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  • On a windy night the neighbors’ nativity scene becomes a procession of Ringwraiths.

    → 8:38 PM, Dec 25
  • Martin Hägglund, This Life:

    If we were absolved from suffering—viewing the world from the standpoint of eternity—we could no longer care about whether someone lives or dies, since nothing that happens could count as a loss for us.

    And again it’s time to watch Arsenal.

    → 8:25 PM, Dec 19
  • Weeknotes, 18 December 2020

    The first week after finals and graduation. Many people at the library, unable to take vacations this summer, have plenty of vacation days on the books and began using them as quickly as they could. I’m no exception, though I worked several days and missed others for medical appointments rather than for pleasure. None of us are starting new projects right now, or trying too hard to close out those in progress; there’s an unspoken agreement there will be time enough in January.

    → 4:16 PM, Dec 18
  • A stormy, snowy morning crossing Lake Champlain.

    Ferry on lake

    → 8:45 PM, Dec 17
  • Jonathan Rose, “The Classics in the Slums”:

    The Workers’ Educational Association, founded in 1903 (and still a going concern today), brought university-level adult courses in literature, history, science, and economics to the mill towns. The students were intensely dedicated: they had to be, given the realities of their lives. One pottery engineer recorded that, over a 26-week period, he worked an average of 74.5 hours per week, then wrote 14 essays for his WEA course, and also delivered a total of 25 lectures to various other classes.

    The WEA offered no grades, no degrees, and no vocational courses. The only motive for study was the disinterested pursuit of learning, and the students vehemently rejected any kind of occupational training. “Knowledge for its own sake is a better principle,” said one. “Adult education is often a way of escape from the tedious monotony of working life. Give as wide a range of subjects as possible and let the student follow his bent.” “We want freedom of mind, power and expression,” wrote another, “and for that reason wish to dissociate work and study.”

    → 9:47 PM, Dec 16
  • We’re looking at the first truly cold night of the winter.

    Map of forecast temperatures, New York - Quebec border

    → 9:48 PM, Dec 15
  • Strange to not have snow this late in the year.

    Beyond a pond, a stone building.

    → 9:17 PM, Dec 14
  • Recent posts on Outliner Software set me to rereading the early years of Manfred Kuehn’s sadly-defunct Taking Note blog. “Lichtenberg’s Wastebook” (July 2009) and “Why GTD does not Work for those who Write” (August 2009) were the pieces that particularly struck me today.

    → 7:30 PM, Dec 13
  • Gabriel Winant, We Live in a Society:

    Organization is the entire question—the building of relationships and trust across the forms of social difference that have thus far prevented the socialist message from resonating as widely as it might.

    Going forward, after the election.

    → 8:23 PM, Dec 12
  • Weeknotes, 11 December 2020

    Finals week. Usually I’d be at the library, and so would be seemingly our entire student body. But not this year, as I’m working from home, and most of the student population went home before Thanksgiving. Though the library itself is usually very busy during finals, the research help desk is less so, as students use the building mostly to study. Faculty are less likely than in previous decades to assign big research projects. That’s reflected in our online reference and chat statistics for the past few weeks. A bare handful of students are requesting help, and those are mostly citation questions rather than for anything earlier in the research process.

    Work goes on as the semester winds down. We’re looking forward now: discussing changes to the student survey for the information literacy course we teach as part of the general education program. And we try not to make UX changes to our website or services during the semester, so it’s time to begin seeing what can be fixed or improved between now and late January.

    → 3:54 PM, Dec 11
  • Today in my favorite sport: West Indies are looking good in the first session against New Zealand, and the Financial Times reviewed Ramachandra Guha’s The Commonwealth of Cricket. Hope I can find a copy in the US. 🏏📚

    → 8:27 PM, Dec 10
  • In the end I went with a compact-sized standing desk, the Jaswig Nomad, and couldn’t be happier.

    Jaswig Nomad standing desk and Phive desk lamp

    → 9:38 PM, Dec 9
  • Reviving a Crop and an African-American Culture, Stalk by Stalk:

    Fall is cane syrup season in pockets of the Deep South, where people still gather to grind sugar cane and boil its juice into dark, sweet syrup in iron kettles big enough to bathe in.

    Worth comparing to Northeast maple sugaring traditions. Artisanal production, derived from a specific place, and thus able to charge a higher price…

    → 9:31 PM, Dec 8
  • U of Vermont faculty members pledge to fight planned cuts to liberal arts

    My brother-in-law is quoted extensively; he says the writer talked to him for an hour and did an excellent job with the article. She likely has a good liberal arts education…

    → 9:23 PM, Dec 7
  • The tree is up early this year!

    Christmas tree with ornaments and colored lights

    → 10:11 PM, Dec 6
  • A nearby convenience store has begun stocking beers from Mikkeller Brewing. Every one I’ve tried so far has been excellent. My favorite remains the Windy Hill IPA, but tonight’s SoCal Distancing IPA is nearly as good.

    → 8:35 PM, Dec 5
  • Weeknotes, 4 December 2020

    Our faculty senate passed, unanimously, an open access policy. I chaired the committee that drafted the policy. It’s a big relief to have it done, and with so much support from across the college. We’ve adopted the consortium soulution, the SUNY Open Access Repository (SOAR), and migrated about three hundred items from an older repository. Next we’re working with the provost’s office to harvest data from faculty’s annual activity reports.

    Otherwise, the semester is winding down. Students left the dorms the week before last, as COVID-19 cases were rising but just before we had enough cases to trigger an automatic closure. This was the last week of classes; next week is finals. So it’s the usual round of reference questions, especially citation questions. Volume is down from the pre-pandemic era. I suspect faculty are assigning much less research this semester, or students are doing everything via Google.

    → 6:47 PM, Dec 4
  • Since Kane Williamson looks unlikely to ever get out, tonight I’ve switched to watching today’s World Cup biathlon from Finland. Sports are the best form of slow TV. 🏏⛷

    → 9:12 PM, Dec 3
  • It’s 7 PM on the east coast of the US and I’m watching West Indies and New Zealand play Test cricket eight thousand miles away. Bright sunshine, green grass, crowds in the stands, and no masks. Feels like a fantasy world. 🏏

    → 8:06 PM, Dec 2
  • A good day at faculty senate: my committee’s open-access policy breezed through, and even better a friend’s policy to implement test-optional admissions passed almost unanimously.

    → 7:06 PM, Dec 1
  • It’s nice to be in a daily writing groove. Thanks, Microblogvember, for reinforcing the habit!

    → 7:59 PM, Nov 30
  • I hope someday ESPN will revive the nineteenth-century sport of pedestrianism.

    → 8:54 PM, Nov 29
  • When the #mbnov word of the day was winter, I wrote “For all that I would prefer to not have to wear a mask, it is at least going to keep my face much warmer this winter.” Conveniently, the phrasing covers today’s word and the sentiment is still true!

    → 8:20 PM, Nov 28
  • It seems to me dilemmas are few during the pandemic. The correct decision most often demands a self-denial that promotes the common good. The problem is that this becomes more difficult every day, like working without a weekend or vacation to look forward to.

    → 7:26 PM, Nov 27
  • The Thanksgiving feast at 2 PM means that by 7 you are long past ready for dinner, and yet there is no dinner. It’s a big adjustment.

    → 8:05 PM, Nov 26
  • Hard Times: Martin Hägglund’s “This Life” and the Pomodoro Technique - Los Angeles Review of Books:

    If you approach each new interval with a question, not an answer, and god forbid certainly not a task…

    A call to use the tools of productivity culture but to reject its logic.

    → 8:34 PM, Nov 25
  • Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò

    A constructive approach would focus on the pursuit of specific goals or end results rather than avoiding “complicity” in injustice or adhering to moral principles.

    The provisions outlined here are really quite good.

    → 9:10 PM, Nov 24
  • Captured! cat sticking head out of dresser drawer

    → 8:34 PM, Nov 23
  • One of the perks of living where we do is that Montreal is only an hour’s drive north. Unfortunately, the border has been closed since March and isn’t likely to open anytime soon.

    → 9:46 PM, Nov 22
  • For all that I would prefer to not have to wear a mask, it is at least going to keep my face much warmer this winter.

    → 8:46 PM, Nov 21
  • Next week is Thanksgiving in the US, and I have more vacation days than I can keep, so even though we’ll be sheltering in place I’m taking the whole week off. The past few days, then, have been a slow fade to black, returning emails and generally closing loops.

    → 6:10 PM, Nov 20
  • It’s possible I forgot today’s post until bedtime.

    → 9:48 PM, Nov 19
  • Caffeine dependence shows a dark side on evenings like this, when having only half as much as normal during the day leads to a collapse at night.

    → 8:45 PM, Nov 18
  • At 11 it might be a little late to train this guy.

    → 5:19 PM, Nov 17
  • From 2003, the earliest memory in my camera roll: the remains of the slave quarter living-history exhibit at Carter’s Grove, Williamsburg, VA. The exhibit was closed for good that year because anything other than patriotic white colonists made too many visitors uncomfortable.

    → 8:06 PM, Nov 16
  • King of the squirrels, for as far as his eye can see

    → 9:25 PM, Nov 15
  • The least spooky Halloween decorations I saw this year.

    → 8:50 PM, Nov 14
  • Every evening I wait and refresh for the college to announce the day’s Covid-19 positives. Students are supposed to leave the dorms after next Friday’s classes, but more positive tests means more must stay and quarantine. It’s anyone’s guess how many will actually get to leave.

    → 8:10 PM, Nov 13
  • A fashionable accessory to wear

    → 8:45 PM, Nov 12
  • poling gently upstream on the River Say

    → 8:17 PM, Nov 11
  • Our elderly Peanut

    → 8:45 PM, Nov 10
  • Back in August, our gym having announced it was closing for good, I began working out with kettlebells. It’s taken three months but I finally feel like my technique has improved enough that I’m not just heaving hard enough to force the weight through the lift.

    → 8:44 PM, Nov 9
  • One of the things I like best about GoodNotes is how it embraces the analog notebook metaphor while allowing for open-ended expansion. Today I realized I could bind together related articles with my handwritten notes in a single document, and give it a custom cover.

    → 7:39 PM, Nov 8
  • I’ve been disappointed with the past two Democratic administrations so hardly want to inflate my expectations for this one. Nevertheless I find myself sharing in the general sense of joy and relief!

    → 8:57 PM, Nov 7
  • A puzzling posture

    → 9:40 PM, Nov 6
  • Racing to paint the house before winter arrives. Scraping of the old paint has begun; flakes falling onto the front stoop.

    Front view of a green two story house, paint flaking off, with a workmen's lift off to the right.

    → 9:10 PM, Nov 5
  • Yesterday brought the season’s first snowfall. It’s nearly melted and tomorrow begins a string of 60°F days. We’re going to try to paint the house during the brief window. It will be a near thing.

    → 8:38 PM, Nov 4
  • Our faculty senate, themselves strained by both today’s election and our ongoing public health and financial crises, have set their own fears aside for an hour or two to work to ease those stresses on our students. Shared governance still retains the capacity to astonish.

    → 5:27 PM, Nov 3
  • We can be hard on ourselves when unable to concentrate. But sometimes, it’s not willpower but a physical malady — in my case today, a sinus infection.

    → 9:58 PM, Nov 2
  • A dreary, rainy first day of November, long past time to take down the screen tent.

    → 3:43 PM, Nov 1
  • Gecko-sitting for the summer.

    → 7:40 PM, Jul 24
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 79: 23.0 km, total 1028.6 km, at Burnt Hill in the NE corner of Tennessee – and done!

    GVRAT 2020-07-18, Burnt Hill

    Joshua Beatty, after long run, holding beer

    → 9:39 AM, Jul 19
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 78: 13.2 km, total 1005.6 km, on the Virginia Creeper Trail near Damascus.

    GVRAT 2020-07-17, Virginia Creeper 
Trail near Damascus, VA

    → 9:38 AM, Jul 18
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 77: 10.3 km, total 992.4 km, near Damascus, VA.

    GVRAT 2020-07-16, near Damascus, VA

    → 10:13 AM, Jul 17
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 76: 17.7 km, total 982.1 km, near Abingdon, VA.

    GVRAT 2020-07-15, near Abingdon, VA

    → 11:37 AM, Jul 16
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 75: 10.5 km, total 964.4 km, passing by Bristol.

    GVRAT 2020-07-14, passing by Bristol

    → 10:16 AM, Jul 15
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 74: 16.1 km, total 953.9 km, passing by Bristol.

    GVRAT 2020-07-13, passing by Bristol

    → 9:33 AM, Jul 14
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 73: 8.1 km, total 937.8 km, Bluff City.

    GVRAT 2020-07-12, Bluff City

    → 10:12 AM, Jul 13
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 72: 8.3 km, total 929.7 km, past Piney Flats.

    GVRAT 2020-07-11, Piney Flats

    → 9:59 AM, Jul 12
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 71: 11.1 km, total 921.4 km, Johnson City.

    GVRAT 2020-07-10, Johnson City

    → 12:41 PM, Jul 11
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 70: 13.1 km, total 910.3 km, past Jonesborough.

    GVRAT 2020-07-09, Jonesborough

    → 10:13 AM, Jul 10
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 69: 10.2 km, total 897.2 km, approaching Jonesborough.

    GVRAT 2020-07-08, Jonesborough

    → 2:52 PM, Jul 9
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 68: 17.7 km, total 887 km, past Chuckey.

    GVRAT 2020-07-07, Chuckey

    → 9:43 AM, Jul 8
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 66: 25.1 km, total 869.3 km, Greeneville.

    GVRAT 2020-07-05, Greeneville

    → 10:13 AM, Jul 6
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 65: 10.3 km, total 844.2 km, crossing under I-81 near Bulls Gap.

    GVRAT 2020-07-03, Bulls Gap

    → 9:51 AM, Jul 5
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 64: 13.7 km, total 833.9 km, past Russelville.

    GVRAT 2020-07-03, Russelville

    → 12:40 PM, Jul 4
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 63: 12.3 km, total 820.2 km, in Morristown, at the Crockett Tavern Museum!

    GVRAT 2020-07-02, Morristown

    → 9:33 AM, Jul 3
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 62: 11.2 km, total 807.9 km, Morristown.

    GVAT 2020-07-01, Morristown

    → 9:35 AM, Jul 2
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 61: 18 km, total 796.7 km, Jefferson City.

    GVRAT 2020-06-30, Jefferson City

    → 7:34 PM, Jul 1
  • Statement on Textbooks in the Library Collection:

    This is not a library problem. This is an industry problem that impacts everyone in higher education.

    Too often libraries hide the realities of the publishing industry from their patrons. Credit to GVSU for telling the truth.

    → 5:40 PM, Jun 30
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 60: 10.3 km, total 778.7 km, Strawberry Plains.

    GVRAT 2020-06-29, Strawberry Plains

    → 11:51 AM, Jun 30
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 59: 8.6 km, total 768.4 km, past Knoxville.

    GVRAT 2020-06-28, past Knoxville

    → 9:42 AM, Jun 29
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 58: 22 km, total 759.8 km, past Knoxville.

    GVRAT 2020-06-27, Knoxville

    → 10:39 AM, Jun 28
  • Robin D. G. Kelley sums up the concept of racial capitalism:

    Racial capitalism, as far as Cedric Robinson, the late political scientist, understands it or explained it basically was built based on this idea that capitalism itself is not distinct from racism. The way we think of racism is that racism is a by-product of capitalism. That is, capitalism emerges and racism is a way to divide workers. It’s a way to extract greater value from, say, enslaved people, Indigenous people, etc. But what Cedric argued was that the grounds of the civilization in which capitalism emerges is already based on racial hierarchy. And that racial hierarchy is not necessarily the global one, it’s even within Europe itself that racial distinctions were ways in which early capitalism was able to take advantage of certain groups over others, whether it’s in terms of wages, whether it’s in terms of dispossession and forcing people off the land, using violence against the Irish, for example. We don’t think of the Irish as a racialized group, but in many ways, in the 16th century, that’s what they were.

    And so if you think of race as assigning meaning to whole groups of people, convincing, ideologically convincing others that some people are inferior to others, that some people are designed as beasts of burden and other people are designed to accept, to embrace the wealth of that, then what you end up getting is a system of extraction that allows for a kind of super-exploitation of Black and brown people. And racial capitalism also relies on an ideology or racial regime, and the racial regime convinces a lot of white people, who may get the crumbs of this extraction through slavery, through Jim Crow, through land dispossession, convince them to be or support or shore up a regime that seems to benefit whiteness based in white supremacy but where their own share of the spoils is actually pretty miniscule. Du Bois called this the “wages of whiteness.” It’s like an ideological wage that doesn’t always translate materially. Sometimes it does, sometimes it doesn’t.

    So if you think of capitalism as racial capitalism, then the outcome is you cannot eliminate capitalism, overthrow it, without the complete destruction of white supremacy, of the racial regime under which it’s built. And we can see how this works with the police all the time.
    → 9:46 AM, Jun 28
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 57: 10.4 km, total 737.8 km, Knoxville.

    GVRAT 2020-06-26, Knoxville

    → 1:01 PM, Jun 27
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 56: 17.6 km, total 727.3 km, Farragut.

    GVRAT 2020-06-25, Farragut

    → 10:06 AM, Jun 26
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 55: 10.2 km, total 709.7 km, Lenoir City.

    GVRAT 2020-06-24, Lenoir City

    → 10:31 AM, Jun 25
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 54: 10.6 km, total 699.5 km, Loudon.

    GVRAT 2020-06-23, Loudon

    → 7:39 PM, Jun 24
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 53: 12.4 km, total 688.9 km, Philadelphia.

    GVRAT 2020-06-22, Philadelphia

    → 9:24 AM, Jun 23
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 51: 18.4 km, total 676.5 km, Rails Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-20, Rails Hollow

    → 6:03 PM, Jun 21
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 50: 10.2 km, total 658.1 km, Rails Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-19, Rails Hollow

    → 4:25 PM, Jun 20
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 49: 10.2 km, total 647.9 km, Harmon Hollow.

    SGVRAT 2020-06-18, Harmon Hollow

    → 9:46 AM, Jun 19
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 48: 10.4 km, total 637.7 km, Elder Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-17, Elder Hollow

    → 10:06 AM, Jun 18
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 47: 15.3 km, total 627.3 km, past the Hiwassee River.

    GVRAT 2020-06-16, past the Hiwassee River

    → 10:45 AM, Jun 17
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 46: 7.4 km, total 612 km, in Georgetown.

    GVRAT 2020-06-15, in Georgetown

    → 9:31 AM, Jun 16
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 45: 30 km, total 604.6 km, past Harrison.

    GVRAT 2020-06-14, past Harrison

    → 3:59 PM, Jun 15
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 44: 10.4 km, total 574.6 km, in Chattanooga.

    GVRAT 2020-06-13, Chattanooga

    → 10:29 AM, Jun 14
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 43: 18.3 km, total 564.2 km, in Chattanooga.

    GVRAT 2020-06-12, Chattanooga

    → 9:21 AM, Jun 13
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 42: 13.1 km, total 545.9 km, a brief detour into Georgia.

    GVRAT 2020-06-11, Wildwood, Georgia

    → 11:51 AM, Jun 12
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 41: 10.4 km, total 532.8 km, past the Tennessee River.

    GVRAT 2020-06-10, past the Tennessee River

    → 2:18 PM, Jun 11
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 40: 18.4 km, total 522.4 km, past Jasper. Halfway to Virginia!

    GVRAT 2020-06-09, past Jasper

    → 9:55 AM, Jun 10
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 39: 11 km, total 504 km, past Tracy City.

    GVRAT 2020-06-08, past Tracy City

    → 9:25 AM, Jun 9
  • Maple sugar and Marx's <em>Grundrisse</em>

    During this spring of social distancing I sat at home and read Karl Marx’s Grundrisse. The Grundrisse is a working-out of the ideas that would eventually make up the three published volumes of Capital. But Marx died before he could put much of the material in the Grundrisse into a more finished form, so it remains maybe the best overview of Marx’s total vision of how capitalism functions.

    Also this spring, the geographer David Harvey taught a course on the Grundrisse at CUNY and posted his lectures to YouTube. At one point he asked his students for feedback — what were they getting from the text and lectures? In appreciation of the work he’d put in, I also sent him an email.

    The email’s as good a summary of where my research has been taking me as anything I’ve written, so I’m posting it to my own blog as a way to mark my progress.


    I’m a librarian by trade, but my training and research interests are in history, and I’m currently researching the history of maple sugar production in the early American republic. Specifically, I’m looking at a set of three attempts, between 1790 and 1795, to produce maple sugar on a large enough scale that it could replace cane sugar imported from the Caribbean.

    One of the key insights that I’ve picked up from the Grundrisse is that of viewing the circuits of capital as a totality. I’m finding that thinking about both how sugar was produced and how it was distributed and consumed is, well, productive.

    Cane sugar was produced on large plantations with an almost industrial character — a great deal of investment in the form of fixed capital, but still reliant on enslaved laborers and a focus on a single staple product for export. After harvest and an initial refining process in the Caribbean, cane sugar was then shipped to the United States (or Europe), where it had to be refined again both to fix damage from travel, and to make it the purer, whiter grade desired by genteel consumers.

    In contrast, maple sugar was produced in the northeast US and in Canada on small family farms, with little investment needed, free labor (whether family members only or occasional wage labor), and as an adjunct to the larger farm production, with most of the sugar kept for personal use and some being sold at local markets. Maple sugar was refined to a level similar to a Caribbean brownish muscovado but not further.

    What the investors in large-scale maple sugar wanted to do was usurp cane’s place within the totality of production, distribution, and consumption, by mass-producing maple sugar in a quality similar to what was shipped from the Caribbean, transporting it to urban seaports, then having existing refineries transform it into a high-grade white sugar.

    There were three major attempts to harvest maple sugar on a large scale between 1790 and 1794. The proprietors were William Cooper, in Cooperstown, NY; Henry Drinker, at Union Farm on the Susquehanna in southeast PA; and Gerrit Boon, near Utica, NY. These were independent but not unrelated attempts; Drinker was Cooper’s biggest investor, while Boon visited both Cooper and Drinker’s operations.

    All three failed. What’s interesting to me, and what the Grundrisse gives me a lens for understanding, are the ways in which they failed, and how the initial vision for the projects gradually retreated.

    Initially, as conceived by Cooper, Drinker, Benjamin Rush, and a circle of Philadelphia Quakers who invested in both Cooper and Drinker’s attempts, the maple sugar industry was intended to strike a deathblow to Caribbean sugar plantation slavery. Farmers and their families, settled in the forests of Pennsylvania and New York, would produce raw sugar equal in quality and quantity to that of the sugar islands. They would do so using simple tools rather than industrial facilities, and laboring for only a few weeks of the agricultural year.

    But Cooper’s first attempt, in 1790, produced only relatively small amounts of a poor-quality sugar that the Philadelphia refiner Edward Penington had difficulty refining and selling. Cooper and Drinker had hoped to gain the endorsement of the country’s elite. But Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, having been sent samples of maple sugar, expressed support publicly but in private denigrated the quality and refused to serve it at their tables.

    The next year Cooper tried to increase the quality of his maple sugar by building a refinery in the woods, based on descriptions of refineries at Caribbean plantations. We don’t know exactly what went wrong, only that he shipped only a very small amount of sugar out of Cooperstown in 1791 and closed up his operation soon after.

    Drinker’s operation at Union Farm attempted to produce maple sugar for several years but, like Cooper’s, never seems to have produced enough to create a return for its investors.

    Boon’s also failed, but in a more interesting way. Boon seems to have had no interest in antislavery; he was a Dutchman employed by a sugar refining and mercantile house in Rotterdam, had experience on Caribbean sugar plantations, and owned slaves at his central New York home. He was simply looking to use his expertise to make a killing for his firm. His attempt was based around a significant investment in fixed capital: creating a system of troughs and gutters to collect the sap and draw it by gravity to the refinery. Modern maple syrup farmers can pull that off with a system of plastic tubing and a vacuum pump, but Boon’s handcrafted wooden troughs warped and leaked. The experiment was deemed a failure and Boon’s firm instead invested in the burgeoning land speculation market.

    I’ve been thinking primarily about production, and a little about consumption, but before watching your lectures and reading the Grundrisse, I hadn’t considered the other circuits that flow within the totality of cane sugar/maple sugar production. Credit is one: from where do Cooper, Drinker, and Boon get their initial investment, and how does that affect the progress of their attempts? And I don’t know as much as I’d like about the farmers or laborers who did the actual work of harvesting and refining maple sugar as I’d like.

    → 1:26 PM, Jun 8
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 38: 20.1 km, total 493 km, in Tracy City.

    GVRAT 2020-06-07, Tracy City

    → 11:52 AM, Jun 8
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 37: 10.5 km, total 472.9 km, near Sewanee.

    GVRAT 2020-06-06, near Sewanee

    → 9:21 AM, Jun 7
  • “No Justice No Peace” Walk for Change protest today here in Plattsburgh. 2,000 participants, in a city of less than 20,000. Significantly bigger than our last major demonstration in January 2017.

    → 8:42 PM, Jun 6
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 36: 16 km, total 462.4 km, past Winchester.

    GVRAT 2020-06-05, past Winchester

    → 9:32 AM, Jun 6
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 35: 13.1 km, total 446.4 km, Cowley Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-04, Cowley Hollow

    → 9:38 AM, Jun 5
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 34: 10.2 km, total 433.3 km, Cowley Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-03, Cowley Hollow

    → 9:20 AM, Jun 4
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 33: 17.6 km, total 423.1 km, Cowley Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-06-02, Cowley Hollow

    → 12:04 PM, Jun 3
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 31: 9.2 km, total 405.5 km, past Fayetteville.

    GVRAT 2020-05-31, Fayetteville

    → 12:10 PM, Jun 1
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 30: 26.1 km, total 396.3 km, approaching Fayetteville.

    GVRAT 2020-05-30, Fayetteville

    → 9:26 AM, May 31
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 29: 370.2 km, outside Sarge’s Shack in Frankewing.

    GVRAT 2020-05-29, Frankewing

    → 9:50 AM, May 30
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 28: 359.8 km, Owl Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-05-28, Owl Hollow

    → 9:30 AM, May 29
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 27: 342.1 km, Jones Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-05-27, Jones Hollow

    → 1:02 PM, May 28
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 26: 329 km, past Deerfield. No Google Street View!

    GVRAT 2020-05-26, past Deerfield

    → 10:21 AM, May 27
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 25: 318.7 km, past Deerfield.

    GVRAT 2020-05-25, past Deerfield

    → 3:38 PM, May 26
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 24: 301 km, approaching Deerfield.

    GVRAT 2020-05-24, Deerfield

    → 7:33 PM, May 25
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 23: 290.6 km, Lawrenceburg, approaching the Natchez Trace Parkway.

    GVRAT 2020-05-23, Lawrenceburg

    → 9:57 AM, May 24
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 22: 272 km, entering Waynesboro.

    GVRAT 2020-05-22, Waynesboro

    → 5:46 PM, May 23
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 21: 261.6 km, Bromley Hollow.

    GVRAT 2020-05-21, Bromley Hollow

    → 12:05 PM, May 22
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 19: 247.5 km, in Olive Hill.

    GVRAT 2020-05-19, Olive Hill

    → 10:53 AM, May 20
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 18: 234.4 km, past Savannah.

    GVRAT 2020-05-18, past Savannah

    → 1:32 PM, May 19
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 17: 229.3 km, in Savannah.

    GVRAT 2020-05-17, Savannah, TN

    → 11:03 AM, May 18
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 16: 203.8 km, past Selmer.

    GVRAT 2020-05-16, past Selmer, TN

    → 1:25 PM, May 17
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 15: 193.8 km, past Selmer.

    GVRAT 2020-05-15, Selmer, TN

    → 12:54 PM, May 16
  • Day 14, Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee: 176.1 km, near Bethel Springs.

    GVRAT 2020-05-14, Bethel Springs, TN

    → 11:16 AM, May 15
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 13: 163 km, approaching Hornsby.

    GVRAT 2020-05-13, Hornsby, TN

    → 9:07 AM, May 14
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 12: 153.1 km, in Boliver.

    GVRAT 2020-05-12, Boliver, TN

    → 1:18 PM, May 13
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 11: 135.4 km, past Whiteville. Stopping for a virtual Gatorade.

    GVRAT 2020-05-11, Whiteville, TN

    → 8:43 AM, May 12
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 10: 127.3 km, past Laconia.

    GVRAT 2020-05-10, Laconia, TN

    → 8:15 AM, May 11
  • Great Virtual Race Across Tennessee, day 9: 117 km, past Somerville.

    GVRAT 2020-05-09, Somerville, TN

    → 7:09 AM, May 10
  • Strong defenses of, respectively, public higher education and faculty-led humanities education:

    • Corey Robin, "The Pandemic Is the Time to Resurrect the Public University"
    • Adam Kotsko, "Not Persuasion, But Power: Against 'Making the Case'"
    → 2:20 PM, May 7
  • The theme of this morning’s long run looks to be labor history — theory, then practice. Casualties of History podcast description Wrestling Observer podcast description

    → 8:00 AM, Apr 11
  • Last September we drove to Lowell, Mass. for a New Japan Pro Wrestling show. With the pandemic, I fear it will be a long time before there’s another.

    → 8:23 PM, Mar 31
  • Butter chickpeas

    → 9:17 PM, Mar 29
  • The W. W. Hartwell house (1870), Plattsburgh, NY

    → 8:46 PM, Mar 26
  • Rural colleges like mine recruit from NYC via social contract. We provide a good education in a fresh environment; students’ tuition and taxes keep the region thriving. Then a pandemic breaks out and we send them back to the epicenter but keep their money. It’s unconscionable.

    → 9:26 AM, Mar 25
  • Working from home

    → 9:03 PM, Mar 24
  • Late March snowstorm

    → 8:14 PM, Mar 23
  • Coronavirus, day 12: the weekend, running, media consumption

    It’s surprising how little there is to write about from this weekend. I ran both mornings, a long run on Saturday and an easier one today, and saw almost nobody else either time. I’d expect that going around the old Air Force base as I did Saturday, but today, when I went out a little later and around some local trails, it was more surprising.

    Inside, it’s just a round of reading (William Gibson, Agency), video games (Mario Kart, Animal Crossing) and YouTube (Bon Appétit, David Harvey’s lecture series on the Grundrisse). I’m reading along with the latter but have fallen about two weeks behind; I’d like to catch up before the end of the course.

    Tomorrow spring break ends and classes return, and I have no idea what will happen.

    → 7:38 PM, Mar 22
  • William Gibson, Agency, ch. 12:

    “The drivers for the jackpot are still in place, but with less torque at that particular point.” He took a seat at the table. “They’re still a bit in advance of the pandemics, at least.”

    Even our most prescient near-future SF author can’t keep up.

    → 10:12 PM, Mar 21
  • Coronavirus, day 10: Animal Crossing

    It’s become clear that we will all be socially distancing for some time to come. Since my immune system isn’t yet back to full strength I’ve been staying in the house for the past week. As of Sunday New York is instituting a ban on all public gatherings, no matter how many people, and closing all non-essential businesses.

    So…I bought a Nintendo Switch yesterday. I’d been thinking about it for the past couple of years. With Animal Crossing: New Horizons being released today, the time seemed right. I’m a slow adopter on video games. I’ve never had an Animal Crossing title the same year it was released. So I’m excited to discover how the game unfolds at the same time as everyone else.

    The library finally shut its doors entirely as of Thursday afternoon. The college has asked students not to return to the dorms — previously we’d expected about 700 to come back. Virtual classes start up on Monday. The library can’t support the students and faculty because the bureaucracy has blocked the implementation of the chat/reference software we purchased until they review the contract. Our IT team has been very good about setting things up so we can roll it out on short notice. But we don’t know when that will be.

    → 5:49 PM, Mar 20
  • Mimi, preparing to slink onto someone’s lap.

    → 10:14 PM, Mar 19
  • Coronavirus day 8: 18 March 2020

    Of course the coronavirus crisis is more than eight days old, but the day it began to change my life was last Wednesday, when the college announced the rest of the semester would be taught online. This week we — the library and IT — are continuing to set up support for the faculty and students, on very short notice. I’m awfully impressed by the amount the IT side has been able to get done, like setting up a virtual computer lab with 200 seats. And they, and our student workers, are all working in the building under what can’t be pleasant conditions. Tomorrow the VPs will decide if we can close the library; our leadership is pleading with them to do so.

    → 7:16 PM, Mar 18
  • Coronavirus: small routines in the midst of chaos

    An odd day, even by the current standard. A flurry of emails received from different levels of college administration all morning until just before 10 AM, then — nothing. The clerks and secretaries’ union got them permission to go home, which is good. But as long as the library stays open that means someone will have to supervise the student workers, and I’ve seen no evidence the library will close.

    Meanwhile, I’m working from home, setting up our systems to accommodate reference chat and virtual appointments. Morning runs, afternoon walks with Peanut, and a beer precisely at 5PM to mark the end of the day.

    → 6:04 PM, Mar 17
  • The coronavirus, online classes, and physical infrastructure

    Back to work today, from the comfy chair in my home office. We began putting together the systems we’ll need to give students online access to reference services when they return from break. I like the system we’re using (LibAnswers, from Springshare). There are collaborative tools embedded that will allow the librarians to work together on reference questions in a way we rarely do. The real question is will students have reason to ask questions of us, and even if so will they actually ask those questions? The first depends on how the teaching faculty teach over the next two months, and as for the second the best we can do is figure out how to make it easy to engage with us, and to follow up quickly on questions.

    But to take or teach a virtual class requires the right hardware and software, and many people need that set up by our IT side. Faculty have been instructed to move courses online and don’t have the equipment or knowledge to do so. They’re actually coming to the building more now than at any time during the semester because they need in-person help. Schools in the area have shut down and other colleges have sent their students back home. So there are more people than ever looking for a public space to work in, and we are the only one left. Plus we are going to have an estimated 700 students returning after spring break, some presumably from places with community transmission of Covid-19. So, when we are supposed to be spreading out and away from each other, the college and library will become more densely populated. I do not think that the system or the college will look good when this is over.

    → 6:42 PM, Mar 16
  • Preparing for social distancing

    This morning I went to the library to grab the things I’ll need at home over the next few weeks. The library was closed — it always is on Sunday mornings, and with spring break this week it won’t open until Monday. It was quiet and dark and I took the chance to crank Deafheaven while I was packing up my things.

    The county has closed all the schools, the local public library is shutting its doors, and the city-owned gym is going offline. That leaves our academic library as the only large public space that will still be open for at least twenty miles in any direction. I’m worried about my colleagues, and especially the staff and students who will be working at the service desks. The state needs to end this pretense of keeping the SUNY colleges open through the pandemic.

    → 8:28 PM, Mar 15
  • The Saranac River, running high from snowmelt in the Adirondacks.

    → 6:09 PM, Mar 14
  • Holding our breath until classes resume

    I worked from home today, so if there was any excitement on campus I missed it. But I doubt there was. Almost no email came across the wire. I suspect everyone is just holding their breath, waiting for a week and a half from now when spring break ends and the shift to online instruction begins.

    It looks like I’ll have more days working from home. I talked to the nurse today, who thought that since my blood counts are still bouncing back post-chemotherapy I should stay away from the library and from crowds. And the dean had told me I could work from home when the crisis was starting. I think it will be good for my mental health as well. When I was at the library this week I mostly just felt helpless.

    → 7:52 PM, Mar 13
  • The library's role under coronavirus

    The college is open today, and classes are in session, but it seems strange: why can’t we cancel classes for two days before spring break, before we move them all online? Keep offices open to support students, sure, but I can’t imagine holding classes did any good.

    Our library is staying open through spring break, and will stay open after break ends, though likely on reduced hours. At most colleges that are moving instruction online, the library is staying open. There are two schools of thought on this. One is that the library provides essential services and has a duty to the community to maintain those services. The other is that by staying open the library becomes another potential site of community transmission. Nor should librarians and other employees have to place themselves in danger.

    The former is the traditional view. But more and more, librarians are shifting to the latter position, in defense of both public and personal health.

    Update: Timothy Burke has an excellent Twitter thread detailing the logic behind “close the libraries,” but from the teaching faculty perspective.

    → 7:28 PM, Mar 12
  • Coronavirus and the college

    Today the governor announced that all SUNYs would be moving to online instruction for the rest of the semester. This wasn’t unexpected, but we’re underfunded and shortstaffed and there’s no way we could be prepared.

    The college isn’t closing. Students with nowhere else to go will stay in the dorms. Some lab classes and internships and experiential learning setups will keep going. And the library and computer labs are going to stay open. Faculty and commuter students are happy about the last, because we’re in a digital desert. Broadband is scarce, and cell networks erratic, once you drive a couple of miles out of the city. Ellen’s museum, fifteen miles north, gets 5 Mbps download speeds — and that’s on a good day.

    I hope our faculty recognize this, and don’t try to replace in-class meetings with synchronous video sessions students won’t have the bandwidth to watch even if their hardware is good. But we’ve signed a contract with Zoom, and IT is pushing that service pretty hard. From the library side, most of our services have an online component anyway — an email account for reference service, online appointment booking, subject and citation guides, and of course our discovery system and databases. We’re adding a chat service, something we’d ditched a few years back due to lack of use. And we can use Zoom or Google Hangouts for meetings with students. Most of our classroom instruction is finished by this point of the semester so that’s good.

    Ellen and I had planned a long weekend vacation in Québec City starting this Friday. That’s off now — even if we felt comfortable traveling, I need to stay here to help get the new library systems up and running quickly, and to make sure everyone is trained to use them.

    → 8:08 PM, Mar 11
  • Ten years ago. Still the worst sleeping arrangement I’ve seen at the library.

    → 9:00 PM, Mar 10
  • Maritime Museum of San Diego. This way to the Soviet B-39 submarine!

    → 7:58 PM, Mar 9
  • Mather Point, Grand Canyon

    → 8:03 PM, Mar 8
  • Jardin botanique, Montreal

    → 7:18 PM, Mar 7
  • → 9:31 PM, Mar 6
  • Jardin botanique, Montreal

    → 9:47 PM, Mar 5
  • Powder horn from the Seven Years’ War, Fort Ticonderoga

    → 9:20 PM, Mar 4
  • Frederick Douglass mural, New Bedford

    → 7:38 PM, Mar 3
  • Ellen gave a talk to the Lions Club tonight.

    → 10:03 PM, Mar 2
  • An attempt to capture a sculpture on campus with the setting sun eclipsed behind it, not entirely successful.

    → 8:23 PM, Mar 1
  • A reminder every time we open the fridge.

    → 5:11 PM, Feb 29
  • I’m reading Joanne McNeil’s Lurking: How a Person Became a User, and aside from giving me flashbacks to the late 90s, there is a lot in here to which micro.blog feels like a response.

    Excerpt of McNeil, Lurking

    Excerpt of McNeil, Lurking

    → 4:04 PM, Feb 28
  • Sign above door, Madison Community Market, Madison NH

    → 8:01 PM, Feb 27
  • Mimi, under covers

    → 10:26 PM, Feb 26
  • Syracuse University, June 2014

    → 8:38 PM, Feb 25
  • Ellen at Point au Roche

    → 9:21 PM, Feb 24
  • Treadwell Bay, looking west from Point au Roche to the mainland

    → 6:46 PM, Feb 23
  • Point au Roche State Park. 40°F and the ice on Lake Champlain is beginning to break up.

    → 10:31 PM, Feb 22
  • 2014: Ellen with Roni Raccoon, the 1980 Olympic mascot.

    → 10:07 PM, Feb 21
  • Ellen made the local news!

    → 6:00 PM, Feb 20
  • Pockets full of pocket notebooks

    → 4:17 PM, Feb 19
  • Our icicles are about halfway to the ground.

    → 9:37 PM, Feb 18
  • Helpful ammonite, New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Albuquerque

    → 8:28 PM, Feb 17
  • Dog sled on Mirror Lake, Lake Placid NY

    → 4:36 PM, Feb 16
  • Looking out the front window, Around the Lake Coffee, Lake Placid

    → 2:31 PM, Feb 15
  • Friday afternoon; time for a Long Trail Butternut Harvest Ale.

    → 5:59 PM, Feb 14
  • So close to snatching a snack

    → 2:53 PM, Feb 13
  • I’m reading Marx’s Grundrisse alongside David Harvey’s lecture series. What, I wonder, was the German original that translated to “crappy shit”?

    → 5:43 PM, Feb 12
  • Winter running, shoe mods

    → 2:37 PM, Feb 11
  • Reading helper

    → 8:23 PM, Feb 10
  • lightning talk proposal, “I Volunteered to Be Our User Experience Librarian and I Have No Idea What I’m Doing, Please Help”

    → 3:24 PM, Jan 31
  • Research note: in 1792 one Samuel Harris of Loyalsock, PA blamed his failure to produce more maple sugar on his laudanum habit.

    Perhaps not unrelated, he put all his one hundred taps in a single tree.

    → 6:05 PM, Jan 29
  • In Farmer Boy by Laura Ingalls Wilder, a frontier teacher has to defend himself from students who beat their previous teacher to death. Is there any historical backing to this?

    Some of today’s best historical writing is in the comments on r/AskHistorians.

    → 4:12 PM, Jan 1
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