explanation of small hiatus, RBOC edition
Oh, right -- and also I am too lazy to code the bullets!
Sorry for the silence, but it's been a busy couple of weeks. Last week, I had to turn in a grant app and a paper abstract, plus the teaching. This week, I managed to totally screw up and assigned exam/essay due dates in ALL of my classes for this week. Oh,and a visit to the ER on Monday (nothing serious, nothing at all wrong, even, as far as they could tell, but tests took a lot of time), and over the next 4 days I need to finish revising all my syllabi (all new preps, people), write another abstract, show up at lots of functions, write at least three lectures, and grade some of the huge piles of paper on my desk. And work on the damned book, which has been sadly neglected for ages, and I'm worried about it. And of course the ILL books I haven't touched are due on Tuesday. And actual life? Not what I'd like it to be. And honestly, I would not be surviving without several of my friends, one of whom spent ages on the phone screaming at me (in an excited way, not a mean way) about politics and life in general this evening, despite a very worrying cough. When you realise you've been arguing with someone for over 20 years and are still friends, life is pretty good.
AND ... there should be a new Carnivalesque up in the next couple of days.
That's all for now. I may be back to talk about how World History is Social Science and not a Humanity, or the funny looks I get when I talk about the Bible in class. Or how I'm confused by the ecko jeans commercials. Actually, I'm getting confused more and more by all commercials. And TV in general. Is it just me, or is TV just way too much information? Because I think my life was way happier when I didn't have cable. I'd kind of like to have cable that just had Premiership soccer, Bones, House, and that channel that plays The Princess Bride and a bunch of the same other cool movies all the time (You know the one -- there's The Princess Bride, Star Wars movies, The Lord of the Rings, Stargate and the various PoTC movies in rotation?). Although ... I'm sitting in front of the idiot box at this very moment and find South Park ... strangely compelling. And totally twisted. Yep ... dumping the cable after the election ...
5 comments:
So, wait, you're revising syllabi? And since the semester's started, I'm presuming these are syllabi for NEXT semester? What is up with THAT??
(From someone who always finished her syllabi the night before classes started. ;-D)
Nope -- revising the readings for this semester's classes, because the preps and/or the books are new, and things aren't flowing well.
It seems to me that a lot if not most history courses actually straddle the line between humanities and social sciences. A lot of historical writing is actually political science, sociology or anthropology (there really are no great differences between these disciplines) set in the past. The only clear cases of history being a humanity rather than a social science are things like intellectual history.
Except that history came first.
You sound like you need to get a Sky subscription. Pity about the sad lack thereof in Slacville :-)
As for poor Alan Curbishley . . . well, he may have jumped in the end, but they were very careful about leaving the window open, and then Zola immediately got everything Curbishley'd been asking for.
On the humanities versus soc sci debate, this is where being a product of the most ruthlessly empirical historical tradition around is so much fun . . . we don't care about where the theory comes from as long as it works, and we don't care whether you call us a humanity or a social science (unless if being a social science gets us money from ESRC, who normally have more dosh than AHRC).
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