remember remember the fifth of november

Today is Guy Fawkes Day! (If you do not know who this is and you are reading my blog, I am going to need you to go obtain a copy of V for Vendetta - the film or the graphic novel are both acceptable - and check back in when you are done.)
Scotland is a very... nationalistic place, to say the least. Though it is part of the United Kingdom, it is very much it's own country: Scotland has its own parliament and Scots law is different than English law. Yes, it's technically English, but it is its own variety of English. (They even have their own dictionary.) Here in Scotland, we are SCOTTISH DAMMIT. Someone who is a native of Scotland would probably be very offended if you thought they were English.

(The closest analogy I can give you is that Scottish nationalism is much like Southern [American] Nationalism - it's as if Texas was the most liberal part of America and constantly threatening to leave as a result of the rest of the country being too conservative. Perhaps more accurately, Scotland is what would happen if Vermont got its act together and decided to become its own country once and for all.)

So naturally the Scots are very, very excited about Guy Fawkes Day. How could they not be? Dude tried to overthrow an entire government by blowing that shit up. I imagine if their Personal Life Hero role had not been already claimed by Robert Burns (more on this in January), Guy Fawkes would be a close contender for the position. People don't seem to really excited about going out for Guy Fawkes Day like we would for the 4th of July, though I have been promised many fireworks tonight. I assure you that my daily life is not full of bagpipers and kilted men - though this does happen, but mostly for weddings and other severely formal events - but I would not be surprised if they were out in full force today.

a day in the life

Every week or so I go over to Glasgow University. Glasgow University is sort of like the BU or NYU of Glasgow, whereas Strathclyde, which is my school, is more like MIT. Glasgow Uni is this amazing, magical, campusy place (complete with trees!). They've got an English language/linguistics department and a literature department, and their library is amazing, whereas Strathclyde is in the middle of the city centre and much less humanities-oriented. (Basically I have a giant crush on Glasgow University.)




Today I listened to a lecture about relative pronouns in the morning and spent my afternoon reading original texts from the 1600s. While this is not the book I actually read (predictably, the special archives collection won't let me take take pictures); I was actually reading about Early Modern English Women's social roles. Last week I was granted access by Oxford to download their full-text Old English and Middle English databases; which means now I have the entire written (documented) early English corpus on my computer. Also today I met with one of the big people in corpus linguistics and a few weeks ago I met with someone who headed the Oxford English Dictionary's recently-published Historical Thesaurus project, both at Glasgow University.

YOU GUYS HOW IS THIS MY LIFE I DON'T EVEN KNOW

Help, I'm Alive!: A One-Month Retrospective

[editor's note: Two years ago in late July, I was in Edinburgh, Scotland for a weekend, with food poisoning. Today I am back there on a hike with some Germans, hopefully without food poisoning. Through the magic of the internet and auto-posting, I present the following.]

You guys, I have been in Glasgow for a month! I can't believe it's been a month already. Things are going so, so well - this blog has sort of shown the ups and downs of the first few weeks of moving to a new country by myself, but I definitely feel like each day is better than the last. There's a lot of things that I am still working out - like what side of the street and which side of the stairs to walk on. (This is more complicated than you'd expect.) Sometimes I still have difficulties figuring out where I would go to buy things - we don't have Wal-Mart or Target or CVS here - but this is getting better. Some days I wake up and just really want to see something instantly recognizably American, like peanut butter and jelly or the word "eggplant", and some days I want be able to talk to someone from home and not have to wait for 7pm to be able to do so. But moving to a new place by yourself is an emotional rollercoaster, let alone a new country or a new continent! I think I am doing very well. I have tentative friends! It's all very exciting.

It's an amazing opportunity to be here, and even more of an amazing opportunity to be working with the man who invented my field in addition to meeting all these other important linguists and literary people across three institutions (Strathclyde, Glasgow University, the University of Edinburgh). I am very, very lucky. There's no second-guessing crossing an ocean to do something and the more I am getting into what I am actually doing the more I am absolutely certain this is was absolutely 100% the right choice for me. I love all the work I am doing, and the people around me are so passionate about their work, so deeply involved that I can't imagine them doing anything else. I've been in contact with all these important linguistics people - the other day I met the woman who headed the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. (No big deal or anything...only one of my life goals achieved! She was so interested in what I had done and what I am doing here.) Glasgow Uni and Strathclyde are already both aggressively courting me for their PhD program next year; I just want to tell them to cool off a little bit!

I can't believe this is my life. I am so, so lucky.

I definitely still feel like I have a giant American flag tattooed on my forehead, but with every day I feel more integrated into Scottish life. Maybe soon I will start talking with a Scottish accent. (Or at least write a blog post about it, as I keep meaning to.) Or maybe that will just have to wait for month two...

Brain so good, coulda swore you went to college

I am starting a new research project with a professor at BU this week. I'm very excited, there's something wonderful about starting a new project. I don't know all of the details about my role as Unpaid Academic Slave Labor, but I do know that I will be spending a lot of time in two libraries. One of them is the BU library, which pretty much anyone can walk into.

The other one is Harvard's Widener Library.
Harvard has a lot of libraries. They all seem awfully specific. Some are more strict than others, but overall the general rule is that if you want to use one of their libraries, you just have to be somehow affiliated with Harvard and be able to prove it.

It just so happens that Widener has the strictest policy for visitors. It is "a research institution for the use of Harvard students, faculty, staff, and visiting researchers, and is not open for public visitation or tours by individuals not affiliated with the University."

If you are one of the following:
a) a Harvard Alumni
b) a faculty member at another institution
c) a doctoral student at Harvard
You are allowed in Widener. Your access is varied depending on your status (ie, alums can only use the Reading Room but not the stacks).

If you are d) EVERYONE ELSE you have to apply for visiting privileges. Even if you are a doctoral candidate at another school, you still have to apply. These visiting privileges are for six days total for a twelve month period. To obtain visiting privileges, you must present a letter to the Library Privileges Office from the reference librarian of their university or Boston metropolitan public library stating that the specific library materials needed are not available elsewhere.

Let's review for a second: I AM APPLYING TO GET ACCESS TO ONE OF THE MOST SUPER-STRICT OF LIBRARIES IN THE UNITED STATES.

legs to make us longer

I took a thesis vacation yesterday evening.

Basically, I'm trying to drink less. Due to this one-month-ish time constraint (my thesis is due on May 10), I can't afford to go out drinking mostly because of the time commitment. I have things to do, and I can't be hungover while doing them - it's a miserable experience. And, I'd rather not do this very serious, important work while drunk. So I have generally been showing up at parties kind of late, trying not to stick around for an exceptionally long time, and am limiting myself to no more than three beers, and especially No Being Drunk. I have been to a lot of parties and bars soberly these days, just to take a bit of a break from thesising. Look at me, being responsible!

So my choices last night were to go to a Joint Birthday Party, as two of my friends are turning 21-and-12-months this upcoming week, to go to a bunch of bars with another friend, or to see Kaki King in Boston.

Friends: I love you, you know this. But I took the Kaki King option. Even though a group of my friends are seeing her in Portland on 4/20 (ahem...) it was in my best interest not to do that. I have work to do, and I can't afford to lose all that time. I'd feel much better if it was on a weekend... so I went down to Boston with my friend Nicole.

And you know what? it was totally worth it. I ended up in front row, three feet away from her. She's this tiny, hot, ferocious woman (totally unexpected, by the way) who can fucking rock. I've liked her for a long time; I went to this concert to see her reproduce her albums' beauty. I left this concert with an intellectual and musical boner for her. Holy shit. opening with this song - disregard the Jimmy Fallon bit, sorry about that -


This happened too. No big deal or anything...

She ended her set by turning Jessica - a soft, light song, into a 7+ minute rock out. AMAZING. and then closed her encore with a dance-party version of Gay Sons of Lesbian Mothers. So, I'm in awe and stuff. And I only see awesome concerts.

Character Study: Dr. Lieber

Since Shelly keeps coming up as a Major Character in my life, I think it is time to define her for you, dear reader.

Dr. Lieber is kind of a big deal.

And when I say that, I mean it- She studied under Noam Chomsky at MIT in the 1970s and while there, developed the prevailing system of understanding underlying linguistic structure which basically says that the properties of each individual word item, both within the word itself and how the word functions in a sentence, are inherited by morphology (the study of word-parts, which is what I've been working on) and syntax (which is the organization of words into phrases which turn into sentences). In picture form, this structure looks like what is seen to the right: Any time a letter (N, P, V representing nouns, prepositions, verbs) is repeated that means it allows for phrasal attachement. This can be applied to word-parts in that you can separate little bits of words which make sense individually and allow for attachment and word-formation. If this makes your head hurt, imagine taking a class strictly devoted to things like that picture. Shelly teaches this class at UNH, and is notorious amongst the 35 or so Linguistics majors on campus for using all of her example sentences about Fenster and wombats.

(Which brings me to the next related thing to talk about - this picture, brought to us by someone in the UNH linguistics department in front of the English building. If you can't read it, it says "Fenster kissed the wombat" in IPA. This is a linguistics joke and a funny one at that - mostly because nobody knows we exist, nor will the rest of the English Department understand it!)

Shelly's work is mostly in morphology despite her important strides in syntax. She co-developed the prevailing formula to measure productivity of affixes through corpus study (in Not-Linguistics-Speak this means "what my thesis is centered around: The Formula.") This - among MANY other things related to word-formation and how it functions - is her main focus of research. She's been working on assorted projects of word-formation rules and how they are understood to speakers of language for a very long time.

She is very, very well respected in her field. So going in to see her today was an intimidating moment, as you have hopefully understood. I have weekly "homework assignments" for her related to Thesis 2.0; this past weeks' was to read three of her articles on word-formation and synthesize a methodology of measuring and understanding word-formation techniques in regards to her own research. But - for those of us keeping track at home, the work I brought into her was described as "on the correct path" (translated from Thesis Advisor-Speak that means "Yes, you're close. Now do this that and the other thing and it will be better. But yes, mostly.")

I AM DOING SOMETHING RIGHT!

I unabashedly love Lady Gaga.

She's great. She's crazy - mixing Bowie and Madonna and pure pop sensibility into the catchiest, most ridiculous cultural sensation in a very long time (I would argue my lifetime, at least.) She's a smart lady. She knows precisely what she is doing. AND she can sing.

To the best of my knowledge, I have yet to meet a single person who does not respect her, at the very least for her conceptualization of fame. (Are you that person? Let's talk.)

I feel like we all got hooked on Bad Romance. I mean, Just Dance? Okay. I remember first hearing it and kind of brushing it off: it was catchy, but whatever. Poker Face? Yeah, alright. It's clever. and then -- BAD ROMANCE. Anyone with fully functional eardrums in the past few months knows this song.

So needless to say, I was more than a bit disappointed when she fell off everyone's radar for a while. The Paparazzi video was cool - Gaga rocks disabledness! - but all things considered it was kind of normal (at least for her). There was a sheer shortage of asymmetrical glittery things and certainly no comically oversized hats. I was getting worried. Nothing strange had happened in a while!

But then the Telephone video happened. And all was right with the world yet again.



Things to notice:
- "I told you she didn't have a dick!"
- Gaga's symbolic commentaries on the prison system and the hypersexualization of women (by other women too!)
- CIGARETTE GLASSES! Diet Coke Curlers! WHAT
- Is that pre-(f/F)ame Gaga in the sunglasses?!
- new crazy arm flailings!
- Beyonce! With Bangs! / Gaga & Beyonce do Tarantino
>> (see also: references to Jackie Brown and the Paparazzi video)
- Telephone Hat
- Madonna reference! -- hair, choreography...

(EDIT 3/16, Upon Further Deconstruction)
erin: i feel like nothing can be more gay than this video
heather: sleeping with women is more gay than that video.
erin: i don't know about that!


WELCOME BACK LADY GAGA
i have missed you

People I love, Part 1

Erin McKean is a lexicographer, which is sort of like being a Professional Word Dork.

She edited the New Oxford American Dictionary (2nd Edition) and has a website (wordnik.com) which is sort of like Urban Dictionary, but with etymologies. Basically, she is awesome AND gets to spend her life sitting around thinking about words.

I want to be her when I grow up!