Blessed decentralization

In some respects, like finding books in libraries, the decentralization of Cambridge is a pain in the ass. But I'd be remiss if I didn't point out one of the benefits of the university's decentralized nature.

There are 31 colleges in Cambridge. Their relationship to the university is a bit hard to describe, but it's sufficient to say that they are autonomous organizations, with their own income, property, statutes, etc. The college range in size from about 350 (Hughes Hall) to around 1000 (Trinity College). The result is that there are lots of self-contained college communities within the larger university communities.

What this means is that students are able to participate in clubs and societies on both levels. For me, this is most significant when it comes to sports. Now, anyone who's ever seen me play baseball, or soccer, or squash, or, come to think of it, any sport, knows that I'm not the most athletic-gifted person in the world. Put nicely, I'm scrappy. So there's no chance of me competing on the university level in any sports.

Playing for my college, Christ's, however, is an entirely different story. Christ's has 500 or so students, so it turns out that I can make a contribution to the college sports teams. In particular, I've been playing for Christ's in the college ultimate frisbee league and coxing for Christ's College Boat Club.

The frisbee shouldn't be too much of a surprise... I played a few years for Swarthmore's ultimate team, the Earthworms. I wasn't great, especially compared to some other players on Swat's team, but I was competent. It turns out that ultimate in the U.S. is at a far higher level than here in the U.K., so I'm able to make a real contribution to Christ's. I don't know whether I'd be able to play on the university team (dominated as it is by Americans), but I'm happy to get out there once a week and have a good time.

Coxing's an entirely different story. Before this month, I'd never been in a (rowing) boat before. And now, twice a week, I'm nominally in charge of eight rowers as we try to maneuver up and down the River Cam. I'm not great at it, but I'm improving with each outing. And we'll be racing in November, so I guess we're approaching competence.

The moral of the story is that Cambridge's collegiate system gives everyone the opportunity to participate in activities at a wide range of ability and commitment. So while the decentralization of some things here drives me crazy, it also gives me the chance to have a great time doing things I probably wouldn't be able to do at similarly sized schools in the U.S.

Word

Have I mentioned here how much I love the Sports Guy, Bill Simmons? I don't think I have.

Well, this is the kind of thing I love him for:

After Womack's leadoff hit over Cabrera's head, [Tim] McCarver claimed that Cabrera "jumped too soon," was proven wrong by the replay, then continued to discuss the dangers of "jumping too soon." I love when announcers refuse to admit they were wrong despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. This is exactly how I would announce games. You can't let little things like facts and indisputable evidence get in the way of your points. You just can't.

By now you probably know my feelings on Tim McCarver. Anyone who lays down just how disconnected from reality McCarver has become is a-okay in my book.

Can we discover the truth? Can we find the right interpretation?

As promised, some thoughts on historical interpretation and truth.

Last week's historiographical lecture for my MPhil course dealt with the postmodernist challenge to history. As far as I can tell (without having read the book), Richard Evans stuck to the arguments in his In Defense of History. On the whole, I found his critique of the extreme forms of postmodernism exactly on target. I want to highlight a couple of Evans's points that resonanted particularly well with me.

- It does not follow from the fact that we can’t get at the truth of the entire past that we can’t get at any single historical truth.

- Interpretive possibilities are not infinite. Some interpretations are better than others.

"Hmm," I thought to myself. "I've heard something along these lines before." Just five months ago, in fact. Here's an excerpt from Barry Schwartz's Last Collection speech at Swarthmore on May 29th, 2004:

People have finally caught on to the fact that much of what the intellectual elite thought was the truth was distorted by limitations of perspective. Slowly the voices of the excluded have been welcomed into the conversation. And their perspectives have enriched our understanding enormously. But the reason they've enriched our understanding is that they've given the rest of us an important piece of the truth that was previously invisible to us. Not their truth, but the truth. It is troubling to see how quickly an appreciation that each of us can only attain a partial grasp of the truth degrades into a view that there really isn't any truth out there to be grasped.

Taken together, these statements reveal a crucial fact about any endeavor of knowledge: we can't know it all. The problems associated with perspective are just too great. And that's to say nothing of the problem of limited source material.

That we can't know it all, however, does not mean that we can't know anything. There's plenty that historians, psychologists (like Schwartz), and regular people can find out about the world.

In the case of historians, we rely on sources from the past, often documents. I think most historians would agree that the meaning of a given document is not fixed, that reading it through different interpretive lenses (to name the Big Three: race, class, and gender) can reveal previously unknown significance.

But it's crucial to emphasize here, as Evans suggests, that just because there is no fixed meaning, it's not necessarily the case that the document has an infinite range of meanings. It's absolutely the case that the background (intellectual and otherwise) of a scholar plays a role in the conclusions that they draw from any given source. But those conclusions do not arise solely from the historian's brain. Interpretations are dialogues between historians and sources, not blithe impositions of the historians' already formed conclusions.

A brief, slightly absurd, example illustrates this point. Suppose I leave a scrap of paper outside my door that says, "My pillowcase is red." Someone who has an interest in my bedding comes along and sees the paper. They'd like to come in and check to see whether my pillowcase is, in fact, red, but I'm not in and the door's locked. So they have to rely on my note. There is simply no way that they can reasonably conclude that my pillowcase is any color other than red.* Now, I could have been lying, and my pillowcase is actually orange. But based solely on my note, the only reasonable conclusion is that my pillowcase is red; any other interpretations are just silly.

In short, sources matter. As Jonathan Dresner so aptly put it, "Sources lie, but they're all we have." I'd modify Dresner's statement a bit... sources lie, but not about everything.

Then there are those who believe that humans can grasp the absolute truth. The Truth is out there, they say, we just need to find it and hold on to it.

To them I say, "Umm... no." For one thing, as I wrote about last week, we simply don't have the sources to examine the totality of the past. Second, interpretation matters.

It's funny. Depending on who I'm reading or listening to, I often find myself more sympathetic to the postmodernist cause or those who defend the notion of Truth. When I hear postmodernists go on about how no meaning is inherent and that it all emerges from interpretation, I want to shout, "No! The sources are saying something!" And then when I hear Truth-ians (for lack of a better term) rant about the dangers of postmodern relativism, I want to shout, "Don't you see how the truths you hold so dear are themselves based on interpretations?!"**

The truth, as it so often does, lies in the middle. No, we can't know the whole truth. But yes, we can figure out a lot of particular truths. No, we can't settle upon a single definitive interpretation of a source. But yes, we can come up with particular interpretations that are more plausible and more likely (read: better) than others. It's not the job of the historian to find the truth; good historians recognize their limitations and come up with their best guess of what the past was like, realizing the whole time that history is a necessarily speculative endeavor.

*Unless, of course, we're in a world where all pillowcases are green or something like that.

**You might think I'm tilting at windmills here. Surely there aren't people who actually take such extreme positions. Oh, but there are.

Coming soon

Just to whet your appetite, here's a taste of the next few posts I have in mind.

- Thoughts on Truth. And interpretation. You can't get it exactly right, but you still should try.

- Decentralization at Cambridge (in spite of what I've said before) isn't all that bad.

- The clergy as creditors in 18th-century France. A topic I knew nothing about two days ago, but now I've gone to a seminar, so you get to hear about it as well.

- Counterfactual history. Maybe.

Richard Evans on Niall Ferguson

"Although he's always wrong, he's always wrong in an interesting way."

Who knows more? Democrats or Republicans?

By now, you've probably seen the Program on International Policy Attitudes study that found that Kerry supporters know their candidate's positions a whole lot better than their Bush counterparts. For example: just 20% of Bush supporters know that George Bush opposes U.S. participation in a land mine treaty. 79% of John Kerry's supporters know that Kerry supports such participation (for a further outline of the differences, see this Kevin Drum post).

There's no way around it. That's a startling difference.

It's not much of a surprise that some have tried to spin these numbers, arguing that Democrats are just as likely to have factual misconceptions as Republicans. Now, that might be true. But none of these claims seem to be backed up by facts or solid argumentation. Here are three examples:

Kaimi Wenger of Tutissima Cassis argues that the survey's biased against Republicans. Ask Democrats questions like ""Is it true that filibustered Republican judicial nominees Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen received a rating of "not qualified" from the American Bar Association?" and you're likely to find out that lots more Democrats than Republicans will get that wrong, not necessarily because Democrats are less well-informed than Republicans, but simply because they're likely to believe what they want to believe.

David Bernstein of the Volokh Conspiracy takes a similar tack, pointing to two factors to explain away Republicans' apparent ignorance: (1) "Bush supporters are inclined to think well of Bush" [...] 2) "Most people have no idea what global climate treaties, land mine treaties, the International Criminal Court, etc., involve. But they all sound good to an ignorant voter." In other words, voters don't know about these issues, so you really can't blame them for not knowing their favored candidate's position on them.

Then there's Eugene Volokh, who comes up with another example meant to show the bias in the survey. He guesses:

that more Democrats than Republicans erroneously think that by not renewing the assault weapons ban, Congress (1) legalized automatic weapons -- it didn't, since the ban was only on semiautomatics, guns which are not materially different from guns that have been legal throughout this time -- or that (2) assault weapons play a role in the majority or even a large minority of crimes (the actual number seems to be around 4% or less).

As far as I'm concerned, there's a whole lot of red herrings floating about in this sea of spin.

Let's take on Wenger first. Democrats, he suggests, believe "that filibustered Republican judicial nominees Miguel Estrada and Priscilla Owen received a rating of 'not qualified' from the American Bar Association." Now, this could very well be true. But it's not at all relevant. Does Wenger really believe that ignorance regarding the ABA's rating of judicial nominees is on the same level as not knowing what your favored presidential candidate thinks about a little issue like, say, trade? These bits of knowledge are on entirely different scales. What effect can knowing the ABA's take on Estrada have on a typical voter? Not much that I can think of. The policies of a presidential candidate, though? That's an entirely different story. That's the kind of thing that should, in a well-informed world, influence people's votes.

Volokh has the same problem. How significant is it that Democrats know less about the recently lapsed assault weapons ban than Republicans? Well, you could argue that it's fairly significant, but do you really believe that it's more important than knowing a presidential candidate's stance towards multilateralism? These facts are on such completely different levels that it's disingenuous to equate them.

Bernstein's take basically comes down to viewing the results "not a reflection of greater ignorance on the part of Bush supporters, just worse guessing." In other words, yes, Bush supporters are ignorant of certain topics. But so, Bernstein argues, are Kerry supporters. It's just that Kerry supports those positions that superficially appear "good," so that anyone who doesn't know better ends up agreeing with Kerry. Now, this could be true. But it seems equally plausible that people who plan to vote for Bush do support the Comprehensive Test Ban treaty, the Kyoto treaty, and all the rest. In that case, they're simply backing the wrong horse, the one whose nose is pointed in a direction they don't want to go.

Beyond all this, there's the teensy little problem that Bernstein, Volokh, and Wenger have absolutely no evidence that Democrats and Kerry supporters would perform as poorly as Republicans and Bush supporters in a survey biased "against" Kerry. It's fine to argue speculatively in this vein, but without evidence of some sort, your conclusions are just that: speculations. Meanwhile, it's awfully hard to argue with the fact that Bush supporters simply do not know his positions on many issues.

In short, Bernstein, Volokh, and Wenger are spinning the data, trying, in the words of Wenger, to make ignorance bipartisan. In doing so, they've treated all facts as equally significant and teased out speculative arguments based on little to no evidence. It's irresponsible, and it ignores what appears to be a real problem in American politics: a large percentage of voters simply aren't well-informed. At the moment, that voting bloc appears to be overwhelmingly Republican. I don't think this fact reflects Democrats' higher intelligence or anything like that. Truth be told, I don't have much of an explanation. But just because I can't explain doesn't mean it's not real. Look at the numbers.

The past is lost

It's impossible for us to recapture the past. No matter how hard we search we are incapable of finding information about the vast majority of human history, to say nothing of understanding that information or discovering facts about the vast stretches of time before the inception of human consciousness.

What, then, do historians do? It is historians, after all, who are charged with discovering, collecting, and analyzing information about the past. Is the historical enterprise merely a joke, foisted upon bored high school students?

The answer, I'm sure virtually all historians would agree, is no. Study of the past is legitimate and worthwhile. But more than that, it's also really hard.

Why the gloom, you ask. Surely history can't be that hard. People have been doing it for millennia.

Well, yes. But I'd argue that they haven't done a terribly good job, and that historians have largely failed, though it's not entirely (or even mostly) their fault.

The ways in which we lose information in the past are myriad. What follows is merely a sketch, and is hardly meant to be exhaustive. Still, it should make clear just how little we really know about the past.

First, there are countless bits of information that never enter human consciousness. Every moment of every day we are bombarded with sensations. Right now, my field of vision encompasses the screen of my laptop, my kitchen table (strewn with two books, my journal, my cell phone, and the newspaper), a bookshelf, and my dog sitting beside me. And that's ignoring what I can see outside through the sliding glass doors. The sounds I'm exposed to are just as varied. Only through making a conscious effort to notice these things did they enter my mind. Everyone constantly filters the stimuli they're faced with, with the result that much of what goes on around us never registers and therefore never has a chance to be recorded for posterity.

Of course, not everything people notice becomes part of the historical record. As I've written before, "when each person dies, innumerable unique memories vanish forever." Even if we were capable of noticing everything that goes on around us, it would be of no use to future historians unless we recorded that information in some form.

There is no simple correspondence between what people observe and what they record, be it by writing in a journal, taking a picture, or what have you. If we were to make a concerted effort to capture all our experiences, we'd be sitting around all day, writing. When you're doing that, you really can't experience all that much. In short, the artifacts (documents, photographs, etc.) of human experience capture just a small percentage of human experience itself.

More knowledge about the past is lost to historians for the simple reason that records are lost. Just today I learned that the 1834 fire that burned the British Houses of Parliament destroyed virtually all the records of the House of Commons. But loss of historical sources need not be so dramatic - books can crumble, photographs can fade, audio tapes can get tangled beyond repair. And, just as perniciously, objects just get lost.

So now we've got ourselves a repository of sources to use in writing history. Typically, this will be an archive that has collected the papers and objects associated with given individuals or organizations.* It's an exciting place, at least for those of us who like reading old newspapers and that kind of thing.

But archives are vast, making it almost impossible for a researcher to examine every possible source that touches upon their topic. Suppose someone's writing a history of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers). They'd spend a considerable amount of time, no doubt, at the Friends Historical Library at Swarthmore College. In an ideal world, they'd take the opportunity to look through the FHL's rich holdings to get an expansive view of Quaker history. But the FHL has "more than 42,000 books, pamphlets and serials, 290 major manuscript collections, and 9,000 volumes of original meeting records." There's simply no way for a single historian (or even a team of researchers) to look at all of that material.

Now you could argue, "Yeah, but Quaker history is a huge topic. How about something smaller, like the history of a particular meeting?" And you'd be right. The smaller the area of research, the easier it is for a historian to have a look at all the available sources.

But when historians move beyond microhistories like the history of a specific Quaker meeting, or the history of a single factory, it quickly becomes impossible for them to examine all the materials and sources that could prove fruitful in their research. In short, not only does a huge amount of information about the past never become available to historians, it's not even the case that all the information that is preserved ever comes before the eyes of a historian.

To sum up everything so far: the sources that historians can actually get their hands on and use in the writing of history represent a miniscule percentage of information about the past.

Here's an analogy that, I think, captures just how difficult doing history is. Imagine that someone from Mars, who knows nothing about Earthly sports, wants to write a book about baseball. Not just the game itself, but also baseball stadiums, fans, free agency, whatever else you can think of that's related to baseball.

Here's the source they get to use: a single aerial photograph of Fenway Park during a Red Sox-Yankees game.

Care to write that book? Good luck with that.

History's like that, too. While the baseball metaphor is, perhaps, a bit overstated, the point is that the sources available to historians don't give us nearly enough information to write an accurate or complete account of the past.

There are at least four points where information about the past is lost and becomes unavailable to historians:
- People aren't aware of everything that goes on around them.
- People don't record everything that they're aware of.
- Not all records of people's experiences survive to the present.
- In spite of this, there's simply too much material for historians to look at all of it, and most historical sources go unexamined.

So before historians even begin their research, they're at a considerable disadvantage, because information about the past is severely limited. It should come as no surprise, then, that historians haven't succeeded in recreating the past. But neither should it come as a surprise that they're largely blameless for it.**

*In an essay that I already linked to a few weeks ago, Tim Burke pointed out how archive’s organizational headings actually construct our research agendas, that you get a radically different sense of what the archive contains when you read widely across its total span. He's writing about the National Archives of Zimbabwe in particular, but I think his observation holds for most archives.

**Historians can be blamed for all sorts of things once they do get around to doing whatever it is historians do. I'll be writing about that at some point.

Grad School Tips 3, 4, and 5

A few days ago, I started writing a post about Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, specifically pondering whether Diamond's work counts as history. But I haven't read the book, and the post would be relying almost entirely on a capsule summary by a classmate, so I came to the conclusion that it wasn't the best idea. It's too bad, since it got me thinking about just what history (in the sense of writing about the past, not the past itself) is. Expect more ruminations on that.

But here's the second installment of Tips for Grad School. Tonight's first two tips are rather obvious and trivial, while the third is more substantial.

3) Figure out where the books you need are as early as possible. You'd think that in a university as large as Cambridge, it'd be relatively easy to find the books you want. Well, even setting aside library decentralization, there remains the problem that there's just not enough copies of the books to go around. If you're in a class of eight, and there's two copies of a required book in all of Cambridge, you've got a problem. Which leads to tip #4.

4) Stay in contact with the other students in your course, and be friendly. The book problem more or less vanishes when everyone gets coordinated enough to share the books. Everyone has questions, and the collective knowledge of the group goes a long way to answering those question.

Tonight's final tip is unrelated to the other two.

5) Discuss and argue in good faith.

The goal of academic discussion should, as far as I'm concerned, be reaching a satisfying conclusion, incorporating the relevant facts and the insights various people bring to the discussion.

Discussion is not about showing off or demonstrating undying loyalty to an ideological principle.

Here's what happened in class yesterday:

In a discussion regarding the rise of nationalism, one student argued that the spread of the written word was the key development that led to nationalism. The mass availability of the U.S. Constitution, for example, allowed all (literate) Americans to see themselves as beholden to a single document and government. The medium, in this view, is more important than the message.

Now, I certainly agree that a widespread print culture is an important precondition for widely dispersed nationalist sentiment. But I vehemently disagree that the message is ancillary to the medium in which it is expressed. Would Americans really rally around the Constitution if it did not express political ideas they supported? It's awfully difficult to ignore the populist sentiment of the opening words of the Constitution - "We the People of the United States..." In short, the message matters.

In class yesterday, I said as much. The other student's response was to maintain the primacy of the medium over the message, more or less ignoring my argument.

A few minutes later, another student pointed out that it's a bit silly to look for a single cause for the rise of nationalism and suggested that we look for a more nuanced explanation.

The first student's response was more or less as follows, "But it's more fun to take an extreme position!"

Well, fine. Have your fun. But ultimately, it's damn unproductive for the class as a whole if we have someone who refuses to budge from his initial position.

Now, I'm not suggesting that people avoid taking extreme positions. Quite the contrary; I think it's often useful to adopt extreme premises and explore their implications. But there's a reason why such explorations are typically prefaced with "For the sake of argument..." That way, it's obvious that the speaker doesn't necessarily believe what follows, but rather that it's something to think about.

The problem arises when you argue for the sake of arguing and fail to take account of inconvenient facts or other people's arguments. Class discussion is not the place to win points. If your primary concern is being right and proving other people wrong, you're not discussing in good faith, you're just trying to look good.

Just keep in mind that the goal is to figure stuff out, not show that you're the smartest or the best. If you really are the smartest or the best, that'll be obvious as discussion proceeds, and you won't come across as a jerk.

Tips for grad school, #1 and #2

I suppose both of these pieces of advice apply just as well to undergrads. But failing to heed them will have particularly bad consequences for grad students, mostly because everyone else in the room knows enough to see your BS for what it is.

Fortunately, I did not make either of these mistakes... another student in one of my seminars took the initiative and ended up with some egg on his face. I admire the effort, but probably best not to make your first impression a bad one.

Without further ado:

1) Don't be too clever. Chances are, your ideas aren't entirely original, and it's fairly likely someone has stated it far better than you. When you're on the wrong track and the prof tries to rein you in, don't keep running with your idea just because you like it.

2) Don't cite a book or article unless you've actually read it. You look particularly foolish when you misinterpret on the prof's general, one-sentence synopsis and use that bit of false information to act as if you've read the work in question.

More to come, I'm sure.

Damn decentralization

As you may or may not know, the University of Cambridge is a rather decentralized institution. The colleges, for example, where a large proportion of the undergraduate teaching goes on, are independent from the university, with their own income, property, and the like. The functions of the colleges are quite different from those of the departments, and certainly from the university as a whole.

In some ways, this is great. It allows small communities to thrive within the larger university, and the differences between the colleges means that everyone can find a place suited to their attitudes and needs. Plus, the decentralization is an historical oddity, and I'm a big fan of slightly bizarre relics of the past.

But decentralization also has its myriad pitfalls. You're never quite sure if you're talking to quite the right person or organization to deal with your issue. You could very easily end up shuffling all around the city trying to solve a problem that could be resolved in ten minutes if you went to the right place the first time.

The most annoying problem that I've come across, though, is the library catalog. As if the University Library weren't daunting enough*, searching Newton, the university-wide library catalog is a pain in the ass.

Let's say I want to find a history book. There's a few libraries it could very plausibly be in: my college library, the history faculty library, and the UL. I know for sure that it'll be in the UL, since it's a copyright library, but the other ones would be a bit more convenient for me.

So ideally, I'd search for the book using Newton, telling it to search through the Christ's College library, the Seeley Historical Library, and the UL. The Christ's library would be easiest... just a two-minute walk from my own. The history library would be next convenient, followed by the hulking mass that is the UL.

It'd be nice to do a single search of those three libraries. But, as far as I can tell, you can't. Instead, you have to search the catalogs of each of them individually. Now, I'm sure there's got to be some way to do such a search, but I haven't figured it out yet, and you don't spend as much time as I do on the internet and in libraries without learning a thing or two about searches.

There's another problem. Even if I just wanted to search Christ's library, I couldn't do it. Instead, the catalog groups Christ's library with "College A-N." That's right, I can't even search a single library without results from other libraries coming back. Now, it's great that Clare Hall and Gonville & Caius have the book I'm looking for, but it doesn't do me much good. The same problem arises with department libraries; you've got to pick a range of catalogs to search through.

But wait! You'd think to search for books in the history library, you'd look in "Departments and Faculties F-M," right? Sure, you'd get some results from the geography library and the modern languages library, but that's not the end of the world; you're used to that sort of thing after searching the college libraries. Well, as I found out, if you're searching for a book in the history library by searching in "Departments and Faculties F-M," you won't find anything. That's because, as you'll see above, it's the Seeley Historical Library, which means you need to search in "Departments and Faculties O-Z," not F-M. Makes perfect sense, doesn't it?

I recognize that it's no small task coordinating and streamlining the cataloges of the 100+ libraries associated with the University. But can it really be that hard to make it possible to select particular libraries you'd like to search?

So this is one of those cases where decentralization isn't charming or quaint. It's inefficient and frustrating as all hell. You can work around the difficulties, but it's annoying as all hell when the difficulties shouldn't be there in the first place and seem to be resolvable without too much difficulty.

So yes, Cambridge has its worts. I'm not surprised by them, I just wish they weren't of this particular type.

*And it is. Besides sorting books and periodicals by topic and year received, they also sort them by size. Yes, size. They have a good reason for it, but it doesn't exactly make it easy to find the book you're looking for.

New pictures

For those interested in my accomodations here in Cambridge, check out these pictures. It's a series, so you'll just have to keep clicking "next" to see them all.

On purely aesthetic grounds, my favorites are the entrance to my building, this view of my room, and this shot through the window over my desk. But to get a good sense of my living space, you'll want to see them all.

Historians all around

In addition to the aforementioned matriculation dinner, today was also marked by drinks with the various people associated with my course, the MPhil in Modern European History [longish pdf, so you've been warned]: fellow grad students (whose names I'm starting to learn) and Real Life Historians. Now I've met plenty of those before, but there's something a bit different between the profs at the history department at Swat and, say, Richard Evans. I can say quite confidently that I've never before had drinks with someone who has turned down a chair at Princeton.

It's all very impressive, and I must admit to being a bit cowed. But everyone's quite friendly, and Richard Evans has even been to Swarthmore! Besides, being privy to all sorts of Cambridge gossip (for example, Peterhouse is a scary place with a clique of reactionary fellows whose political beliefs, if made public, could seriously damage the reputation of the university) makes one feel more comfortable.

So. There are famous historians here. And I get to spend time with them. It's all very exciting.

What to do, what to do

I've just now come from my first ever meal eaten while wearing a gown. Yes, one of these. I'd eaten in the formal hall before, but the grad night's more informal. Tonight was the real deal, with formally dressed waiters, utensils whose use I didn't know, and decanters of port. It was all a bit silly, but everyone goes along with it and has a lovely time.

The title of this entry refers to my uncertainty about just what direction to take this blog during my time here in Cambridge. Like Adam, with whom I had lunch today, I really don't want this to become a "blow-by-blow of what's going on in my life". Frankly, I've done that before, and it doesn't make for the most interesting reading.

So my current thinking is to just write about the most interesting things, those I actually have something to say about besides the bare bones of what occurred. If the rest of my time here is at all like the last week, I'm quite sure there'll be lots to say.

Almost there

This time tomorrow, I should have internet in my room and I'll be able to start blogging again. It just doesn't feel right blogging from a computer lab.

Until then, know that England's a very different place from the U.S. But fun, as you'd suspect.

Cambridge

I'm safely installed here in Cambridge (the real one, not that place up in Massachusetts). I'm still settling in, but everything so far is quite nice.

I've already been in the computer lab for 90 minutes or so, so a more extensive update will have to wait for another time. Soon, if all my errands tomorrow go well.