I am about to deliver my paper at SHARP 2004, dear reader, but you are probably asleep right now so I won’t ask you to send me good vibes. Lyon, France is fun, but hot. I cannot seem to stop sweating. My French has held up remarkably well, thankfully.
The keyboards are not QWERTY, so typing is a challenge. I cannot find the necessary keys to create HTML tags, for example.
More later!
Posting some pics from earlier in my trip: ladies and gentlemen, the lovely ladies of Manchester.
I had a very productive day yesterday in the British Library. The staff are just top notch and very helpful. I must admit, though, that when I first arrived, I was treated a bit brusquely (the bluejeans and bleached-out hair probably don’t help) until the “Dr.” on my UMKC card was noticed. Then everything was peaches and cream. It’s good to know my advanced education is good for something.
Last night we had a fantastic South Indian meal (I blogged a NY Times article about this cuisine back in April) and then headed to the Tate Modern, where we took in the sublimely eerie “Head to Head” before settling in at the bar on the top floor and gazing out at St. Paul’s across the Thames while mocking the pretensions of our snooty French waiter.
Manchester to London: three hours on a very Star Trek Virgin train with Sonic Youth in my ears. Rain and dark skies are exchanged for breezy warm blue. Meet Laurie at Euston Station. Walk for ten minutes to the Goodenough Club. Almost weep with pleasure at the posh, but tiny, room in which I’m staying. I’ve been in a dormitory for three weeks. Shower. Lie on the bed for a few minutes. Take the tube to Brick Lane, London’s latest hip neighborhood (and the title of a recent novel). Delicious Bangladeshi food. Then a hookah bar for exotic and fruity drinks served by an Italian/Swedish server. Now for some sleep. Research in the morning: Calvinistic evangelical periodical.
There’s a moment when you’re crossing all the time zones at 625 miles per hour, when the light in the sky no longer looks normal, when flight attendants have brought you a meal and you’re not sure if you’re supposed to be hungry or not but you eat it anyway. There’s a moment when the hands just fall off the face of the clock, the gears slip loose from the spring, and you have no idea what time it is. I started thinking of this as “zero time.” The passage of time eludes your senses. I kept doing the math, and it didn’t seem to help. The inside of the Boeing 777 offered no usual indicators of time, and the trip here to England seemed to be over before I knew it. I managed only about 2 hours of fitful sleep.
I’m researching Methodist communications networks in eighteenth-century Britain: preaching, letter writing, diaries, publishing, reading, writing, listening, sharing. The first day in the library was pretty spacey due to lack of sleep, but I managed to get some good work done, returning to the inventory of books that was completed upon John Wesley’s death in 1791. It’s a very detailed snapshot of Methodist publishing activity in the late eighteenth-century.
Next, I returned to the Bible of Methodist lay preacher Samuel Bradburn, obsessively recording as many details from it as possible. This book is filled with marginalia, most of it in the form of fat “iron crosses” next to particular verses, which I take to be his system for reminding himself which texts to use when he preaches. Over a thousand of them are spread throughout just about every book in both the Old and New Testament. As far as I know, no one has ever written about the ways in which preachers customize their Bibles to improve their use as tools like this. I don’t know how many Bibles that look like this survive from the eighteenth century, and I did not expect to find it: I just opened what I thought would be a box of Bradburn’s personal papers and there it was.
I also got a tour of the boxes and boxes of manuscript material downstairs. Librarians and archivists are wonderful people, listening to what you’re interested in and then pointing you towards what you need. And each box seemed to contain something unexpected. There are dozens of boxes containing thousands of pages, and as with most special collections, the level of cataloguing with most of the material is relatively general: you know the box contains the papers of so-and-so, but you don’t necessarily know what those papers are. Diary? Receipt book? Letters? It’s a treasure hunt. Fun and scary at the same time. What if I miss the best stuff? What if what I hope to find isn’t here? What if it doesn’t exist?
If you want to see something silly and fun, Manchester is currently doing the CowParade.
And just for yucks, here’s a brief playlist of Manchester music in roughly chronological order:
Note: last year’s Manchester Adventure starts here.
I’ve decided to try to cut back on the blogging for the rest of the summer, limiting myself to no more than one entry a week. I need to finish up some writing of a different sort before classes kick back in this fall. Specifically, as I mentioned on my task list:
Here’s the thing: I am untenured, and the path to tenure is lined with publications. I go up for tenure in 3 years (yikes!). Blogging is very rewarding to me, and I do not intend to give it up. The contacts I’ve made and maintained through this medium are wonderful. But I do need to consider how many words I put out there into the blogosphere versus how many I am putting down on the page leading toward scholarly publication (and thus an ongoing academic career).
One thing I’m going to try to do to get the most out of my writing is to blog what I’m working on. My book project is a significant expansion of my dissertation; my focus is on Methodist communication networks in eighteenth-century Britain, a time and place of new technologies and habits of communication triggering significant cultural change. This is a topic that has particular relevance now as we find ourselves in what is often termed the “late age of print,” electronic communication technologies triggering another series of significant cultural change. More details as my writing progresses this summer.
Next Sunday I leave for a month in Europe. I’ll be mostly in the Methodist Archives and Research Centre (MARC) in Manchester, but also at the British Library in London. Additionally, I’ll spend five days in France at the 2004 meeting of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.
In Manchester, I plan to continue work I started last summer, reading the diaries, letters, and administrative records of preachers and lay people. Conversing, preaching, listening, reading, writing, publishing, exchanging books, recommending books, selling books, giving books away. Combing through personal papers looking for references to these very basic, but very important, activities is a slow and painstaking process, but it’s also very rewarding. I found some remarkable evidence last year, and I am confident that more remains to be uncovered.
At the British Library, I’ll be examining The Gospel Magazine, one of the periodicals that inspired John Wesley to begin publishing his competing project The Arminian Magazine. As you can see from this entry in the English Short Title Catalogue, the British Library is the only place in the world with a complete run of this publication. I am particularly interested in The Gospel Magazine because it was edited by Wesley antagonist Augustus Toplady, about whom I wrote last summer. To be able to make the most of my time in London, I spent today reading volume one (1774) of TGM at KU’s Spencer Research Library, which has a world-class collection of rare eighteenth-century British materials and is only a forty-minute drive from my apartment.
Last year, I paid a very reasonable 40 pounds a night to stay at a bed and breakfast in Manchester (At least I think I did. The site lists a lower rate right now.). This year, I’ll be staying in university accommodations for an incredibly affordable 75 pounds a week, and I believe the walk from my room to the library will take me all of about 5 minutes.
As I was last year, I’m nervous about travelling. But this year I know my ATM card will work, I have a brand new credit card, I know where my passport is, I know my plug adaptors will fit the plugs, I know how to get from the airport to where I’m going, and most importantly, I know my way around the collection at the MARC. Once I get to London, I know two or three people there already, so I’m less nervous about that aspect of the trip. As for France, well it’s been a very long time since I’ve been there, but back when we lived in Belgium, we went to Paris all the time, so I guess I’ll find my way.
This will be my longest trip to Europe since (pre-EU) 1988, when I went home to visit my parents and stayed pretty much the whole summer. Heck, I’ve never even seen a Euro.