bronze_ribbons | a bit of planning, a bundle of self-promotion

Oh, golly. I am definitely going to preach on Joseph Priestley next month, in part because his birthday falls on March 13 (the day after my pulpit date) and in main because there isn't a single book in my public library about him. And it's a good library. That's not right.

On the other side of the coin, Interlibrary Library Loan just landed a book on African Americans in Iowa I'd wanted to get my mitts on. (I'm writing an article on Gertrude Rush -- the first black woman to practice law in Iowa -- and there's precious little in mainstream print about her. Any of you legal scholars have suggestions...? Side notes: first woman to practice law in the US was Arabella Mansfield, admitted to the Iowa bar in 1869. First female African American attorney was Charlotte E. Ray (admitted April 23, 1872, DC). Rush passed her bar exam in 1918.)

Reasons for you to consider participating in the Strange Horizons Readers' Choice Awards:

(1) If you vote, you'll be entered in a drawing for an Amazon or Booksense gift certificate.

(2) My poem Some Houseguests Can't Be Helped is on the ballot. Bruce Boston disliked it,

joannemerriam (to whom it is dedicated) loved it...

(3) My favorite of Joanne's poems is "Settler's Song" -- which differs from her own assessment of the lot, but what fun would this be if we agreed? ;-)

(4) Lots of other talented people on the list, including

fairmer,

douglain,

jlundberg,

matociquala, and, and, and... You have until March 17 to peruse their work.

BlueGreen Planet will featuring some of my work on e-cards in the near future, and

marrael's looking for various kinds of volunteer help as well as submissions of short poetry and prose. Check it out...

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Doesn't Byrd just rock your socks off? He's grrrreat.

My experience with legal history is limited (I've done a little with intersexuality and the law, but not a whole lot) but I'll see if I can come up with any suggestions. What comes to mind right away is calling the Iowa Bar Association or checking to see if any of the unis in Iowa have law schools that might publish a law review. I'll think this over.

Doesn't Byrd just rock your socks off? He's grrrreat

Mmm, yes. Him and Tallis &co. One of these years I am going to have to get serious about improving my vocal chops so I can expand my early music options (I'm a decent ensemble singer, but not quite at the level needed to perform at semi-professional level in this town).

(Then again, right now my mind is still obsessively running through "Aicha," which I finally realized is reminding me of (1) the Offspring's "Self-Esteem," (2) Los Lobos's "Stay Gold," and (3) some other French or Corsican pop song called "Reponds a moi" or somesuch. Bloody predictable hindbrain hooks...)

Thanks much for the suggestions! I do have a list started of schools/associations to contact, based on the online stuff i've found so far on GR, and need to do some more detective work on whether her Des Moines University records still exist anywhere (the current Des Moines University is not the same institution, it turns out). The glitch is that I don't have the contract for this yet, so I'm reluctant to spend any much time on it until the publisher comes through...but odds are excellent that contract will arrive, so I don't want to be scrabbling for sources at the last minute. *sigh* Priorities, priorities...

(I'm a decent ensemble singer, but not quite at the level needed to perform at semi-professional level in this town).

I have a fab range but very little vocal agility, it turns out, so a lot of the 16th/17th-century stuff I love to listen to is out of my league as far as performance goes. I even have trouble with some of the longer passages out of Handel and Mozart - I can usually hit the root of each of the arpeggiated chords (after two semesters of theory I should know what those are called, but I don't) in those long passages, but I can rarely do the whole run. Even when I hear someone sing them it just usually sounds like they're singing while being shaken.

My issues are even more fundamental than that -- I took a break from singing for five years or so, and with lack of practice (compounded by recurrent brochitis), I've lost both range and breath control. Things I'd like to retrieve eventually, but when I'm honest with myself, music is not even among my top five priorities, so I'm trying not to beat myself up about not getting around to practice. (The good thing is that I'm a far smarter musician than I was back in my twenties, and I've just started learning the "Nashville Number System" (i.e., how to read and write band charts), which I'm finding nifty enough to engage both sides of my brain...)

P.S. So maybe some Morley duets just for the heck of it, if/when we finally meet? :-)

I suppose I could be persuaded. :^)

That's some nifty stuff you got in the hopper. Would love to read the sermon when it's ready.

Who the heck is Bruce Boston? I hope you win!

Thank you for the encouragement! I shall post it once it's delivered.

Bruce is a well-known and well-regarded speculative poetry writer. The whole kerfluffle amused me more than not, since it was obviously Not About Me.

Oh, oh! How did I miss the bit on Joseph Priestley? Wow. That's cool. He's a really funky guy - one of my faves from the 18th century. I'm not surprised that the public library doesn't have anything on him, though, since...okay, he's a big person in the history of science, but in order to know that he is, one would first have to know something about the history of science. Meaning, he's not a Galileo or Newton or Darwin or Einstein - the folks everyone knows. He falls in more with the Copernicus/Kepler/Mendel/Faraday crowd, who are equally big in many ways but for some weird reason not as widely known amongst the hoi polloi (of which you are decidedly not a member, but still).

I don't know where he stands in theology or religious history, though I imagine that whole bringing of formal unitarianism to the U.S. would, y'know, like, warrant some prominence. :^)

So what about him interests you?

(Is that what you're specializing in -- history of science? (I'd been meaning to ask anyway...))

Regarding the choice of topic, the church I speak at is very keen on sermons that focus on Unitarian Universalist history and/or context (which matches my own informal mission of publicizing the doings of lesser-known UUs), and there wasn't an obvious holiday for me to use as a springboard for next month's homily, which has been a tactic I've used in the past. (Didn't feel up to doing anything related to Purim, although I might bring a crate of mishloach manot goodie bags if I'm feeling ambitious. *grin*) So, I decided to see if there were any birthdays near March 12, and lo... given all of the press about science vs. religion, that I missed Evolution Day, and that a number of congregants are in fact scientists and/or linked to a local tech university, I think we're going to have some fun with this. :-)

Yup, history of science. Of course, now everyone on the web will know Who I Am...or, well...probably not. :^)

Sounds like a really cool idea re: homily. It's especially interesting because the "other side" of Priestley isn't as well told in undergrad classes, I don't think. They do the the oxygen thing as a priority dispute with Lavoisier and then sort of vaguely mention that Priestley was run out of England for supposedly fomenting anti-trinitarian rebellion and just move on. My first encounter with him was in a class taught by a UU prof ("The only thing that characterizes Unitarians is that nothing characterizes Unitarians," quoth she) who found that side of the story just as interesting, if not more so.

I really ought to know more about these things and people than I do, given how nifty they are. FWIW, I spent way too much time yesterday trying to remember Thomas Kuhn's name: a dorm-mate who majored in HiPSS at Chicago had to read Structures of Scientific Revolutions so often that another friend bestowed upon him a fresh copy of it at Christmas as a gag gift.

I kind of feel the same way about Leviathan and the Air-Pump. What, I have to read this AGAIN?!

a bit of planning, a bundle of self-promotion

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