Monday 6 February Have turned in my paper in anticipation of Supervision (moved to next week). Email with Piotr and other professional correspondence. Updated research and training journal.
Tuesday 7 February GSTD Generic Skills Training Day
Wednesday 8 February: Online research of catalogue at British Library (rings, marriage and engagement customs, representation of courtship in ballads and art). Evening Film Course.
Thursday 9 February: Reviewed notes from Goody, Goode and Habakkuk again. I need to find more current work on the subject. Also not much use from the ballads-based documentation (line of inquiry) which is fine. It is at this stage tangential. Looked through Sahaptin dictionary to double-check on some of the meanings for a gift that my mother wishes for me to present to my supervisor and went to dinner in the evening with colleagues. Pleasant conversation of course but particularly enjoyed discussion of relationship between perception of physical experience and reality of physical experience as relative estimations that we are trained to interpret as, for example, the room becoming warmer and brighter RELATIVE to having been more or less so the moment before. Do we have with certainty a socialised standard of perception of environment or is it all much more idiosyncratic and predicated upon an immediate precedent of experience? Do we correlate with our most recent experience of a particular phenomena?
Thus for example, compare the warmth of the room with what we felt two minutes before and (again for example) the quality of a chocolate we are eating with the last instance of consuming chocolate, that we most recently had? This is a strange thing--this last--because I feel fairly certain that I do have certain ‘ideals’. I think (for better or worse ) I probably do have the ‘perfect chocolate’ experience somewhere in my mind . . . but not necessarily ‘the most perfectly temperate room’ experience.
And it may all be quite personal. There may be some people that don’t have such ‘ideals’ and for them, every chocolate is the ‘most perfect’ or perhaps they simply take that particular chocolate at the moment they are consuming it, for what it is. Perhaps some people take each 'instance of chocolate' for itself; not for how much more or less perfect than any other 'instance of chocolate' they have experienced. (I strongly suspect though, that most of us have 'standards'.)
I know this may not sound terribly ‘related’ to my research--but it is. If the essence of the gift exchange is based upon expectation, are there predicates to expectation that modify perception of the display experience? Are ‘experienced’ museumgoers leveling an idiosyncratically-informed critique about the displays upon the situation, a critique that modifies their personal experience of the object in display? Do visitors have expectations for objects or classes of objects that alters receptivity to the 'ideal' museum experience?
Friday 10 February: Training Day at British Library--Curatorial Sessions Arnold Hunt, Curator of Modern Historical Manuscripts and with Ed King, Head of Newspaper Collections. In the evening attended The Royal Library: Old and New : “The magnificent items on display in the exhibition Royal Manuscripts: the Genius of Illumination have largely come from the Old Royal library, collected by generations of kings and presented to the nation in 1757 by George II. A subsequent donation by George IV of over 65,000 printed books, known as the King’s Library, is also housed at the British Library, where it forms an impressive sight displayed en masse at the heart of the building. In the meantime, the Royal Library, primarily kept at Windsor Castle, is a rich and intriguing collection boasting many remarkable bindings and fascinating personal links to successive monarchs. The stories of these libraries are explored by Kathleen Doyle and John Goldfinch of the British Library, and Jane Roberts, the Royal Librarian.”
While I enjoyed this very much I think that the previous session I attended was better received by the audience. Here is its official description: “In the later Middle Ages, sacred, solemn texts were often accompanied by images seemingly intended to distract, to amuse and perhaps even to shock their readers. Playful and sometimes perverse, such images offer powerful insights into the nature of devotion in the period. Drawing on the monkeys and monsters depicted in the margins of the British Library's Royal manuscripts, this lecture considers what these images tell us about the people who made and owned these books. Alixe Bovey is familiar as the presenter of the BBC television series In Search of Medieval Britain (2008). She is a lecturer in Medieval History at the University of Kent and former curator in the Department of Manuscripts at the British Library. Her research has been chiefly concerned with pictorial narratives and their cultural and literary context. She has also written on medieval monsters.”
The notion of 'margins as commentary' and the idea that the medieval mind was constantly consciously contending with what the senses experiences vs. what one was 'allowed' to experience, was fascinating . . . because they seemed to acknowledge that it was a losing battle. It suggests that for society to 'get on' without impossible bloodshed, there was some understanding that natural urgencies needed to be managed, not simply suppressed. Of course some of the management was to burn people at the stake . . . but at least there was a healthy recognition that human nature is . . . complex (in a very simple sort of way).
The Victorians seem to be about 'suppression' of 'human nature' or of what I've called 'natural urgencies'. I personally believe that discipline and ignorance will only take a society so far however before resultant is an entire generation of psychopaths and a backlash of self-indulgent fecklessness in the guise of 'freedom'.
The upshot for my work is that I may need to spend more time on periodicity than previously intended.
Weekend: Monitor Administration.
