Month: March 2022

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Back to Normal?

I’ve traveled to see family three times between getting the vaccine and now, but this will be my first trip for research. Both the travel itself and the spontaneity with which I planned the trip feel so strange after two years of effectively not doing any profession-related travel. I used to go somewhere at least once a month to give a talk or visit an archive before the pandemic, but now I’m mostly planning how I will get digital surrogates for the archival and manuscript materials I will need to read  for my book-in-progress because going to the UK right now seems foolish. And yet, here I am, having freaked out last night about a dramatic turn in my research and writing, and having dealt with it by booking myself a last-minute trip to a domestic archive a flying distance away to see if I can salvage the project there.

Part of what feels frenetic is that this trip as well as my last trip to see family were booked at the last minute as the potential end of the domestic-flight mask mandate is set to expire. Last time, when I went home, it was extended; this time, I don’t expect it will be. And so even though my travel schedule is nothing like what it was before the pandemic, it doesn’t feel so different: the suddenness of needing to change gears and be in a different place after not being able to think about it too much or for too long.

The world seemed like it was closing down and getting very small at the start of the pandemic, and I have that sensation again: that just as we were beginning to be able to emerge and do some things we used to more safely, protections like the mask mandate on flights are being rolled back that are going to make those of us who believe in the germ theory of disease transmission begin to retreat again. Back to the old normal seems so unwise.

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Dispatches from the Roof

I went on the “vertical tour” of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine yesterday with a friend who was visiting from out of town — up into the clerestory, the space between the ceiling and the roof, and then onto the roof.

The wildest thing, for me, though, even beside being that close to an installation of Guastavino tile and the surprise, gorgeous, a cappella choir concert that was going on in front of the altar, was how *easy* it is to go up and down the narrow spiral staircase when the risers of the steps are perfectly even and the treads haven’t been worn down with seven or eight centuries of use. When I’m in Europe (or, when I used to go to Europe before the pandemic) I’d usually limit myself to one bell tower climb per trip because coming down, in particular, I would find really taxing; and I realized that it’s very much about the minute differences in the depth and evenness of the stairs .

One woman on the tour said she was worried about coming down, and I told her: “Look, I’ve been up and down a lot of these things, and worst case scenario, you can just sit down and scooch. It’s not elegant but it works.” She made it all the way down on her feet, in the end, though. 

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A Personal Seamus Heaney Syllabus

Following my surprising foray into poetry? as a pandemic project, I applied for and was accepted into a yearlong program at Brooklyn Poets — lots of writing, lots of reading, lots of critique, lots of class. One of the elements of the program is that each participant chooses a poet to do a yearlong deep-dive read. Because I’m particularly interested in translation and reworking medieval texts, I’ve chosen Seamus Heaney. I feel a little intimidated about having to be intelligent about the work of a poet that is totally out of my context, as if I should be able to jump in and be brilliant just because I already know how to read text; but if I can screw up my courage, I’ll try to blog my way through reading Heaney’s oeuvre. 

I’ve kept the secondary literature to a minimum, partly so that I’m approaching the poetry without it being filtered through others’ readings first, and partly, honestly, just because there are still only 24 hours in a day and I have an academic book, a trade book, and a translation that I’m also supposed to be working on, plus all the other stuff… But in any case,  what I’m reading this year is after the jump:

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