![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Wow! What a day. What a wonderful, exhausting day.
My search for coffee was pretty much a failure -- nothing opened until 7:00. The weather was cool and cloudy, so I took the opportunity to wander the campus and orient myself. Once I got tired I found a place to read, and settled in with Hesiod.
At 7:00 I found the refreshment room near registration and hung out there for an hour. I had nice conversations with some folks from Connecticut, Minnesota, and Leiden, Germany. At 8:00 registration opened and people to talk to disappeared, but the dealer’s room opened.
The dealer’s room was a religious experience. Booksellers galore, clubs and organizations, a rare coin dealer, an amber jewelry booth and so much more, all spread out in several rooms taking up nearly the entire ground floor of two of the dorm buildings. So far I’ve only bought two books and one medieval coin (a 12th Century Champagnois denier) but I’m sure I’ll buy more. The books are nearly all from academic presses and so are horrendously expensive, even with 20% - 50% show discounts, but I guess that comes with the territory. It just offends my tightfisted sensibilities. :)
There was one vanity press there trying to dig up authors. They tackled me as I was looking at the books they had on display -- cheap-looking hardbacks with horrible covers and discounts prices of $39.99. They started off by asking me what I was writing. I was taken aback at first, how did they know I was writing something? But I quickly figured out that an academic of my age _must_ be writing something. She seemed incredulous when I told that I ran a small publishing company.
The two hours before my first session flew by, and between not wanting to leave and getting a little lost, I arrived there late. It was titled “The Chanson de Geste and the European Epic” and consisted of the presentation of two papers about The Song of Roland and two about other less well known texts. Three of the papers were written and presented by grad students and you could tell. They were poor publics speakers, the theses and writing were weak and the one I was most interested in hearing turned out to be simply a summary of the plot of Roland pointing out how different characters dealt with their problems in the text with no even small amount of insight.
Needless to say, for my first session, I was highly disappointed. We had a two hour break for lunch and I decided to see if the internet was finally working. It was, so I sent e-mails and blog posts and caught up on some things, then curled up for a nap. It was noisy out so I slept with my headphones on and that worked quite well.
At 1:30 pm I went to “Approaches to Magic in the Northern European World”. That was a very interesting session. The first presenter talked about the magic sword that Beowulf find in Grendel’s Mother’s lair and uses to kill her, and the symbolism of that sword and swords in general throughout the poem. I may use some of her ideas in the novel that I’m going to try and write this fall.
The middle lecturer was best forgotten, but the third speaker was fabulous, talking about the treatment a magicians in the Laxdæla Saga (which, conveniently I had just read). His thesis combined some ideas of Levi-Straus about the conflict between nature and culture, and compared them to how the saga used magic and law.
I was very happy to see that my experience with my first session was not going to be a consistent problem. My next session was in the same building, so I used the 30 minutes between to get a soda and to call home. I had a very nice talk with Chris (I am missing her and Becca quite a bit).
When I got to the next lecture, “The Early Italian Commune”, we were told that two of the three presenters had been unable to attend so it would be short. I had come to that one really for only one of the papers, so I was happy to learn that “Magnate Violence and Strategies for Lordship” was the one who was there. And it was a a fabulous lecture. It was what I’m going to start calling “Hard History” and was actually about collecting and synthesizing data to come up with a picture of an historical event, system, location or person.
The presenter, Carol Lansing, using records from the complicated Florentine legal system, painted a picture of lordly and knightly families in and around Florence, and how their “rights” to violence were constrained by the emerging towns by the guilds and merchant classes. How some continued to prey on the weak and especially on the clergy, enforcing what they saw as their hereditary and traditional rights, especially in the years of poor harvest of circa 1270 and then later in 1338-48.
There was more to the day, but I’m out of writing time for this morning. Hopefully I’ll find time to catch up later.
My search for coffee was pretty much a failure -- nothing opened until 7:00. The weather was cool and cloudy, so I took the opportunity to wander the campus and orient myself. Once I got tired I found a place to read, and settled in with Hesiod.
At 7:00 I found the refreshment room near registration and hung out there for an hour. I had nice conversations with some folks from Connecticut, Minnesota, and Leiden, Germany. At 8:00 registration opened and people to talk to disappeared, but the dealer’s room opened.
The dealer’s room was a religious experience. Booksellers galore, clubs and organizations, a rare coin dealer, an amber jewelry booth and so much more, all spread out in several rooms taking up nearly the entire ground floor of two of the dorm buildings. So far I’ve only bought two books and one medieval coin (a 12th Century Champagnois denier) but I’m sure I’ll buy more. The books are nearly all from academic presses and so are horrendously expensive, even with 20% - 50% show discounts, but I guess that comes with the territory. It just offends my tightfisted sensibilities. :)
There was one vanity press there trying to dig up authors. They tackled me as I was looking at the books they had on display -- cheap-looking hardbacks with horrible covers and discounts prices of $39.99. They started off by asking me what I was writing. I was taken aback at first, how did they know I was writing something? But I quickly figured out that an academic of my age _must_ be writing something. She seemed incredulous when I told that I ran a small publishing company.
The two hours before my first session flew by, and between not wanting to leave and getting a little lost, I arrived there late. It was titled “The Chanson de Geste and the European Epic” and consisted of the presentation of two papers about The Song of Roland and two about other less well known texts. Three of the papers were written and presented by grad students and you could tell. They were poor publics speakers, the theses and writing were weak and the one I was most interested in hearing turned out to be simply a summary of the plot of Roland pointing out how different characters dealt with their problems in the text with no even small amount of insight.
Needless to say, for my first session, I was highly disappointed. We had a two hour break for lunch and I decided to see if the internet was finally working. It was, so I sent e-mails and blog posts and caught up on some things, then curled up for a nap. It was noisy out so I slept with my headphones on and that worked quite well.
At 1:30 pm I went to “Approaches to Magic in the Northern European World”. That was a very interesting session. The first presenter talked about the magic sword that Beowulf find in Grendel’s Mother’s lair and uses to kill her, and the symbolism of that sword and swords in general throughout the poem. I may use some of her ideas in the novel that I’m going to try and write this fall.
The middle lecturer was best forgotten, but the third speaker was fabulous, talking about the treatment a magicians in the Laxdæla Saga (which, conveniently I had just read). His thesis combined some ideas of Levi-Straus about the conflict between nature and culture, and compared them to how the saga used magic and law.
I was very happy to see that my experience with my first session was not going to be a consistent problem. My next session was in the same building, so I used the 30 minutes between to get a soda and to call home. I had a very nice talk with Chris (I am missing her and Becca quite a bit).
When I got to the next lecture, “The Early Italian Commune”, we were told that two of the three presenters had been unable to attend so it would be short. I had come to that one really for only one of the papers, so I was happy to learn that “Magnate Violence and Strategies for Lordship” was the one who was there. And it was a a fabulous lecture. It was what I’m going to start calling “Hard History” and was actually about collecting and synthesizing data to come up with a picture of an historical event, system, location or person.
The presenter, Carol Lansing, using records from the complicated Florentine legal system, painted a picture of lordly and knightly families in and around Florence, and how their “rights” to violence were constrained by the emerging towns by the guilds and merchant classes. How some continued to prey on the weak and especially on the clergy, enforcing what they saw as their hereditary and traditional rights, especially in the years of poor harvest of circa 1270 and then later in 1338-48.
There was more to the day, but I’m out of writing time for this morning. Hopefully I’ll find time to catch up later.
