And now that we've settled down from the hurricane......
Sorry about the delay, folks, but there was this hurricane called Ike....kinda glad I'm living in Houston rather than Galveston at present, although Galveston's a nicer place most of the time. Thankfully, we didn't lose our big yard tree, just the fences blown down and some roof shingles torn off. Loss of power for several days slowed down productivity, and then the Internet was out a week longer than that. Had to hang out at Panera Bread for free WiFi for awhile. Been back to normal for about three weeks, but too busy catching up with work to write about it.
Let's just begin where I've been recently, literarily speaking. Most fun since the hurricane was with a lovely coffeetable book on old photo picture postcards from Texas towns from about 1900 to the 1930s. Towns had their own photographers whose main job was to take pictures of all the economic progress as folks came in to farm on lands once part of the open range in the Panhandle of Texas. Some of these places were boom towns at the time and are ghost towns now. The weirdest part is seeing all those "old" western buildings looking brand new for a change. Picture books are cool. It's called Taming the Land, and is being published by Texas A&M Press.
Today I just finished indexing a book on four centuries of Jewish women's spiritual writing. Having indexed a lot of Jewish history for the New England Press's series, I was already familiar with some of the names in the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first-century sections, but the really early stuff was new. They actually found excerpts from some poor Jewish women who were interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition. They had to "confess" to conducting Jewish rituals (Sabbath, Passover, etc.) in secret in their homes. Very sad. Also, although I've read some stuff about the Holocaust as well, it is still moving to read surviving poems and diary entries from the mostly ghostly hands of those who suffered so much at the under the Nazis. The good part is that time has seen a reduction in anti-Semitism as well as a big improvement in women's public role in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles.
Next up is an index for a history of the Trinity School in New York City, some kind of prep school, looks like. Way too many endnotes in tiny print. I'll let you know if the story turns out to be a good one.
Let's just begin where I've been recently, literarily speaking. Most fun since the hurricane was with a lovely coffeetable book on old photo picture postcards from Texas towns from about 1900 to the 1930s. Towns had their own photographers whose main job was to take pictures of all the economic progress as folks came in to farm on lands once part of the open range in the Panhandle of Texas. Some of these places were boom towns at the time and are ghost towns now. The weirdest part is seeing all those "old" western buildings looking brand new for a change. Picture books are cool. It's called Taming the Land, and is being published by Texas A&M Press.
Today I just finished indexing a book on four centuries of Jewish women's spiritual writing. Having indexed a lot of Jewish history for the New England Press's series, I was already familiar with some of the names in the nineteenth and twentieth/twenty-first-century sections, but the really early stuff was new. They actually found excerpts from some poor Jewish women who were interrogated by the Spanish Inquisition. They had to "confess" to conducting Jewish rituals (Sabbath, Passover, etc.) in secret in their homes. Very sad. Also, although I've read some stuff about the Holocaust as well, it is still moving to read surviving poems and diary entries from the mostly ghostly hands of those who suffered so much at the under the Nazis. The good part is that time has seen a reduction in anti-Semitism as well as a big improvement in women's public role in Judaism, even in Orthodox circles.
Next up is an index for a history of the Trinity School in New York City, some kind of prep school, looks like. Way too many endnotes in tiny print. I'll let you know if the story turns out to be a good one.
posted by Joanne | 6:22 PM
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