How to concentrate on just one research project?

Someone asked how I manage to concentrate on just one research project at a time.

Eek. Well, to a certain extent I don't, but I do try. Usually, what I use is a combination of deadlines and grim persistence.

I find Interlibrary Loan (especially when you work in the same building with the ILL staff) concentrates the mind wonderfully.

For the CA, I had a desperate deadline, for something that I really couldn't work on without making special arrangements. It needed to be in Word, with footnotes, and there were issues with access to Word in our mostly-recycled computing environment running almost exclusively Linux. So I borrowed a laptop from our computing department for two weeks, cleared off the dining room table, and begged an indulgence from my family to Do Nothing But Type for that time. Then I dumped ALL my books, photocopies, print outs, etc on the table and started work. Of course, I kept getting distracted by things like cleaning house for Christmas (my mundane boss points out that she succumbed to the desire to clean out and reorganize her linen closet when she was working on her first Comps).

I tend to do something similar, though often I stay at work late to do it, when working on a class. Putting my class notes online means that they can evolve as my research evolves, but means that it costs a lot to make photocopies of any notes for class I've been working on for a while.

I originally started this blog as a way to post short things and quotes in a place where Google would find it, without having to make new web pages every time and link them. While the lack of Google indexing for entries older than about 2 weeks and the lack of searchability for the blog is frustrating, tagging my research entries with terms relating to the subject makes it possible to pull up a page of the relevant work when I'm ready to put the paper or handout together.

I was never any good with the whole index-card thing, but I guess you could say that this blog is my equivalent of index cards-- though that would ignore the piles of Blackwell boxes filled with photocopies, books filled with post-it tags and markers, and general stuff I keep around me in addition to the blog. :)

For indexing, I've discovered Google Books. I use it for what I have gathered is its original purpose-- being able to find material in books you do have that you can't put your finger on and whose indexes are unhelpful. Of course as y'all have seen, I sometimes stumble over cool stuff (like the Tudor dollhouse book) by doing phrase searching in Google Books, and I've got an unfortunate addiction to searching Jstor, Project Muse, and Google Scholar for full text too.

Early Christian bathing

From the The Dirt on Clean by Katherine Ashenberg, p. 56-57

...mixed bathing was forbidden, though this was not immediately clear to everyone. Cyprian, the bishop of Carthage, scolded a devout Christian woman who patronized a mixed bath, which was apparently an unremarkable practice in third-century Carthatge. The woman, who had taken a vow of chastity, responded stoutly that she was not responsible for the motives of people who might look upon her nudity: "As for me," she wrote, "my only concern is to refresh and bathe my poor little body."

Cyprian disagreed, claiming that by delighting the eyes of others with her nudity she was corrupting herself.

In the fourth century, St. Melania, the abbess of a women's monastery on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem, successfully petitioned for a bath in the nunnery. Until then, her nuns had been walking down into the city and washing in the public bathhouses.

The objection, however, was to the mixed bathing, not the bathing itself:

Most church authorities did allow Christians to patronize single-sex baths for the proper motives. Clement of Alexandria was a second-century teacher and writer whose views on most subjects were balanced and moderate for his time. In his guide to Christian thought and behavior, the Paedagogus (Instructor), he writes that there are four reasons for visiting the baths-- cleanliness, warmth, health, and pleasure. Christians may not bathe for pleasure, nor (although this is a less serious objection) for warmth. Women may bathe for cleanliness and health, and men only for health-- probably because men could wash in the river, which would be immodest for women. Clement prized the democratic nature of the baths, chiding ostentatious customers who arrived with a parade of servants, "because the bath [has] to be common and the same for everybody." For the same reasons, bathers should wash their own bodies, not relying on the care of an attendant.

Even the austere St. John Chrysostom (ca. 344-407) classed bathing, like eating, with the necessities of life... when the emperor Theodosius punished Antioch by closing its bathhouses in 387, Chrysostom protested that giving up bathing was too great a hardship and that he worried about the old, the sick, children and nursing mothers who relied on the bathhouse to safeguard health.

Ashenburg goes on to point out that many saints and ascetics spurned cleanliness as self-denial and/or a way of rejecting the flesh/protecting virginity, and that Christianity's relationship to cleanliness of person was conflicted.

friending angst

Periodically, I wonder if there are people who friended me for the research that I publish unfriends-locked, and then I friend them back, at which point they see the friendslocked stuff, and they might be like oh noes! TEH DRAMA! makez it stopz!

I'm considering putting a note in my bio saying "drop me a note if you'd like me to consider friending you back, otherwise if you friend me and I don't know you I'll assume you are along for the research wierdness." What do you think?

Also, if anyone now friended would like to be locked out of the personal friendslocked posts, just drop me a line...