I’m figuring things out as I go along, so please excuse any mess, wonky images, etc.
Image via Wikimedia Commons
Case in point: the lovely image that I’ve substituted in the header is Road to Dos Lunas by David Wilbanks. It’s used under a Creative Commons CC BY 2.0 license. There’s some HTML code that I should be able to use to make that attribution more cleanly, but I don’t seem to be able to figure that out just yet.
Spools 02 (Photo credit: sarabeephoto)
I set out on this period of adventure with this idea that I’d like to learn to do and make some new things. Physical things, I mean: things I build, assemble, or fabricate, and that result in a concrete product.
Recently I’ve been working on sewing. My mom taught me to use her sewing machine sometime around the time I graduated from college. I made myself a jumper, felt a small sense of accomplishment, and that was about it. In the years since, I’ve never had much urge to sew anything, certainly not enough to motivate me to get a machine, figure out where to keep it, and get in enough practice to actually remember how to use it the once every 5 years or so an idea gets hold of me.
The ideas I would get weren’t very Martha Stewart-ish. They definitely weren’t Project Runway. (Well, I shouldn’t say that, really, because I’ve never seen Project Runway. But I don’t have the impression that they make things out of old tablecloths, so that lets me out.) I would get fixated on a stained or holey tablecloth seen at a yard sale and wanting to be able to cut it up and turn the good bits into napkins or something. Or, I’d wish I could darn the holes in my socks. Small projects, silly even, but ones that would make me feel like I’d used things well or restored some order to my little corner of the world.
Now I find myself living in a house with three sewing machines, some wonderfully soft–but torn–cotton sheets, and a shortage of kitchen towels. It seemed like an opportunity.
There’s a kind of meditative quality to sewing straight lines that I’m finding very relaxing right now. True, my hems aren’t all that straight yet, but they’re getting there. And I’m wishing I had even more old sheets to cut up.
Wikipedia (Photo credit: Octavio Rojas)
Popping in quickly to report progress on my goals from last week.
Oh, wait. You didn’t know I had goals, did you? Because I never got around to writing that post except in my head. (While running. Which is a good time to think, but not a good time to type.)
No matter. Fortunately, catching up on blogging wasn’t one of my goals for last week.
No, I decided that I was drifting into a funk in part because I kept putting off some of the interesting things I wanted to do while underemployed until after I had finished all the things I should do. I’ve always been an eat-your-vegetables-first kind of girl. But that approach wasn’t doing much for my spirits, or for learning, lately.
I resolved that in addition to doing my taxes last week, I would make tangible progress towards two different projects I had identified for myself. And, in fact, I did.
This week is a particularly busy one, so I’m setting the more modest goal simply to make more progress on one of those things. Grandma Meyer’s 30 year old Bernina Nova quit working about 3/4 of the way through hemming the second tea towel, so the smart money is on Wikipedia.
I’ve had a few weeks of wanting to pull into my shell and hide from the world recently. The phone rings and I find myself hoping it’s not for me. I see someone I know briefly, in a public place, and am secretly relieved when they don’t notice me.
To be clear, this has nothing to do with the specific people involved. I enjoy talking to friends on the phone and I mostly enjoy any of the people I might run into in public. It’s just that interacting feels like it takes a lot of energy right now, especially if I’m taken by surprise. My ability to go from 0 to full-on sociability in 10 seconds is really lacking.
If you’re an introvert, this may sound familiar to you. I recognize it as an amplification of my normal introvert tendencies, something that just happens sometimes, especially if I’m tired or feeling a bit blue.
While I was in this mode, a very nice person did a very nice thing for me, passing along Versatile Blogger Award. Per the instructions, I was encouraged to post seven little-known informational tidbits about myself, and then pass the award on to seven others.
Now I know these kinds of awards are a bit of a longstanding blogging institution and a completely friendly way of encouraging new people and bringing attention to their blogs. But, I also have a long-standing aversion to — and semi-official policy against — anything that involves passing a set of instructions on to five, or seven, or ten different people. And while I was trying to reconcile these two contradictory things I. just. kind of. froze. Mix in a couple of bad dreams about it, let stand for a few days while preoccupied with something else, and behold: one case of very solid writers block and a craven desire to avoid the blog altogether.
I’m going to attempt to get out of this fix simply by publicly admitting it and moving on. While sidestepping official participation in the award protocol, I plan to write an upcoming post on things you may not know about me. And I resolve to make more regular efforts to direct your attention to other blogs and bloggers you might enjoy, but I’m going to do it in my own way.
Stay tuned: hopefully I’ll have more to say in the future than I have in the past few weeks.
Piece of chalk and blackboard (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
This is one of the questions I’m asked most frequently when people hear that my full-time museum job was eliminated. Often, it turns out that the asker is thinking about college or community college teaching.
I totally understand why this seems logical. After all my career has mostly been in teaching and learning–albeit outside the classroom–and in a core subject that almost every institution of higher learning has multiple classes in every semester. I don’t have a Ph.D., but I do have a subject area MA, which is generally enough to qualify you to teach in community colleges and maybe, sometimes, in certain circumstances, to teach special classes at four year colleges (though almost never on an ongoing or full-time basis).
I exist on the fringes of the academic world, sort of on the periphery of a cluster of occupations that are coming to be known as alt-ac, or alternate academic careers — the sort of things that involve advanced learning and are often embedded in, or contiguous to the academic context without actually constituting the traditional faculty role. So I’m pretty attuned to what’s going on in academia in ways that I forget many people are not.
And that’s why I know that it doesn’t make much sense for me to think about teaching as a major career direction. It’s because of things like this. And this.
It’s worth the time to take a look at the links if you’re interested in higher education or labor conditions. Or if you’re thinking about going to graduate school in the humanities. But for those who don’t have the time, the bottom line is that most teaching jobs these days involve adjunct positions (i.e. part-time, pay-per-course gigs). As summarized in the ProfHacker post linked above, this often means you max out the number of courses you can teach, while earning about $375 / week. “Depending on the number of hours this faculty member spends with course preparation, teaching, grading, and student conferencing, this professor’s hourly rate is often below the national minimum wage. It’s important to keep in mind that this rate does not usually include any kind of health insurance or retirement benefits.”
It is not, unfortunately, particularly unusual for those college teachers to qualify for food stamps or other forms of public assistance, or to find that they’re stuck in a pattern that they can’t get out of, partly because they’re working every spare minute to keep their heads above water.
That, in a nutshell, is why I don’t spend a lot of time thinking about teaching.
I’ve got some catching up to do here. First off, this is the completed version of a post I started a couple of weeks ago.
Captain Field's Improved Parallel Rule, c. 1854, uploaded by Rodhullandemu to Wikimedia Commons
My job search is a bit amorphous right now. Yes, I’m looking at job announcements for full-time museum positions, especially those that involve history research, writing, interpretive planning, or curatorial work. I’m also thinking about transferable skills and where else they might be useful. I’m working as a contractor on some projects for my old museum, and setting up a small business infrastructure to take on other freelance work if the opportunity presents itself. I’m open to an economic strategy that involves combining different temp, part-time, or sideline work. And I’m consciously thinking of frugality as part of my strategy. After all, money not spent is money I don’t have to earn.
On the ground, this being open to multiple options sometimes translates into aimless wandering. Or at least that’s how I suspect it looks from the outside. As someone who likes to have everything all planned out, I cringe a little bit when kind people making small talk ask me about my job hunt and I hear how unfocused my response sounds. Or when I have to admit that I have a privilege license and a tax id, but only worked on a business plan briefly one morning before becoming absorbed in another task.
Beneath the self-consciousness, though, I really do believe there’s some sense in what I’m doing.
I found myself in a hands-on workshop on eighteenth-century surveying and map-making techniques recently. (Yes, I know, the very idea of finding yourself in a class on how to plot roads the 1700s way is enough to provoke snorts from most of you. All except the select few who are deeply jealous.) Here’s the one thing I learned that will stick with me longest: you start the map by marking all your angles. You might be tempted to mark your starting point, use the protractor to find the angle to your first landmark, measure the distance, make a dot, move the protractor to the dot, find the next angle, etc. But every time you move the protractor, you introduce a new opportunity for error. Maybe you place it only a fraction of a degree off its previous orientation, but those fractions add up over time. So, you place the protractor once, mark all the bearings you’re going to need, and then use a parallel rule to “walk” the angle to wherever on the paper you need to draw your line.
Not only did I find this process deeply satisfying in some mysterious way (perhaps similar to what some people get out of knitting?), it also gave me a useful way to think about my current career juncture.
I may look like I’m standing around looking off in a lot of directions while putting off actually moving. Really though, I’m finding my bearings.
I haven’t had the urge, or time, or energy to say much recently. So I’ll simply share this link to some gorgeous, starkly beautiful photography of the Highlands. Spending a few minutes mentally immersed in the landscapes has done my heart good this morning.
Winter Trees (Photo credit: mikecogh)
Last week was an up-and-down week. Some immediate next steps for me suddenly started to come together. Then, just as quickly, other things started falling apart–some in ways that are eminently fixable, if exasperating, and some in ways whose ultimate impact is unclear.
Friday through Sunday I attended a professional meeting that was close enough to commute to, but far enough to keep me in the car for 2-3 hours a day. That didn’t leave much time for writing, but it made up for it in thinking time. A lot of those highway miles sped by in processing events I encountered in the last week that were discouraging and demoralizing.
But, when I’d worried those around long enough inside my head, I consciously started a list of affirmative things I’d encountered in the last week, things that spoke to my better nature, inspired me, or gave me joy:
I’ve been on Pinterest for while now. Long enough that the early thrill of madly pinning stuff had worn off. Recently, I’ve mainly been using it as my morning . . .and break time . . . and evening . . . dose of eye-candy, taking quick scan through the images that the people I follow have been saving.
But Pinterest seems to have achieved some kind of critical mass in the last month or two, at least judging by the number of new people who have followed me and the increasing number of how-to articles and “finally succumbed” references I’m seeing.
I’d read a couple of people’s ideas about how Pinterest might be used in PR, including for cultural organizations and museums, but nothing was really clicking for me until this week. Recently, though, I’ve been checking out Melissa Mannon’s ongoing project to create a crowd-sourced board about archivists, and just yesterday I followed a twitter link to NEMA’s impressive (and apparently brand-spanking-new) collection of boards on New England museums.
So, this morning, when I ran across a cool, vivid pink, end of the 19th century, designer evening gown that I liked, I changed my pattern. Instead of debating whether to repin it to “my style” (I like it a lot, but not sure I’d want to wear it) or “old” (admittedly a catch-all for anything of that description that doesn’t fit another category) I created a board called “cool stuff from museums.” If nothing else, maybe it will remind the other users that see it that these images of neat things don’t magically appear out of the maw of the internet (or Photoshop), but represent real items in actual physical collections somewhere.
The way Pinterest works, I can designate other users to add to this board, but I need to know their Pinterest IDs; I can’t just make it open to anyone. (Or at least, if I can, I don’t know how.) So if you have some cool museum artifacts to add, just let me know and I’ll designate you an editor.
My second guest post for The Uncataloged Museum is up today. If you happened to miss the first, you can find it archived here. Thanks again to Linda Norris for giving me a platform.
Codex Climaci Rescriptus. The fainter, two-column text is the earliest known version of the New Testament written in Palestinian Aramaic. Image courtesy of the Green Collection.
This morning I went with several of my former co-workers to see an exhibit. That’s not unusual, as we occasionally do take in exhibits together, both for our own enjoyment and to see and discuss different exhibit approaches and techniques. However, this differed in that we weren’t at another museum or local gallery; we were at the Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary to see a four-day exhibit called The Museum of the Bible.
If you live in Charlotte, and read the Charlotte Observer regularly, you may have caught the brief story about the exhibit last week. Otherwise, I’m not sure how you would have known about it, but obviously there was some publicity (through churches, I would guess) because all available tickets were spoken for a few weeks ago. In fact, I probably would never have known about it, had not one of our colleagues received a related inquiry from the seminary.
The collection of rare biblical manuscripts was passing through Charlotte on its way to the Vatican. It’s part of a massive collection of 40,000 texts and artifacts amassed by Hobby Lobby president Steve Green since 2009. An even larger subset of the collection is currently on exhibit in Atlanta.
Aside from obvious differences in the texts involved, the exhibit reminded me most of The Declaration of Independence Road Trip several years ago. Both projects involve wealthy private individuals purchasing extremely rare documents with the admirable purpose of sharing and making them available to the general public. Both involved exhibitions that stayed in town for much briefer periods that typical museum exhibits and attracted snaking lines of viewers drawn by a once-in-a-lifetime chance to see rare documents.
At the seminary, the exhibit flowed through three interconnected rooms, including the chapel. Yellow adhesive arrows on the carpet marked the designated traffic flow. Artifacts
A complete Torah scroll from northern Spain around the time of the Spanish Inquisition. It was amazing to be close enough to the scrolls to see the threads of the stitching and the color variation in the skins that denoted repairs over time. Image courtesy of the Green Collection.
were displayed on tables covered with black tablecloths. For the most part, the books and document fragments had portable tabletop cases. However, most of the scrolls in the room devoted to Judaica were too large for the cases, and were rolled out atop the tablecloths. A row of chairs lined up in front of the tables provided some spacing between visitors and artifacts. Still it would have been easily possible for us to reach out and touch several of the medieval scrolls, though of course we didn’t, and didn’t notice anyone else doing it either. Simple paper “table tents” served as object identifiers and provided some interpretive information.
I thoroughly enjoyed the exhibit, despite often wishing for more historical or contextual information than the labels provided. In particular, if it hadn’t been for some helpful seminary volunteers and an inquisitive lady ahead of me in line, I would still be in the dark about why the mummy mask was included; I completely missed any written explanation that papyrus fragments of biblical texts have been found embedded in mummy masks, and that the mask context provides a crucial chronological context for establishing that those texts were around in that form by the earliest centuries CE.
The scrolls in particular were amazing, and their stories were often moving. I was a bit taken aback to read that the fire damage to one had undoubtedly been inflicted by Muslim extremists, without any additional information or rationale for that statement given. Torahs desecrated by Nazis, or partially destroyed by communists were labeled with more specific details to clarify what had happened to them.
A favorite of mine, this 13th century Ethiopian New Testament is written in Ge'ez and was commissioned by a woman, for her daughter. Image courtesy of the Green Collection.
Of course, it wasn’t possible to take pictures in the exhibit, but the Charlotte Observer has a short image gallery here, and I’ve incorporated some images from the Green Collection media guide.
The exhibit was well-attended, with (not surprisingly for a Monday morning) a heavy representation of visitors that I took to be retirees, and at least one mother with young children. People seemed engaged with the objects, tolerant of the need to bend over to read labels at table height, and respectful of exhibit rules and restrictions. The Green Scholars who travel with the exhibit, as well as the seminary volunteers stationed throughout the rooms, were almost always engaged in answering questions and talking to people.
In short, I’d judge the exhibit to be a success, at least from the standpoint of visitor engagement and satisfaction. And it made me reflect again on the challenges and paradoxes that museums face in truly engaging with the public. For a lot of different reasons, most career museum people I know would never entertain the idea of putting centuries-old artifacts out on tables with folded paper labels. And yet, increasingly, I get the sense that for a lot of our audience that kind of “just put it out there and let us look” approach has a tremendous appeal, that perhaps it’s what they want in a museum. How do we reconcile the aim to be responsive to the public as equal partners in our institutions with an ingrained professional culture that insists that exhibits should have more interpretation, a more polished presentation, and different preservation trade-offs than many visitors seem to prefer?
And how can museums capture the sense of opportunity and wonder that these private collections seem to inspire? Is a limited time frame key to creating the sense of urgency? Does moving outside of museum halls make things more approachable? Is there something about the concept of an individual owner sharing a collection that makes it feel more compelling? Because really — and without slighting the great gift that the private owners have made to the public by sharing their collections — this is what museums are all about: sharing collections for the public good. In fact, it’s inherent in the way American museums, even private ones, are set up that the collections are held as a public trust. So how is it that we’ve missed the boat on making every museum visit feel like a rare special opportunity to see unparalleled treasures?
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