Dwelling attained, I have returned from my sojourn to the northern wastes, where it is still, like, friggin' spring, and have resumed my rightful all-peach diet.

Hello, students.

My analytics inform me that a bunch of people from around the country are googling me at the moment. I'm fairly sure I haven't become famous, so I can only conclude that the googlers are my new students. So this is a post for them.

Hi, students. I'm looking forward to meeting you on Wednesday, bright and early at 8:30 am. As far as I can tell, there are only seven of you. We should be able to have excellent discussions with such a small group. A small group also poses some challenges, though; in particular, you all have to be pretty well on your game, because there's no room to hide. (Translation: if you don't do the reading, I'll definitely know.) Keeping me posted on problems that come up should help the class go smoothly; because we're a small group, we can be extra nimble and reassess as needed.

You may have noticed that I'm not regular Emory faculty. I'm a postdoctoral fellow at the Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, that charming house on North Decatur Road, across from Glenn Memorial. I've been here all year doing research, but this is the first and very likely last course I'll teach at Emory. Previously I was a fellow in the English Department at the University of California, Berkeley, where I also did my Ph.D. Although this is a temporary appointment, I take teaching at Emory very seriously; I'm still in touch with many of my former students, and hope I'll stay in touch with you too.

At Berkeley I taught a number of courses in poetry and fiction, mostly American lit, but some British and French too. My most recent course was a delightful upper-level undergraduate seminar in American poetry called "Didactic Modernism." I miss Berkeley students, but I hear Emory students are pretty great too. You can read some of my thoughts on teaching here.

Are you wondering whether you need to fear me? You don't. I'm not an "easy" teacher; I have high expectations for you. But I also want to help you meet those expectations.

There are a few things I expect you to have nailed down on your own, of course—basic grown-up stuff like doing the reading, showing up to class, and keeping track of the course schedule. If you have a high school diploma (and you do), then that stuff should be no big deal. We will be doing some genuinely challenging work, however, and I expect to need to walk you through a few things. Because I'm old and decrepit (compared to you), I sometimes forget which concepts and readings are hard. If I seem to have forgotten, do me a favor and remind me.

While you'll meet me in my capacity as a teacher, it's important for you to know that I'm also—indeed, primarily—a researcher. Although it may not be obvious in class, my research is an important part of my teaching; it lets me design courses that have never been taught before, and integrate the most recent and interesting scholarship into your education. I don't just want to dump facts or concepts into your head; I want to draw you into the process of making knowledge—i.e. research—that I find so exciting. I want you to come out of this course knowing some new things, but just as importantly, I want you to come out equipped to find out things that no one else yet knows or has been able to describe.

I think this course is going to be a lot of fun. Do you have questions? Lay them on me; I'm at ncecire@emory.edu. I'd be happy to hear from you.

See you Wednesday!

Cyclorama

I've been wanting to do some Atlanta blogging lately, but I never seem to have time. This morning Bart and Colleen and I went to the Atlanta Cyclorama, which was as awesome as you might expect (i.e. super awesome). The painting itself is of course cheesy, and the voiceover that they do for the tour does a little of that Confederate nostalgia thing, but they didn't lay it on as thick as I expected they would (I grew up in Virginia, so). The Clark-Gable-as-dead-Union-soldier figurine in the front? Amazing. I was surprised to learn that all the tchotchkes at the base of the painting were added in the 1930s, since such effects are sort of classically 1890s. But the painting was on tour in the 1890s, so I guess that makes sense. And it's a reminder of the unevenness of the way we periodize media—Frederick A. Lucas talks a lot about cycloramas in his 1920s pamphlet on the AMNH dioramas, for example. It was also, shall we say, sociologically interesting to observe the people who were on this cyclorama tour.

Sooner or later I want to write up something about the High Museum, which currently has some cool stuff on loan from MoMA, but I guess that isn't going to be today.

I may as well throw out the obligatory Americanist point, though: the High Museum has a building called the Wieland Pavilion. Seriously!

In case of fire, people, stop, drop, and roll.

Kind of blue

I'm not at all a food blogger, for a number of reasons. Primarily, I cannot follow a recipe to save my life. Halfway through I always decide a recipe is really more like a guideline or a suggestion. As I've mentioned before, if I ever had a food blog it would have to be called "Whatever; It's Probably Fine."

But mostly, I'm just not very interested in writing about food. I prefer to eat it.

That said, there is something beguiling about the vast assortment of grains available at Your DeKalb Farmer's Market, the enormous and bizarre food purveyor in Decatur that is filling in the gap in my life where the Berkeley Bowl used to be. And it's autumn, so, in short, I've made some cookies.

Let's call them "Kind of blue" cookies, or "I am easily distracted by grains" for short. This makes a small batch, because, in addition to being easily distracted by grains, I live alone and never need a zillion cookies at a time. I imagine the recipe could be scaled up, although I haven't bothered to try.

Ingredients:

1/4 c softened unsalted butter (or salted; who cares?)
1/2 c white sugar
1 large egg

1/4 c each: coarse semolina; white flour
1/3 c blue cornmeal (or a little more)
1/4 tsp baking powder (I say this as if I measured it, but obviously I didn't; just dump a little in)
sea salt: use your judgment

If you care about form, use Standard Cookie Procedure: cream the sugar into the butter, add the egg, combine the dry ingredients in a separate bowl, then put the dry ingredients into the wet and stir until just combined. I think the butter/sugar step is the only one that really needs to be kept separate.

This does not call for a Kitchen-Aid.

Drop the dough onto parchment paper (trust me, I speak from bitter experience) with a spoon (use your judgment) and bake at 400F (or whatever) until they're, you know, done.

If you should happen to forget the salt and wind up sprinkling it on top of the cookies while they're in the oven, not that I have done this or anything, the results are, I think, intriguing in a good way.

Nobody cares if they're uneven. They're made of sugar, for God's sake.

N.b. there is no vanilla extract in this recipe. If you are one of those people who dumps vanilla in everything willy-nilly, well, go for it. I, however, am a believer in the flavor of flour and butter, and prefer to protect its purity. Long-time acquaintences will recognize in this philosophy the origins of the Scone Principle as well.

My missing books!: a crucial update

So... it turns out that someone in New York (a poet, in fact) received twenty-two of my precious missing books in the mail, all jumbled up with books of hers. It wasn't all of my books (Arcades Project? still missing), and in addition she wound up with three books belonging to an unknown third party. But my copy of This Sex Which Is Not One was in there, along with my complete Plato, my Myra Jehlen (what, I needed it just yesterday) and my Gubar-annotated A Room of One's Own.

Now I'm starting to have hope that my other books may return to me through the magic of the internet. (Yup, she googled me.)

So IF YOU HAVE MY BOOKS!: I really miss them. Send them?

Books that I appear to have lost in the move:
The Arcades Project
Jen Fleissner's Women, Compulsion, Modernity
Ugly Feelings
The Wings of the Dove
all of my Fredric Jameson (??--this was several volumes!)

So much bitterness.

New stuff

I sure have been neglecting this blog lately, and all I have of late is a little linkspam.

First of all, Ryan Cordell writes on the overly-Facebooky-but-okay-I-guess Google+ about a cool project for people who want to get started in digital humanities but aren't sure where to begin:

Know someone who wants to get started in the digital humanities but doesn't know how to do so? They should apply for DHCommons' preconvention workshop at MLA 2012, cosponsored by NITLE and the Texas A&M Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. Representatives from a range of prominent DH projects and centers will be on hand for training and consultation.

Apply here.

And second, we've finally launched Colloquies at Arcade! Here's my Ed Blog post introducing Colloquies, the Colloquies landing page, which will soon have more than one Colloquy on it (specifically, on September 1, when I release the next Colloquy), and our very first Colloquy, "The Contemporary Novel," introduced by the great Lee Konstantinou.

And, shhh, Arcade may also be seeing a long-awaited up-hay-ade-gray.

Oh, and I switched my California driver's license over to a Georgia one. Guess I'm a Georgian now.

Image: Peaches. Bryan Costin, 2005. CC NC-BY-SA 2.0.

Coffee in Atlanta

[A report, after four days of intensive investigation, punctuated here and there by "apartment-hunting."]

1. You can buy Blue Bottle beans at Star Provisions on Howell Mill Road. When I saw the Bella Donovan I nearly wept with relief.

2. Steady Hand on North Decatur (right by the Fox Center!) brews Intelligentia, which is respectable. I don't know what their funky apparatus is, but it produces a clean brew that does a good job of revealing the character of the bean.

3. Octane on Marietta brews Counter Culture, and I was favorably impressed; it is, like the coffee from Steady Hand, nuanced third-wave stuff. But they brew it in a French press, apparently with a finer grind than is really appropriate for a press, and the result is a rather muddy brew even after you've let it settle. Good coffee, but advantage goes to Steady Hand for texture.

4. I want to like the local roaster, Batdorf and Bronson, and they seem, you know, perfectly fine. But so far I'm not thrilled by it or ready to adopt it as my new local coffee. Aurora and the Bakeshop brew it and dispense it in an air pot—which is to say, it's morally okay to put this coffee in an air pot. This is, I would say, perfectly acceptable coffee, but I wouldn't go out of my way for it.

5. Urban Grind's coffee, I am sorry to say, is a disappointment.

So, like, I'm in Atlanta?

Sweet FSM. I packed one (1) box of books. It barely made a dent in my shelves, and I nearly died schlepping it down to the Elmwood post office.

This is going to be a trial.

Today is officially the last day of my appointment at Cal, although I'm around for a few more weeks. I'm still somewhat in denial of my impending move to Atlanta, where I'll be a fellow at the Fox Center at Emory for the next year. Part of that is my reluctance to leave the Bay Area (and my fantastic 1908 Leola Hall-designed Elmwood apartment); most of it is the enormous pain in the ass of a cross-country move.

Hall was known for her built-ins.

But I'm looking forward to the year's work, which will mainly be on my book, and to hanging out with my new Emory and ATL-area colleagues. I'll also teach an undergraduate course in the spring. (On lady robots? Undoubtedly.)

Including my postdoctoral year, I'll have spent nearly eight years in Berkeley. It's been a good run.

[Obligatory Georgia-related link. Come to think of it, I probably need a playlist if I'm going to get all this packing done. Suggestions welcome.]