Chag sameach! I hope you all had a lovely Seder. We were at the Ps, where the usual chaos was "enhanced" by an extra dog: another retriever, visiting from Boston with GP's family. The was at least one dog under the table at any time. It was strange to have a Seder which was read almost entirely in English, after so many years of everyone being able to follow the original text. And we skipped a lot more than we do at home, except for singing Echad Mi Yode'a twice, once in English with a weird tune.
The past couple of weeks have involved a lot of travel for me, some of which was on domestic flights where there is not enough elbow room to knit, so I have finished two books which I read purely for enjoyment: Evolutionary History by Edmund Russell, and A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness. Evolutionary History was one of a bunch of books that ADC received from Cambridge University Press as payment for reviewing a proposal for them, and he read it first. In a way, the point of the book is to take the ideas of books like Guns, Germs, and Steel and show how evolutionary biology can help understand historical processes. One of the major case studies is a new interpretation of the Industrial Revolution, where the emphasis moves from English exceptionalism and ingenuity, to the importance of the evolution of cotton - both before and after domestication - in the New World. It turns out that New World cotton has a different genotype from Old World varieties, enabling extra-long staples, or threads, that can be woven by machine without breaking. In other worlds, New World cotton had to arrive in Lancashire in order for it to be worth anyones while to invent the machines that kicked off the Industrial Revolution. A Discovery of Witches was quite different. It is paranormal fantasy, set in a world that is identical to ours except that in addition to humans, there are three races of "creatures" - witches, daemons and vampires. The author, like her heroine, is a historian of science, specialising in the early modern period (that, in retrospect, is why her name was familiar), and the first scene takes place in the Bodleian Library, consulting a 17th-century alchemical manuscript.
On March 20th it snowed, for the last time this winter. Despite that, next day we went to the National Arboretum. Very little was actually in bloom yet, apart from crocuses and snowdrops, but we still managed to spend a long time there, enjoying the first warm sunny day in a very long time. We were all very impressed by the extensive bonsai collection, some of which - presents from the Japanese government - are hundreds of years old. My favourite, though, was a pear tree, which was blossoming. You could smell the pear blossoms as soon as you entered that part of the display, and it took a while to realise where the scent was coming from. As well as the usual Japanese trees, as you can imagine there were also native American trees that had been trained into bonsai. The bald cypress (complete with knees) that we had seen full size in the South Carolina swamps in December was very cute!
I have also had my second sewing lesson, in which I learned to make pyjama shorts (which most of you saw me wearing to clean the house). It was a very simple pattern, and I was surprised at how easy it was to sew a more-or-less straight line even over longer distances. I imagine that this feeling was very much influenced by the fact that the previous night, I had cannibalised one pair of S's tracksuit bottoms to make knee patches for another - which involved sewing two pieces of knit fabric (much stretchier and less stable than the woven material I'd used in my previous lesson) AND having to scrunch each pant leg beyond the needle, so as to actually be able to access the knees! The result is not something that I would wear out of the house, but S seems very pleased.
The next day I set off to Conway, South Carolina, where I participated in a colloquium on Coastal Carolina University on disease and society throughout the ages. I spoke for 20 minutes on the image of the pharmacist in medieval Egypt according to non-medical sources (this was basically a section of my dissertation, so I really did not have to prepare very much, apart for looking for images for my PowerPoint). Another speaker discussed the day of thanksgiving in February 1872 celebrating the Prince of Wales' recovery from typhoid, and what that can teach us about the construction of disease and the construction of empire at that time, while the last one spoke on her experiences as a medical anthropologist working in Sierra Leone during the outbreak of Ebola last summer and after she returned to the USA. I learned a lot from both talks and my own one seemed to fascinate the audience (I think my accent did too - most people once again assumed I was British). Coastal Carolina was formerly a two-year college and is now reinventing itself as a four-year university, including graduate programs, with the help of which they hope to increase enrolment by 50% over the next five years. A very different world from the research universities I've been to up to now. The conversation at dinner was fascinating: I was the only non-South Carolinan, as the other speakers were from the College of Charleston and CCU, respectively. A lot of time was spent on the local sailing options, and whether it was was better to own a boat or to belong to a club and have use of one when you wanted. invited by Eliza Glaze, a thoroughly nice person whom I met last July at the Leeds conference. I hope I will be able to host Eliza in Jerusalem some day. Not only did she fully fund the trip, she also sent S a box of comics abandoned by her teenage son when he left for college, and is planning to send us a box of South Carolina delicacies to make up, as she put it, for missing a trip to Charleston. As I had an almost absurd amount of free time, I took advantage of the spa packages offered by my hotel, and had a facial and head/arms/foot massage in the morning before I gave my talk. It was a nice surprise to be told that I clearly take care of my skin, seeing as I haven't had a facial in ten years or so, and especially after all the teenage years of being scolded for having oily skin and blackheads.
I got back from South Carolina to a terrifying cold snap, and to ADC's cousin from San Francisco and his family - none of whom had really sufficiently warm clothes. Fortunately I could lend LC a scarf, but the others had to shiver (well, mainly JC - the little boys seemed quite happy). The main thing we did with them was go out to St Michaels, an almost self-consciously quaint village on the far side of the Chesapeake Bay, which involved crossing the local Bay Bridge. A and S had fun riding in the rented van, while LC enjoyed riding with us, without any children. St Michaels was rather reminiscent of Zichron, with the same kind of boutique-y shops and restaurants. We had crepes and hot chocolate for lunch, after a freezing walk (it was about 10 degrees, and windy) through the town to the old harbour. After lunch the weather warmed up considerably - mainly because the wind had dropped - and we walked in another direction, admiring the nineteenth-century houses. Owning a house like that is a full-time hobby, I should think. Many of them looked as I would imagine the houses in Anne of Green Gables would have looked, except with electricity instead of gaslight.
I didn't really get to spend much time with JC and LC this time, as I was away for so much of the time there were here, but it was clear that the four boys picked up from where they left off at Thanksgiving, and no doubt will do the same in August, when we get to San Francisco, the same way they picked up where they left off with GG and AG just before we left Israel. I should add that we now have firmer plans for the summer: ADC got approval for two weeks at Friday Harbor Labs, from July 10-24, and we are flying back to Israel on August 7 - so we have two weeks to get down to San Francisco and spend time there.
The busy week continued with a fascinating seminar at Johns Hopkins on the matatu minibuses of Nairobi on Monday, and finally, my talk on Galen at Rutgers on Tuesday (it was postponed from January due to snow). My talk, which I had been a bot worried about, as I had no idea what to expect from the audience, was very well received. The Q&A afterwards was very different from The Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton: most of the audience were Europeanists, and I was forced to admit that not only was everything after 1500 rather fuzzy, so was everything west and north of Istanbul (except for Spain). I had decided not to stay over in New Brunswick, and got home at 11:00 at night, having made by that time significant progress on my cardigan.
All that academia was great fun, but rather exhausting, which is why I did not write this letter on Wednesday and send it out before Pesach. Since then, I've been dividing my time between cleaning the house and completing the editing of a dissertation that had to be submitted immediately after Pesach. Since I will be away most of next week, and in any case my client needed time to reread everything, ask questions, and print it out, that took up most of my time the last few days. The dissertation was very interesting, on the sacred stones of Jerusalem in the Crusader period from an art-historical point of view. It is nice having a non-university client from time to time, as I finished that on Thursday and have already been paid!
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