The end of an era

[hrj]

To a large extent, the entire long process of reorganizing and redecorating the house has marked the end of the "grad school period" of my life (if only because some parts of the process were specifically put off for years while I was finishing the degree). But somehow there's something very ... final about taking all my old photocopied class readers and binders full of class notes and homeworks and putting them in the recycling bin. I'm having to make a very clear separation between the linguistics books and references that I have some expectation of using in the future, and those that I acquired only to help me write the dissertation. Well, ok, the separation isn't that clear yet. I'm keeping a bunch of books that I probably will never use again but that are simply such wonderful gems of analysis and information that I can't bear to part with them yet (or that I paid enough for that I'd like to try to squeeze some trade-in value out of them rather than simply putting them in the general "deaccessioned" pile for rummaging). On the other hand, I really don't need three copies each of Metaphors We Live By, More than Cool Reason, Philosophy in the Flesh, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, or Mental Spaces. I'm not at all sure why I have three copies of some of them. Two I can understand: one for the campus office and one for home. But the only reason for three is that I kept getting freebies as a TA. Now if I squeeze all the Indo-European grammar books into the free space in the non-Celtic language and linguistics bookcase, I'll have freed up four shelves in the general linguistics bookcase that will be enough to cover the onomastics overflow (from the onomastics bookcase), and then ... well, the dominoes keep falling. So far I think I have about 20 shelf-feet of deaccessioned books. Yow.

I really must get back to doing fun linguisticky things. I have some ideas for an in-persona SCA collegium class on linguistic theory. I think with a lot of pre-planning and scripting, it would be fun to do in a sort of Socratic mode: asking the students questions on grammatical theory and then "correcting" them with the official medieval answer. (Ok, I have to work on this a lot if I'm going to make it fun for the students and not just for me.)

Comments

[beanolc.livejournal.com]

Regarding the grad school purge: I am definitely not ready for this, and fear I never will be. I still have notebooks from my undergrad days.

Regarding your collegium idea: I think it sounds fun now, but I am lit geek. Regardless, I'd take the class.