Live Blog: A Student Burns the Midnight Oil

Today the term essay was due for my History and Society of the Near East seminar. Though back at UBC I would generally wait until the day and night before the deadline to launch into things, having made feeble stabs at research throughout the previous month, I started reasonably early with this one. But it is not done, so to relieve my boredom, I will be sketching the process.

22:13 Have finished taking notes on Gavin Hamblyn's introduction to Women in the Medieval Islamic World: Power, Patronage, and Piety. In fact I had read part of it as the obligatory reading for a class presentation three weeks ago; should have read all of it. Now foraging through the bibliography and looking up the extracts on Google Books (which I am using as a scholarly resource for the first time and which is pretty good, though it would be better if I had a couple of weeks to read up what it leaves out in the Islamic Department library, which I visited on Tuesday and rather like).

An Arab-Syrian gentleman and warrior in the period of the Crusades, though I don't much like the chronicler, Usāmah ibn Munqidh, who is being translated and quoted here, has quite corking stories about the Crusades. They show how deranged people were by the brutality, even in their attitudes toward family. I haven't the foggiest notion what to think of this anecdote (p. 179), for instance:

A Moslem captive drowns herself. — In the army of the Bridge was a Kurd named abu-al-Jaysh, who had a daughter named Rafūl, who had been carried away as captive by the Franks. Abu-al-Jaysh was affected by a kind of monomania on account of her, which made him say to everyone he met every day: "Rafūl has been taken captive." The second morning as we were walking on the bank of the river, we saw by the side of the water an object. We said to one of our attendants, "Swim and see what is that thing." The attendant went to it and lo! the object was Rafūl herself, dressed in a blue dress. She had thrown herself from the back of the horse of the Frank who had carried her away and was drowned. Her dress was caught in a willow tree. The anguish of her father, abu-al-Jaysh, was thereby abated.

I think the chronicler's moral compass is generally as wobbly as a Verne hero's literal compass near the core of the Earth, and yet he seems smug about it. On the other hand, it was in the middle of the Crusades.

Every now and then I hop to other sources, like this book chapter which has a broad vein of jargon or humbug:

the contributions in this book examine indigenous sources which reveal the visibility, the agency and the consciousness of women's actions—and their limits [. . .] and which show that these women exercised a certain amount of economic, legal and intellectual freedom within defined areas in different situations.

I think I should use this inspiration to draft an essay in the scientific realm. For instance, "The impact of hydrogen dioxide upon the human epidermis can produce a feeling of fluidity combined with the sensation of a temperature minimally below that of the corporeal climate at the boundary of muscle to the lipid boundary underlying the dermis, which in the common anglophone usage may be described as wetness." Upon further research, "One may find that the application of cotton, wool, and other natural textile fibres is capable — by trapping the molecules within the tiny hairs — of absorbing the compound and assuaging the stimulation to the peripheral nervous system."

23:09 I am on the next page of the 'water is wet' chapter and, to be terribly mean but honest, my satire is looking more and more like the reality.

23: 20 Another quotation (not my satire):

the identity of any one specific woman, like that of a man, is multiple and develops according to numerous criteria determined by her personal relations and her networks which connect her with other individuals inhabiting her social, religious, cultural, political and economic environment.

23:23 Why must you torment me, o circumlocution??

23:26 Drinking game: "normative." In my case, that means I get to drink a swig of tea.

23:50 Second swig: "normative." As in

the second part of the volume turns to juridical sources which not unexpectedly also reveal women's visibility, agency and consciousness of action or, rather, the limitations of them through the prism of normative parameters.

I put lots of sugar in the tea for stimulation.

00:00 It's "normative" again. "Normative texts."

00:06 Taking a break.

00:39 Back to work. A lovely note for my dawdling to end on: "Streep donates $10,000 in Davis's honor to R.I. school" (from Yahoo News).

01:27 Now the footnotes!

01:28 Google has picked up on my preoccupation and is encouraging me to fly to Egypt, meet Muslim women, and convert to Islam, by way of its advertisements. The Pope will no doubt be relieved to hear that I am not going to take Google up on the offer.

01:32 A swig of tea as a reward for reaching the footnotes!

01:55 There was nothing in the bibliography that seemed too pertinent, so I have hopped back in time to Sassanid Iran (before the 7th century A.D., I think) to look at precedents for women rulers and so on. It is in many ways a very strange dynasty.

02:08 I've sort of lost grip of the essay subject approach, so I will be wasting time again. (c:

02:34 Finished extract of An Arab-Syrian Gentleman; will endeavour to waste time more.

03:01 Off to sleep!