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Posts by Laura Kolb

A long, skinny map titled: "Life and Travels of the European Eel" with a subtitle reading: "From the Eel's Perspective." A label at the bottom of the map reads: "Begin Here." The map top half of the map is an mirror copy of the bottom half.

I will put the full text of the column in the alt text in an image in the next post in the thread.

 The map goes from the bottom of the page up, starting in the Sargasso Sea. An set of arrows show the eels paths to shore, then up a river and into a marshland. The arrows continue up the page to show the eel leaving the marshland and heading back downstream, and out to sea. The land is green and verdant at the bottom of the map, because the eels migrate upstream in the spring. The land is brown and dry at the top of the map, because eels migrate downstream in the autumn.

A column of text on the side tells about the eels' journeys and changes. It is more text than I can relate in the space allowed here. Each paragraph has an arrow pointing up to the next one, and they are designed to be read from the bottom of the page going upwards.

A long, skinny map titled: "Life and Travels of the European Eel" with a subtitle reading: "From the Eel's Perspective." A label at the bottom of the map reads: "Begin Here." The map top half of the map is an mirror copy of the bottom half. I will put the full text of the column in the alt text in an image in the next post in the thread. The map goes from the bottom of the page up, starting in the Sargasso Sea. An set of arrows show the eels paths to shore, then up a river and into a marshland. The arrows continue up the page to show the eel leaving the marshland and heading back downstream, and out to sea. The land is green and verdant at the bottom of the map, because the eels migrate upstream in the spring. The land is brown and dry at the top of the map, because eels migrate downstream in the autumn. A column of text on the side tells about the eels' journeys and changes. It is more text than I can relate in the space allowed here. Each paragraph has an arrow pointing up to the next one, and they are designed to be read from the bottom of the page going upwards.

Several years ago, on a whim, I started drawing a map of an eel's life travels as seen by the eel.

I figured an eel thinks about its life as a linear journey, rather than a there-and-back again adventure. So I wanted to do a map to reflect this.

This morning, on another whim, I finished the map!

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Not a specific piece but a couple places to look (if you haven’t already): the Folger’s Collation blog & the Sundial

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Please repost: Can you recommend a piece of writing (by you or anyone else) that sets out to make the writer's research in early modern lit/culture accessible to a general readership? I mean Conversation-type stuff but not necessarily The Conversation.

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The ides of March has the chance to do the funniest thing ever

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View of Borderlands Shakespeare and the Sustaining Strategies of Collaboration | Borrowers and Lenders: The Journal of Shakespeare and Appropriation

just learned that my piece on teaching Shakespeare at WTAMU is out in Borrowers and Lenders: on sounding country, Shakespeare voice, and the shame of trying.

borrowers-ojs-azsu.tdl.org/borrowers/ar...

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Assistant/Associate Professor of English Job TitleAssistant/Associate Professor of English Agency West Texas A&M University Department English, Philosophy & Modern Languages Proposed Minimum SalaryCommensurate Job LocationCanyon, Tex...

My department at West Texas A&M is hiring a creative writer (with a Ph. D. required).

Please encourage anyone you know who might be interested to apply. I'm also glad to answer any questions that anyone might have.

Job listing here: tamus.wd1.myworkdayjobs.com/WTAMU_Extern...

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Letter Opposing the Closing of DPAM

If you’re as incensed as everyone at DePaul is about the closing of the university art museum, consider signing this letter. Thanks for the support! openletter.earth/letter-oppos...

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new poem, "Altogether Elsewhere," in new issue of The Sewanee Review thesewaneereview.com/articles/alt...
(1/2)

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Parliament Fowladelic I apologize for the title

celebrate valentine's day by reading this thing i wrote last year about geoffrey chaucer: shooktownreview.substack.com/p/parliament...

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This will warm any annotator’s heart

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Thank you!

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Last semester, I got very excited about one endnote, then ALL the endnotes, in Wilson’s Iliad. Then @bookpostusa.bsky.social gave me the chance to write about them: books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...

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Diary: Laura Kolb, “Sing, Notes” Venturing into the Iliad with new students and Emily Wilson’s notes

New Post → Laura Kolb on the joy of great annotations hitting their mark and the stellar marksmanship in a translation of The Iliad.

books.substack.com/p/diary-laur...

@wwnorton.com @laurakolb.bsky.social

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Question re: accreditation site visits for departments. Are your institutions doing these online now? In person again? Curious what these are looking like these days. (Also welcoming answers from those who serve on eval teams.)

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I definitely do. Weird!

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Update - as several people have suggested, this was very likely a fortune-telling game. Kicking myself for not opening at random & finding out my true calling

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It was used as a fortune-book. It was custom to write the professions of their future possible husbands in the margins, and then 'flip the pages' and then see what came out.

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This from Meadowlands, which uses the Odyssey as a conceit to tell the story of deteriorating marriage. There are 3 broken hearts

There is the detachment of not taking sides, but also the detachment of time – the speaker looking back as an adult and seeing things differently

#poetry
#poemoftheday

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Fortune teller game? Open the book to a random page to play? (I’m thinking of how we’d play MASH with types of houses and occupations of husbands)

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Oh I love this idea!

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There does not seem to be - none I could puzzle out!

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“A drawer at an inn”

“A drawer at an inn”

“A toy shop merchant”

“A toy shop merchant”

“A drummer”

“A drummer”

But I loved spending time with her, and all her people!

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…but that’s a guess. As to what she was up to—imagining different jobs and lives? peopling a world?—all I have there are guesses, too

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The annotations have nothing to do with the text, which offers lessons in manners for young French noblemen, useful (perhaps) for all. I think maybe it was given to Mary because she was a young person, and young people are supposed to learn manners…

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On the book‘s last page she signs her name: Mary McDonald

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“Admirall of the Red” written in the margins

“Admirall of the Red” written in the margins

This job, “Admirall of the Red” gives us a clue as to when the annotator lived: this position (wikipedia tells me) came into being in 1805

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… another runs “a midwife,“ “a messenger,” “a chimney sweeper”; later, we get “an insurance master, a poet, a professor of Greek”

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There is no real ordering principle; one sequence runs ”a wheel wright,” “an emperor,” “a silk-weaver”…

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… and on subsequent pages, always on the right-hand margins, the same hand has written other professions: “a chaise-maker,” “a whale fisher” -

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Title page of The Rules of Civility, printed in London in 1685. In the right-hand margin, “a tanner” has been written in ink

Title page of The Rules of Civility, printed in London in 1685. In the right-hand margin, “a tanner” has been written in ink

Yesterday, nearing the end of a magical library fellowship, I called up The Rules of Civility, a conduct book written originally in French but very popular in Restoration England. Curiously someone has written “A Tanner” in the right-hand margin…

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