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Even in a little thing

20th March, 2008. 11:54 am.

If friends are dropping in tomorrow night then I need to clear some of the flat surfaces in this place. My flat surfaces during teaching periods are always covered, often to two feet deep.

Today I have worked very hard at sorting and thinking and no surface has more than six inches of paper on. I have a single stack of 'need to finish with' stuff next to my arm chair. I have a big bag of paper for recycling. I have piles to go away in various locations (the biggest is financial matters and the second biggest is poetry by one of my students). I have a growing list of stuff that must be done today, before 4 pm, and finishing that list should clear a whole chair.

This whole procedure is very strange right now, though. I still have four weeks of teaching left. The paper should be mounting ever-higher, not reducing to rationality.

For all folks droppping into tomorrow night, I will not have won the paper war, but there will be chairs, and I promise you won't find yourself sitting on a note saying (picking paper at random):

"'Computers,' I said, surprised at hearing the word."
or even
"semi-anthropological semi-historical descriptive narrative exerts its gravitational pull"

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20th March, 2008. 12:16 pm.

Lots of deeply influential people have died this week. I keep telling myself that I won't post about them because the world doesn't need yet another blogger talking about how Arthur C Clarke influenced their lives. I also keep opening LJ to post. Except it isn't about Arthur C Clarke specifically, it's about how some people influence us so deeply that they can change our life trajectory.

Greg Dening died the other day. I knew he was ill, so the death wasn't a surprise. It was, however, a vast sadness. Without Greg's single archiving unit in my honours year, it would have taken me a lot longer to work out how things fitted together and to acknowledge my own obsession with cultural constructs and with their dynamics. He gave me a bunch of tools and an outlook on sources that has been invaluable for over twenty years.

If Greg hadn't taught me, I might have done normal history until my brain caught up with the rest of me. I might have tried to be fashionable or ordinary. Instead, I simply followed evidence and consequences and wrote my kind of history.

I know I would have been more publishable without this. I rather suspect I would have been more employable. I know for certain that I would have been less happy. For me history has never really been about the academic job trail - it's always been about learning and understanding. Ethnographic approaches to history were as big a gift to me in this respect as learning historiography.

I've seen a couple of academic tributes to Greg. They talk about his amazing scholarship and his lovely personality. They don't talk about his brilliance as a teacher. I don't know many teachers who could introduce a whole, brand-new discipline as a sideline to a course on using archives.

When I get some quiet time I'll remind myself of his work by looking again at his book on Bligh's bad language. While I read, I shall hope that every history student gets a teacher as good and generous as Greg, just as I'm hoping now that every potential SF writer finds an Arthur C Clarke or a Ray Bradbury to read in their formative years.

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