Stream of Consciousness

• recently got to handle my first snake (caught by my brother; apparently it lives in the stone wall by their house).  It was surprisingly soft and velvety to the touch.  My nieces are cool with snakes.  Which is pretty cool.
• bought a small canister of asafetida, based on my recollection that Madhur Jaffrey characterized this spice as "indispensable" to Indian cuisine.  The sealed plastic container, from inside a plastic bag, has left a lingering stench in my backpack six days later.  I'm nervous about opening the container now.
• was thinking to go rollerblading today, and then head to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.  And a yoga class.  Instead, I've spent hours researching my proposed topic for a chapter in an upcoming book... and certain other papers that I'm thinking to present and/or publish.  I'm on the rooftop deck though, enjoying bright cloudy skies.  So maybe this is a good day to work out in the gym. 
• just accepted an estimate for one home improvement project.  Two more in the works - need to figure out soon if I'll go forward.  Fingers crossed.
• oh, and the paper proposal that was just accepted for Mythcon?
  Title: "First Contact: Man in the Landscape of Tormance and Perelandra."
  Abstract: Lewis wrote that "The real father of my planet books is David Lindsay’s Voyage to Arcturus, which you also will revel in if you don’t know it." This paper will compare Maskull's introduction to Tormance and Joiwind with Ransom's introduction to Perelandra and the Lady, with an eye to understanding Lewis' authorial choices in depicting his own alien and exotic flora, fauna, and landscape.  
• highlights of some presentations I enjoyed at Kalamazoo:

• DIY astrolabe session - learned out to figure out the time of sunrise and sunset with a few pieces of paper

• Anderson & Rateliff talking about women in JRRT's professional life... with Flieger & Chance not only in attendance, but actually cheering from the audience at times.  Pretty darn cool.  

• math prof argued that invisibility cannot happen without rendering the invisible person [in this case, a hobbit] blind, whether the light goes through the hobbit or around the hobbit.

• on a Game of Thrones panel, when responding to a question about differences between fans of the TV show (or a film) and the book, one panelist mentioned stained glass windows (they were for those who couldn't read the bible for themselves)

• GoT fan community tends to defend GRRM as a "lone genius" whose vision is supreme and unquestionable; they tend to defend complaints about Westeros as sexist/misogynist, racist, and violent by claiming that this accurately reflects "medieval times" - but without any understanding of the actual historical period (their source appears to be GRRM himself)

• a plenary speaker showed us some of the ways stuff spread in what I'll call the Greater Mediterranean region.  Included: a really cool map showing the spread of the Black Death, and a map showing that traders crossed the Sahara not like modern day long-distance truckers, but in a series of short, overlapping circuits.  

• a talk on the Smithfield decretals featured a picture of the Hellmouth!  The point of this talk was that it was pretty weird for a legal treatise to include a running series of diagrams in the margins about the encounter between the "three living" and the "three dead" (but the expanded moment of encounter is perhaps intended to encourage reflection on morality and salvation, perhaps appropriate for the law) 

• another speaker on the same panel (re text and image) mentioned that putting words into a rising and falling scroll was intended to reflect the inflections of actual speech.  Also, she was talking about a particular medieval document made by or for a leader of a convent, which showed (a) OT men in a circle around JC, who is speaking to them in direct lines, with no response from the men; and (b) NT women in a circle around JC, who is still speaking to them in direct lines, but the women each respond in a curved arc of dialogue; the words of one woman end in JC's chalice.

That's all for now.  Gotta get to the library for a few things I can't access online!