west of the moon

file under "little known urban holidays."

Today, the first trash-pickup day after Epiphany, is the day where the streets are lined with the dessicated corpses of Christmas trees.  I keep trying to give this a German name, something something "die töten Tannenbäume," but I can't quite make it work. 

mimsy.

Things that I think I should have known about sooner: they've made a movie out of "Mimsy Were the Borogoves". 

The original story, by Lewis Padgett (a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore), was published in Astounding in 1943, and it's one of the few Golden Age stories that I think is actually brilliant, both in concept and execution.  I feel like I almost have to assume that the movie is going to be disappointing--getting a movie's worth of plot out of a short story pretty much necessitates changing the story in significant ways, and this is one of my all-time favorite pieces of short fiction, so it's going to be hard for me to just enjoy the movie even if it's good.  But I have hope, or at least guarded optimism. 

They've got a website with the trailer: The Last Mimzy.  (And yes, the Mimsy/Mimzy shift makes it difficult to sustain that guarded optimism.)  That site generated some popup ads, and I think the trailer starts playing automatically, so be prepared.  Based on the trailer, there's at least a chance that it's going to be okay. 

I -want- to like this.  I mean, my god, someone took a story that I love and made a movie out of it!  Of course I want to like it, and I want it to be good, and I want it to do well.  It's just that there are so many ways it could go wrong.  The basic premise behind the story is that a brother and sister find a toybox that contains a bunch of weird and inexplicable toys; the reader knows that the toys come from the distant future, and that they were sent back in time accidentally.  They're educational toys, though, and as the children play with them, they learn the things that the toys were meant to teach, mainly ways of manipulating the physical world that seem impossible to present-day humans.  (There's a part at the end that I think actually prefigures posthumanist science fiction, and that's also part of the charm, even if it's a little clumsier and less well-developed than the rest of the story.)  The idea that our interactions with the world around us are completely dictated by our expectations, that's a pretty common and even cliche one in genre writing by this point, but it's something I associate more with modern or urban fantasy.  People can't do magic because they think it isn't real, people forget or ignore spooky or supernatural events because they're not capable of processing what they've just seen, etc.  It's a compelling idea, but it's almost too easy as a fantasy concept; this story is one of the few treatments of it that I've ever seen from a more science-fiction base--physics works for us the way that it does because we understand it in a particular way.  (Other takes on similar ideas include "The Story of Your Life", and while I can't remember specifics, I know I've seen at least one or two more.) 

In any event, I wasn't trying to do any serious critical analysis, I was just noting that this movie exists.

er. wow.

As previously noted, I had a great time at the AHA meeting this weekend--it was both enjoyable and productive, and I've returned home exhausted, but full of ideas and energy.

I'd imagine that part of my general positive feeling about the whole thing comes from the fact that I didn't get arrested for jaywalking.  (The story is worth reading in more detail, but the short version: at the AHA meeting, an extremely distinguished historian was arrested for jaywalking.  And when I say "arrested", I mean physically subdued, handcuffed, and taken to a city jail, where he spent eight hours before finally making bail.) 

Atlanta!

Atlanta.
Originally uploaded by Susan Groppi.

I'm in Atlanta for the 121st Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association.  I have maligned this meeting in the past, claiming that it's little more than a stress factory driven by the collective tension of hundreds of job-seeking historians.  I say "maligned" because, while that aspect of the conference is certainly present, I am finally willing to concede that there's a lot more to it.  (My problem, mainly, is that I've been holding the AHA up against the example of the History of Science Society annual meetings, which have a much stronger sense of community.  It's an unfair comparison.)

I'm having a good time, even though I'm spending a little too much time holed up in my hotel room, working.  These conferences tend to have an energizing effect when it comes to work, and in the last day and a half I've made some good progress on a few projects. 

All this working means that I haven't attended much of the scheduled programming, although I did make it to a great panel yesterday, "Getting to your first publication: Articles and Monographs."  The panelists, two journal editors and two university-press acquisitions editors, were friendly and informative.  Most of what they said about submissions and publication was just common sense, but that was useful--the process seems so obscure to most early-career academics that there's enormous value in just having one's common-sense instincts affirmed. 

One of the book editors cited some interesting (and disturbing) statistics, though, about the state of academic publishing.  He said that in the last twenty-five years, the number of individual titles published by university presses had increased dramatically--if I'm reading my notes correctly, he said that in 1980 there were approximately 2300 individual titles released by university presses, and in 2004 it was more like 11,000.  That almost looks like good news for academic publishing, except that it's not as simple a statistic as it looks; the increase in number of titles has been accompanied by an equally dramatic decline in the size of print runs.  College and university libraries (the major market for academic books) are buying far fewer books than they were twenty or thirty years ago, and where university presses used to not even consider print runs smaller than 1500 or 2000, they're now down to 700 or 800, and in some cases as low as 300 or 400.  And, of course, smaller print runs generally means a higher per-book production costs, so the prices of academic books have been rising, which only exacerbates the problem of academic libraries not buying as many of them.  (He said that the decline in book purchasing is generally attributed to increases in the subscription costs for scientific journals; he cited some figures saying that in 1980, academic libraries generally spent seventy percent of their acquisitions budgets on books and thirty percent on journals, but the most recent surveys show a complete inversion of those figures.) 

The impact on early-career academics, of course, is that it's probably more difficult to sell a first book.  First books are usually based on dissertations, and dissertations are usually very narrowly focused, and publishers who can't rely on large-scale library purchasing have to place an even larger priority on finding a broader audience for any given book in their list.  Both of the book editors on the panel expressed some dismay about the way that academic publishers have (in their words) become implicated in the tenure process; the take-home lesson for graduate students, I suppose, is to pay attention to the ways in which the dissertation project can be related back to larger contexts.  (To paraphrase another example from a panelist, if your dissertation is an examination of the changes in fishing patterns in three small Sicilian villages in the early eighteen hundreds, you'll have an easier time selling it if you can demonstrate that in some fundamental way it's really a study in the impact of the Industrial Revolution on rural economies.) 

ringing in.

Happy New Year, everyone!  We celebrated in style, a smallish party with good friends and a lot of laughter.  Also party hats. 

My year had a lot of changes in it (finishing the dissertation, finishing graduate school, one of those round-number birthdays, starting a new teaching job, publishing a book ), but the changes were all couched in a kind of environmental stasis--the work of my days is so different, but I'm still taking the same bus, going to the same coffeeshop, walking around in the same buildings.   It's an interesting balance.  In any event, I've given up on making bold statements about what the future holds.  Welcome to 2007, whatever it may bring.