east. From my right window I can see the Hancock Building! I heard that this program houses you in an ideal location, but now I'm seeing that it's true!

Check out my room!

Three other program participants live down the hall from me. Yesterday, I went over to meet two of them. Tonight, our professors are hosting our first social gathering as a big group. What better way to meet and greet than over dinner?