travel back in time - before Wednesday?

Well I was supposed to do this before 10:00am Wednesday, but somehow I failed. In a week where we have dealt with Aztec ritual - have you any idea how unmemorable Aztec gods' names are - they all seem to be variations on Whatzicotl and Poxiwhatl, More's Utopia and Christian Humanism, the Power of Print and problems of illiteracy in the Early Modern World, and to top it off Cortes hacking and slashing his way through the Mexican jungle, there doesn't seem to have been much time for blogging, the web, or even reading anything that wasn't related to these not altogether enticing subjects. Huiziwhatls and Mixitotls seem to have begun muddling their way unpleasantly through my sleep. Today, however, I finally took the time to begin looking at RSS readers. I thought a poetry feed might be appealing and so subscribed, only to rapidly unsubscribe having waded through several turgid and uninspired so called verses. I tried again for an RSS on a different subject and this time found a handier feed on book reviews on history and travel books. At least this may bring my attention to books I might otherwise have missed, although at the moment they seem to be dominated by works on Kabul and Mount Everest, two areas that don't come into this otherwise rather wide ranging blog. I also took the opportunity to subscribe to a news feed on Canada, and came to the conclusion, that today at any rate, Canada did not have a lot of noteworthy news.
So what was my impression of RSS? Really Singularly Superfluous. At least at the moment, they make me feel like I am barraged with information, and while some of that information can be entertaining, I don't think I could hack keeping up with RSSs that were actually to do with my work, and otherwise I would sooner be reading my books. I think were I to use one in anyway to do with my teaching, it would have to be one that was updated minimally. I think I shall head back to Roman Africa now instead and, read along with St Augustine as he reviews his life in PPF (plain paper feed).

To Byzantium and beyond

Well, yesterday provided the perfect excuse to travel with books. My friends were off around the world and I thought it necessary to weight them down with words. I am not sure how auspicious they thought a copy of the Odyssey translated by T. E. Lawrence was but they smiled cheerfully. The caught the theme quite easily when to that was added Travels with a Tangerine (one of my favourite books that I have read all year), Journey to the Centre of the Earth (something I rather hope they DON'T do) and Fugitive Pieces.

Having invested in these books for other people, for myself, it was more visual travelling than literary travelling as I went off to the Byzantium exhibition in London. Three and a half hours later I emerged better educated and still thrilled with Byzantine icons, though less thrilled with the range of postcards the Academy had to offer. Why oh why do museums always choose the least enticing things in the exhibition to make postcards of? Virtually none of the sumptuous display of icons was available. Today it is time travelling that I am setting off upon - we shall see how the British museum's Hadrian exhibition compares.

4 continents in a day (+a world wide web)

Well I have been doing a lot of travelling through books lately. Yesterday took me to the New World again, where following Townsend, Clendinnen and others we went with Aztecs on the warpath, and a peculiarly bloody story it was. A few hours later, and we were following Barros and Correa tracing da Gama's route round the Cape of Africa and over to Calcutta. That was a voyage of extremes. Da Gama imprisoned his pilots and threw his navigational instruments overboard, putting all his faith on his own command and in God. His belief and zealotry may have taken him to India, but it didn't exactly make him tolerant of other faiths, and our journey ended in a brutal mass murder. Then having visited the New World, Africa and India, we hopped back to Germany to witness Scribner's views of popular propaganda in the German Reformation, and ended the day with humour rather than a bloodbath.
On a different note, I also decided to take a further journey into the worldwide web and try out some of google's tools. I must admit the google reader left me infinitely preferring my books. I felt overloaded with information and clutter; no tidiness there. It was a bewildering voyage. On the other hand, I found google documents rather handy and have even uploaded a bibliography on travel and literature.

Wading through the web

Well having dutifully settled down to do some homework and find a blog I appreciated, I was sorely disappointed at first. I at first began simply by looking at googles "next blog" and this wasn't worth the time it took to press the next key. I was literally wading through the morass of the web. I seemed to find rather a lot of dross about car racing, hougang mall and harbour toys, and horror of horrors, a blog on streetfighing. I decided I needed to find a different solution and searched for blogs on cartography and maps. This lead to some unexpected delights - first one run by the BL on mapping London which accompanied an exhibition which to my sorrow I had missed, but the blog and the virtual exhibition lived on. (http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/londoninmaps/cartography/index.html) Then came my true delight - a blog on strange maps. (http://strangemaps.wordpress.com/2008/10/19/321-the-forgotten-kingdom-of-araucania-patagonia/)Who knew about mapping tea-drinking? Has anyone else come across a map of the Forgotten Kingdom of Araucania-Patagonia? This site though perhaps less useful than the Chicago Blog on Cartography and Geography archives provided and indeed provides a lot of fun. I can travel through the map and web into some of the weirder cartographic images of our world.

My first blog

Well, I can smile properly for the first time in months now that I am halfway through a root canal, on the other hand, I am running pillar-to-post and back again so not much time to stop to smile - or should I say voyaging. So far today been to India, Africa, the New World and now the world wide web.