Reading The Handmaid's Tale

I'm a pretty passive reader. Even when reading for research, it takes more mental energy to engage critically with the author's ideas than to simply let them wash over me until I turn the last page. Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1985) is different. Not only did it transform me back into the kind of bookworm I was as a kid--reading while walking, getting dressed, or brushing my teeth--but it also inspired me to lie in bed on my one day off in seven, just thinking about it. Atwood herself observed once that The Handmaid's Tale has "haunted" her in the thirty years since the book was published, although at the time it was an intensely productive but not self-reflective period. Funnily enough, it was the historian's talk at the end that really got my juices flowing. The result is a blog review a whole four months in advance of my annual Books I Read This Year list.

Although I had loved Atwood's short story "Bluebeard's Egg" as an undergraduate, I had gotten all the way through college AND graduate school without reading The Handmaid's Tale in either a feminist studies class or on my own. I really only knew the premise from the promos around the current Hulu series (now confirmed for a third season), of a dystopian future in which a violent theocracy uses women as reproductive vessels. I was enthralled with this book from the first few pages. I was struck initially by two things: 1) the narrating character's word play, which I assume came from Atwood herself and which is so prominent throughout the book that I can't pull out a single favorite passage, and 2) the way that the reader's view is blinkered, the environment and context revealed piecemeal, much like the main character's point of view is physically limited by her headdress and practically limited by the regime's control of (mis)information. Fragmentation comes up repeatedly in the story, from the flashbacks set between action "in the present" to the body parts mailed to defectors to the bits of recording scattered among dozens of cassette tapes.

I found the characters nuanced but not entirely knowable, which fits the setting in an oppressive society wrought with spies (::cough:: DDR, USSR), as well the style of writing with a narrator who is not omniscient. I particularly appreciated that Atwood had Offred tell Moira's story in Moira's voice, letting this female figure speak as herself in a culture that sought to silence women. Finally, I thought about the passage of time. The table of contents contains seven "Nights," suggesting one week--of creation? By the narrator's description, the events in the present tense take place from early spring to late summer of one year. It was harder to tell how many years had elapsed since the Sons of Judah had taken over the country--perhaps three? And of course Offred's memories stretch back to her childhood in what sounded like the mid- to late twentieth century. Atwood's critiques of American culture and politics made me wonder what it would be like to read this book alongside Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, for its expose of physical and chemical danger to the environment.

Story + Recipe = Storecipe

Over at H-Net, on the H-Nutrition online community where I am an Editor, we are observing something called "What is a Recipe?" It's an unconventional kind of conference happening partly in person, partly on the interwebs, during the months of June and July. The folks over at The Recipes Project put out a call for proposals to address the question in whatever creative way we wanted. Some people are making YouTube videos, there's a gal growing potatoes and blogging about it, and lots of people are tweeting. We asked our list-serv members to write a short piece about their favorite recipe and what it has to do with the history of nutrition. I wrote about satiety and the stereotypically heavy Central European dinner; others tackled oatmeal (food for animals or children?), dehydrated rations for Indian soldiers during World War II, and even individualized recipes for Soylent.

One of the groups participating in What is a Recipe? invited us to their "Cooking with Anger" netprov (internet + improvisation) as a way to think about the influence of emotions on cooking and eating. I decided to give it a try. Here's my storecipe (story + recipe) with the automatically generated list of ingredients and "spices." Click the link in the story to find the recipe.

Level: Chef

Your basket
Main Ingredients:
step-sister
pickpocket
mango
kohlrabi
futon

Spice Pack:
1/3 cup of love
1 teaspoon of nervousness 

I heard the door of my apartment slam and the squeak of worn springs as my step-sister threw herself onto the futon in the living room. “I can’t believe that fink got away with it!” she said.

“Who’s a fink?” I asked, drying my hair with a towel as I came out of the bathroom. It was 7AM on a Saturday morning, and Janice had been gone all night clubbing.

“A pickpocket on the subway,” she answered juicily, around a mouthful of mango. She must have spied the fruit bowl on the kitchen counter as she entered. “This one’s really good!” she said, and cut another piece.

“I should hope so,” I countered. “They’ve been ripening for the last week.” I took the slice she proffered me on the flat of the knife blade. “What did he or she take?”

“My cellphone with IDs—right out of my back pocket!” said Janice. “Do you think I’ll ever see them again?” she asked nervously. “I’ve got to catch the train back to Philly this afternoon.”

“Maybe, maybe not, sis,” I replied. “It’s unfortunate but not all that uncommon here in New York. I’m sorry that happened to you. Let’s make some phone calls to your bank and the DMV, and then I’ll fry you some kohlrabi fritters before we head down to the train station.”

Janice sighed a combination of frustration and satisfaction, ran her hands through her hair, and then laughed when her sticky fingers caught in her curls. “Sure, let me shower and look up the numbers on my laptop. Thanks!”

She gave me a wet kiss on the cheek on her way to the guest room, while I headed for the kitchen.

Book Review: Feeding the Nation Left a Sour Taste

In my last blog post, I described an academic study of hunger, food, and cultural racism in twentieth-century South Africa that is so prize-winningly good that it intimidated me as a writer. Let's just say that the next book I picked up engendered just the opposite feelings. For a book with a title like Feeding the Nation: Nutrition and Health in Britain before World War One (2010), I can't believe it wasn't on my radar before this spring. But Yuriko Akiyama's dissertation/first book seemed to promising that I went ahead and purchased it. Her argument is simple: cookery teachers, nurses, and other "educationists" (a British word I had to look up that means "educators") taught nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Britons both nutrition and hygiene through lessons about food preparation and consumption. 

The Accomplisht Cook, or the Art and Mystery of Cookery

(because the last image of "Books for Cooks" from the British Library corrupted)

However, Akiyama conflates teaching with learning. This is pitched as a study of reception, but she offers precious little data about what the trainees thought of their lessons. I don't really fault her for that, because designing a reception study is hard (I know, I've tried); the answer is to frame your work as a discussion of other people's discussions, of what they wanted to convey. Unfortunately, she seems to take many of her primary sources at face value, blithely recounting their letters, speeches, and booklets. This may be one reason why the timeline of events in each chapter is so confusing: because each author rediscovered the importance of food for health in order to justify the importance of their particular program, it seems like the thread of the argument that cookery was recognized as important for the health of individuals and the nation is constantly being dropped and picked up again. She sometimes explains a particular idea as "now/suddenly/finally" being perceived as important once some reform has happened, which neglects the interest that had to exist beforehand to generate the political and social will for that reform. It also doesn't help that she argues for the importance of Florence Nightingale in the development of cookery and hygiene and then mentions at one point that real change required 30 years. In the long duree that's nothing, but in real time three decades an entire generation.

The other difficulty that arises from Akiyama taking her sources at face value is that she adopts their disapproving, reformist tone, especially toward the lower classes. Although she includes such important details as the fact that many poor Britons lived in hovels or tenements without private cooking facilities, she nevertheless makes comments about how uninformed and unhygienic they were. She confuses lack of knowledge with lack of will or ability, when there were manifest structural and institutional hindrances. This is important, because on the one hand she argues that the army taught every man to cook his own rations to ensure that nutrients would not be wasted by an inexperienced (non-British/foreign) cook, and then later she notes that the navy trained professional cooks so that all sailors could benefit from good, hygienic food. Somehow both are supposed to convey the same message about the importance of diet on health, when I suspect the army was mostly concerned about cost cutting. I will concede her one point though, which is that just because hygienic structures and routines have been created doesn't mean that individuals will absorb the lesson (I think of soldiers defecating outside of their tents because it's more convenient than going to the communal latrine).

The best part of the book is that she tried to cover a variety of sites: schools for cookery teachers, elementary schools, hospitals and nursing schools, training for soldiers and sailors. In this way she covers girls and boys, women and men. I wish she had spent more time on the recipes that were taught, rather than talking about the educational institutions, but then I would have written a different book. And maybe I will.

Why I Didn't Get Any Writing Done Today

Yesterday I diagnosed our refrigerator as too wet and our toilet as too dry. Six hours, five trips to two hardware stores, two new parts, one new $20-tool, and a union lunch break later, Dear Husband, a friend, and I had investigated a leak in the refrigerator, completely replaced the innards of our toilet, and cleaned the outsides of both appliances thoroughly (yuck!). I'll do some reading tonight, but this is why I didn't get any writing done today. At least the toilet flushes now. Surely there's a line for that on a C.V.

Audiobook Review: What's fate got to do with it?

Editor's Note: I have been reviewing audiobooks I listened to in the car while driving to and from residency interviews. You can find other installments here and here and here. A combined review can be found on the IPRH Reading Matters blog.

Walter Mosley, Fortunate Son (2006)

Walter Mosley's (1952- ) name was familiar to me when I picked up this box from the library shelf, but I didn't know why he is famous. Maybe because he is one of the best known and most prolific black-Jewish American novelists living today? He has written more than 40 books--mostly crime fiction like the Ezekiel "Easy" Rawlins series--and Denzel Washington starred in the 1995 film adaptation of Mosley's first book, Devil in a Blue Dress. Mosley says he wants to write about black male heroes, and Fortunate Son is an interesting contribution to this genre.

The story begins as a sweet, interracial romance between a poor black florist and a rich white surgeon. Branwyn's infant son Tommy is struggling to live in an incubator in the NICU; Minas's baby Eric sucked the life out of his mother and is now thriving and entitled. The single parents fall in love and raise their boys together in a Beverly Hills mansion with a visionary Vietnamese-refugee nanny, Ahn. After Branwyn dies and her ex-boyfriend and mother show up to claim 6-year-old Tommy, the brothers' lives diverge drastically. Skinny, introspective Tommy drops out of school almost immediately and lives on the streets, having a series of wild and violent encounters with drug dealers, gang members, and the police. Blonde Adonis Eric is popular, athletic, and excels at school, but he seems to carry a curse that dooms the people around him. The two young men pine for each other, and 13 years after their forced separation, coincidence (fate?) brings them back into each other's lives.

While I was listening to this audiobook, whenever someone would ask me its title, I would trip up and say, "Unfortunate Son," because on its face, it is a tale of woe--especially for Tommy. Eric does appear to be the fortunate one. But Tommy--whose friends call him "Lucky"--has a near-supernatural ability to survive, whether it's leaving the bubble of his incubator as an infant, being repeatedly shot or raped, or not dying in a terrible automobile accident. The end of the novel asks us, through Ahn, whether our fortunes are inevitable, or whether Tommy is an unconventional black male hero through the choices he made to help those he loved.

Accomplished actress Lorraine Toussaint (1960- ) read the version to which I listened. She makes some effort to give the main characters different voices, and I think she generally got the pacing and inflection right. I can imagine reading this book again some years from now, if only to savor the delicious turns of phrase with which Mosley closes many of the chapters, especially early on. I think my favorite is the image of Branwyn as a cut flower: although she is beautiful, once removed from the garden (black LA) from which she came, (emotional) cold can only prolong her inevitable death.

What Medical School Looks Like XXIII

Sometimes medical school looks like this stunning view of Baltimore's Inner Harbor while writing a mock phone case scenario, reading a student's weekly case report, and reviewing a manuscript on the history of pediatric surgery.

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A 21st-century medical student's vade mecum

In the Middle Ages, physicians didn't have smart phones or tablets to help them remember important but random bits of information. Instead, they used a small book called a vade mecum (literally, "go with me"). When I "re-entered" medical school last summer, I didn't have a smart phone either, and I wanted a way to collect the hundreds of facts I would be acquiring as I entered the wards and clinics. So I decided to buy myself a little book. The idea was that I would keep it in my white coat pocket for easy reference. However, all the small booklets in the store were drab and ugly. I didn't want to hate looking at my little book for the next 2-3 years. So I bought a slightly larger one with a snazzy cover and four colors of pages. It doesn't fit in my pocket due to the metal spine, so it has lived either in my bookbag or on my desk. Some clerkships have lent themselves to using it more than others (internal medicine and family medicine, yes; Ob/Gyn and surgery, not so much). Now that I am studying for my next round of board exams, I keep it next to me, more to write things down in order to commit them to memory than to jog my memory when answering questions.

Blue is for pathology. On the left in purple are leukemias. On the right in red is Multiple Myeloma: "Bone pain + anemia = MM until proven otherwise."

Red is for clinical pearls and best-practice guidelines.These heart murmurs are differentiated by color, too: green for systolic murmurs and purple for diastolic murmurs.

Grey is for "Miscellaneous," including dermatology, pediatrics, and anatomy. Here I have drawn the musculature of the eye and the major tracts of the spinal cord. "Head trauma can stretch cranial nerve IV, but increased intracranial pressure is more likely to affect cranial nerve VI."

Green is for pharmacology. (I was thinking of Mr. Yuck!) From this catalog of Drugs and Their Antidotes: "Arsenic poisoning smells like garlic and presents with seizures and nausea, vomiting, diarrhea."

Blue-Ribbon Medicine

Over the course of my third year in medical school, I have become proficient in a number of genres of medical writing: the long History and Physical (H&P), the short SOAP note (subjective data, objective data, assessment, plan), and verbal report. This past month I learned a new one: the clinical vignette. It's a five-minute power-point presentation that uses a case study to teach something new, interesting, or important to other medical practitioners.

Every year the medical school holds a day-long research symposium with research talks, posters, and clinical vignettes. I had an interesting case while on pediatrics and decided to write it up. The key to preparing a good vignette is paring down the amount of data to the bare minimum, given the 5-minute time limit. Above all, I tried to put as few words/lines per slide as possible. After talking with one of the chief residents, I also devised a nifty table for dividing the evidence into pertinent positives and negatives. (Putting together the slides was the subject of What Medical School Looks Like XI.)

Dear Husband was a great sport and let me practice on him a couple times, even though he didn't really understand what I was talking about. At the end, he pronounced me "multi-lingual" in English, German, and "medical."

The symposium is a competition, and I was the last speaker of the day. I thought the talk went well but not perfectly. However, it was good enough to beat out several residents and a couple of enthusiastic first-year medical students for the blue ribbon for Best Clinical Vignette. (Apparently, there's a check in mail!) For the curious, I've included the abstract below.

"Breaking the Rule of Twos"
The most common congenital malformation of the gastrointestinal tract, Meckel's Diverticulum is a remnant of the omphalomesenteric duct. The rule of twos says that a Meckel's Diverticulum is ~2 inches in length, has 2 types of heterotopic mucosa, occurs less than 2 feet from the ileocecal valve, is found in 2% of the population, and presents with painless GI bleeding by 2 years of age with a 2:1 male-to-female ratio. However, it can be found in older patients.

A 14-year-old boy with asthma and viral pharyngitis the previous week presented to the ED with an 8-hour history of multiple episodes of non-bloody, non-bilious watery diarrhea, multiple (near) syncopal episodes, and a fall in the bathroom with closed head trauma. Some crampy periumbilical pain had resolved, but in the ED he had one bloody stool. He denied nausea, vomiting, fever, rash, sick contacts, and recent travel. Past surgical history was notable for circumcision and unilateral cryptorchidism status post orchidopexy. Family medical history was notable for maternal Irritable Bowel Syndrome and possible Rheumatoid Arthritis. Although EMS reported a SBP in the 70s, by the time he was seen in the ED, his vitals were essentially stable. On physical exam the patient appeared pale and fatigued with a capillary refill of 2-3 seconds. Abdominal exam was positive only for lower abdominal tenderness to palpation. CBC found a hemoglobin of 10.3 g/dL. Upon consultation with Pediatric Gastroenterology, a technetium 99 scan was performed. It revealed a Meckel's Diverticulum with active gastric mucosa. One unit of packed red blood cells was administered for anemia. General surgery was consulted, and the diverticulum was excised laparascopically with elective appendectomy. After 1 week in the hospital, the patient was discharged to home with Norco PRN for pain.

This case demonstrates an unusual presentation for Meckel's Diverticulum: in an adolescent with mild abdominal pain, a single episode of melena, and syncope secondary to volume loss and severe anemia. Most individuals with a Meckel's Diverticulum are asymptomatic, but the 25% with atopic gastric mucosa can present with painless GI bleeding, (repeat) intussusception, or with a false case of "appendicitis." Heightened clinical suspicion led to diagnosis via Meckel scan, which has a sensitively of 85%, specificity of 95%, and accuracy of 90%. Treatment is surgical excision.

TL;DR This kid had an extra piece of intestine from where his belly button formed that didn't cause him any problems for years until it started making stomach acid that ate into his gut and made him poop blood. A team of doctors figured it out and cured him with surgery.

What Medical School Looks Like XII

Sometimes medical school looks like second-year medical students wearing plastic leis and blowing bubbles. Red clown noses and Chinese finger traps might also have been involved.

We were learning about healthy ways to handle stress and appropriate ways to use humor in medicine.

These students had just had their psychiatry final exam the day before, and they were understandably nervous about both their grades and catching up with studying everything else. In addition, most are counting down the weeks until their first board exam (Step 1) and feel overwhelmed.

I shared what I had learned about avoiding burnout as a third-year medical student: I only work six days a week, five if I can. As a graduate student without a lab or office on campus--and being too cheap to pay for food to work in a cafe--I wrote my dissertation at home. I felt as if I were "always" working. But I easily gave into distractions, so really I was always "working."

Now that I am doing clinical rotations, I work five to six days per week in the office or hospital. There is some but not much down time, so I feel more productive during the day. I try to study at least two hours in the evening. On weekends, I do household chores and work on side projects, like presentations. I told the second-years, "I cannot be a medical student seven days a week. I don't want to be a medical student 24/7. For my sanity, I need to be not-a-student on the weekends so that I look forward to resuming clinical duties on Monday morning." In other words, I have discovered the necessity of a Sabbath, thereby saving me from burnout. And I still pass all my tests.

However, with the next set of board exams just months away (Step 2), let's see how much of my own advice I take!

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What Medical School Looks Like XI

Sometimes medical school looks like eating a make-shift dinner of cheese & crackers, carrot sticks, and trail mix while editing a clinical vignette Power Point presentation on the travel bus after a day of inter-professional simulation/training at the sister medical school in a city 2 hours away.

This presentation later won first prize for a clinical vignette at the research symposium!

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“Stop reading and start writing!”

“Stop reading and start writing!” said my senior dissertation adviser on, I think, two occasions. So I did. He was trying to snap me out of the graduate-student dilemma of being a few years (or sometimes decades) behind in knowledge of the literature in one’s academic field. Why won’t other scholars stop publishing, at least until we catch up? One of the hardest lessons of graduate school is that you cannot read everything—even everything that you “should” read. When it comes to writing the dissertation, it is better to stop procrastinating by reading “just one more” book or article that contains someone else’s position on the subject and articulate your own position. The only time I relapsed into reading secondary sources was when I needed to know something factual (e.g. how working-class European families organized meals) or when I wanted to remind myself about a particular historian’s position, so that I could argue against it (e.g. that communal kitchens were unpopular and unsuccessful). Three years later, I had completed, defended, and deposited more than 300 pages of prose on the merging of science and politics in the rationing systems of World War I-era Germany. And I had stopped reading.

The weekend before graduation, I attended the annual conference of my professional organization, the American Association of the History of Medicine. During one of the keynote talks, which involved “shout-outs” to numerous well-known historians of medicine, I realized that I had managed to get through a decade of graduate education without having read some key texts in medical history. Granted, many of these cover American topics and so are not directly relevant to my own work, but being a medical humanist in the US, it is easier to talk to one’s clinical colleagues about our shared national medical history. So I promised myself that I would read one book in the history of medicine every month until I graduate from medical school. So far that has meant a few pages here and there at night before falling asleep, and many pages in airports and on planes while traveling one weekend. Although, now that Dear Husband and I have started preparing for the 32-week-long Disciple I Bible study together at bedtime, I may have to block off another time when I am not in clinic or studying for exams to recover this crucial bit of my identity and intellectual life.

In June I read Medical Muses: Hysteria in Nineteenth-Century Paris, by Asti Hustvedt. Written for the general reading public, Medical Muses describes in detail the lives and medical cases of three women made famous at Jean-Martin Charcot’s psychiatric hospital in Paris: Blanche, Augustine, and Geneviève. In the 1870s and 1880s, Charcot developed a theory of hysteria involving epileptic “fits,” catatonic poses, hypnotism, promiscuity, confabulation, and insensitivity to pain. Hustvedt attempts to recover these women’s lives before and after their incarcerations at the Salpêtrière and to show how they still had some autonomy over their symptoms and representations, despite the fact that Charcot literally displayed his favorite patients like circus animals, opening the lecture hall on Tuesday afternoons for demonstrations of their symptoms. Hysteria was a leading medical theory until Charcot’s death in 1892, when it was quickly swept under the rug of medical misadventures. He is still remembered for Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease and other neurological and medical phenomena. For someone who is not trained as a medical historian, Husvedt does an admirable job explaining the social and medical contexts as well as the various images of the three beautiful, afflicted women.

Up next: Susan Reverby’sExamining Tuskegee.

Fer Shizzle!

In the last post about my dissertation, I used a Wordle to represent the terms that appear most often in the text. After a conversation online, I then got the idea to create magnets with two different images at Zazzle. They arrived just two days later and are currently decorating our stove.

If for some reason you would like a little dissertation swag, just let me know. More can be ordered; they're $5 each.


Editor's Note: Dear Husband told me I had spelled "fo' shizzle" incorrectly, so I looked it up. Urban Dictionary and Slang Words Dictionary tell me that "fer shizzle" is the preppy, suburban corruption of the stylized urban phrase...my bad!

Introducing: Dissertation 3.0!

Copyright + Title Page + Abstract + Table of Contents + Preface + Introduction + 5 Chapters + 2 Introductory Essays + Conclusion + Appendix + Bibliography = 1 Dissertation

Pages: ix + 363 (323 pages of text in the main body)

Words: 141,528

Footnotes: 1,022

Illustrations: 26

Tables: 9

Recipes: 15

164 Primary Sources + 399 Secondary Sources + 29 Periodicals + 6 Online Resources = 598 Total Sources

7 Archives + 9 Libraries in 7 Cities

And it can all be reduced to a potato-shaped Wordle that shows I use the word "like" more often than "Dresden," less often than "food," and about as often as the word "body." Fabulous. German history written by the Valley girl I never was! (Click to enlarge.)

Editor's Note: You may also be interested in Dissertation 3.0, Dissertation 2.0 or Dissertation 1.0.

From Soup to Nuts

Early in my dissertation I discuss the ubiquity of feeding beef broth to patients, and I close with some remarks on nutrition and food policy under the National Socialists. In an irreverent universe, I would entitle the book manuscript

"From Soup to Nuts: Nutrition and the Telescopic Body in Germany, 1890-1935."

But that probably won't fly at an academic press, so I'll stick with the original title, "The Politics of the Table." For your amusement, here is the table of contents in the format of an elaborate, 11-course banquet menu:

Oysters on the Half Shell

Acknowledgements

Soup

Introduction: Bodies that Eat (and Drink)

Appetizer

Nutrition in the Laboratory, 1890-1930

Light Meat

Feeding the Sick: Nutrition and Authority in the Clinic and the Sick Room

Cold Entrée

Under the Hygiene Eye: Nutrition at the German Hygiene Museum

Hot Entrée

How to Cook Your Vegetables, or

Ragnar Berg’s Controversy with the German Canning Industry

Pudding

The Blockade and Rationing in Saxony

Roast

The Politics of the Family Table during World War I

Vegetable

Special Rations: How the War Came to Sick Rooms in Dresden

Dessert

“I am not a taste barbarian”: Taste and Bodily Sensations during World War I

Fruit and Cheese

Nutritional Knowledge and Power in the Third Reich

The Dissertator

Now that this period in my life is almost over, I finally feel like I can joke about it...

We are pleased to introduce the third in our line of student action figures: The Dissertator! Our busy bee wears jeans and a t-shirt so she won't look out of place in the library, at a coffee shop, or at home on the couch. She comes with one stack of library books and one stack of manila folders containing photocopies from the archives. There is even a sheet of stickers so you can choose her laptop screen: MS Word? Facebook? YouTube? For only $15 extra, we'll include one of three distractions: a cat, a basket of laundry, or a pile of Netflix DVDs. Let us choose for you please.

You may also like our other student action figures: Biker Graduate Student, Conference Goer, or their companion, Card-Carrying Union Member. New this summer: Medical Student!

Dissertation 3.0

Countdown Clocks

You may also be interested in Dissertation 2.0 or Dissertation 1.0.

Dissertation 2.0

Now announcing Dissertation 2.0! Thanks to market pressure, this update to Dissertation 1.0 has been released two-and-a-half weeks early. The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Telescopic Body in Saxon Germany, 1890-1935 offers improvements to all of the features of the first model, an extended Introduction and Conclusion, and a full suite of Appendices and Illustrations. Due to timing and supply issues, we regret that we cannot offer Chapter 6 at this time.


COMING SOON! Dissertation 3.0!

The Write Stuff

What, don't you recline on the floor to work?

Or have you adopted those new-fangled contraptions they call "desk" and "chair"?

Dissertation 1.0

Today I delivered the first version of Dissertation 1.0! At 307 pages, it is the longest piece of writing I have created myself. My undergraduate honors thesis clocked in at 5 chapters and 125 pages, while our book, Individual and Collective Memory Consolidation, is as long as the diss, but there were four of us. This model of The Politics of the Table: Nutrition and the Telescopic Body in Saxon Germany, 1890-1935 comes with an introduction, five chapters, and two introductory essays. Front matter (abstract, acknowledgements, preface, and table of contents) included free of charge. It ships without Chapter 6. If you would like to have Chapter 6, please order Dissertation 2.0, due out next March. Conclusion still in Beta.

Cut & Paste

Because sometimes writing really is a matter of cut and paste/tape/staple:

This is what the conclusion of my dissertation looked like on a recent afternoon. I have since scribbled three more pages of handwritten paragraphs. The document open on my laptop is still blank.

When I took this picture I don't remember noticing that my feet were in the frame, so I must not have been wearing my glasses. However, they are not among the objects scattered on the floor, so I'm not entirely sure where they were while I was engaged in this activity. That empty spot on the floor is for me.


Editor's note: I have been too busy cooking up fun, recuperating from it, and immersing myself in work to make up for my lack of productivity while traveling/recovering to write anything to post to this blog. I have a few hours this evening in which to rectify the situation, so email subscribers don't be surprised if you receive some back-dated posts over the next week or so.