Whig Hill

Tuesday update

I'm headed back to North Carolina tomorrow morning to get some work done. And I do so comfortable that dad's all right for now. Everything is improving and he looks good. I'm mean, he looks and mostly acts like his old self. This is not how a dying man appears.

Yesterday's theory on the coughing-up-blood: TB. A shot in the dark, indeed, and everyone admitted it. Today's theory: the multiple antibiotics plus the blood thinner caused it. He still spits up a little. They gave him platelets to thicken his blood before I left.  He had a mild fever this afternoon, but the room was alive with relief as everyone, including the doctors and nurses, exclaimed how well he looks now.

He's still sick with infection and a weak heart and beyond that, the mds is still ravaging his body. It feels so good to have hope. But I also know this probably won't end well.

Monday update

Short report because not much is happening. Today his breathing is better, his heart rate is normal, the rampant fevers have gone away, he looks good, he's not coughing up blood (well, a little), he sat up, he speaks without hesitation, he's hungry, and he was dropping some witticisms. But he's still sick. Still has the infections. Still swollen. Still can barely walk to the bathroom. He had a bone biopsy this morning and we're awaiting results.

I don't know.

Cousin Mark has moved on. Uncle John is back down. Sylvia returned to Tennessee this morning.

I've got to get back to Tarheelia this week. But that depends on a yet-to-be-made appointment so I don't know when it will be. I trust I will find the weather still wholesome, the sky still blue, and the girls still the cutest around.

Sunday update

   
  Originally uploaded by natmaconjr.

The cardiac events are almost routine. Yesterday I changed plans and ran the hospital thinking death imminent, but when I learned his heart did the same thing this morning, I still went out to visit my brother’s family. Lizzie needed a day out of the house and the kids played soccer with her and I walked her through the enormous field behind the house. Photos here.

I’ve been actively dreading this moment for years and years. I imagined myself in a state of inconsolable grief. But I’m holding up better than I could have hoped. The brain pills help, of course, but so does all the family nearby and the friends I reach through this blog.

The wait is disheartening. All those little signs of hope I mentioned yesterday stand firm, but the causes for despair increase. I just talked to mom and she said he’s been coughing up blood today. The doctors don’t seem concerned, but now I want to rush back up to the hospital (haven’t been today) even though I know it will be more waiting. The blood thing seems like a serious setback and hearing of it makes my chest sink into my back. But for the doctors, and for his body, it’s just another variable to throw into the algebra of platelets, infection and time.

Whenever I leave his ward, I make certain to take one last glance into his room, just in case.

Saturday update

Here is how it works. The MDS weakens the immune system. The immune system won’t fight infection, so infection sets in. And it causes a build-up of fluid in the heart and lungs. The body demands more work from the heart. The heart, already weak from disease can’t keep up. It freaks out and beats 188 times per minute. That happened this morning. He had a shot to calm down the heart but I scrapped my plans to visit my brother and his kids and went up to the hospital. Dad is back in the coronary care unit and he likes it there—doctors and nurses are at his side all the time. We kid him that he caused this morning’s panic so he could get back in this ward.

There are a variety of risks at this stage. His heart could give up at any moment. Or he could recover enough to start chemo again. That’s what we’re hoping for now. They’ll do a bone biopsy Monday to see if this has turned into leukemia. The fevers and infections suggest that. He’s still hungry and that’s good. He still has a healthy countenance and that’s good. The infection won’t quit, that’s bad. He has no strength to walk and his voice is halting and weak. Some signs of hope; some cause for despair. Not knowing what will happen next is the worst part. I had a good crying-session alone with him this morning. Hopefully we’ve now got that out of the way.

I’m on my way out to Dulles Airport to pick up cousin Mark from California.

Friday update

My dad is grumping on too many visitors. Having a room full of people staring at him waiting for him to die, or acting like he’s going to die, really interferes with his plan to get better. So I took today off and went to the opening of the new exhibit hall at Mount Vernon.

I’ll have to go back because me and half a million school kids, dignitaries, and elderly folks just don’t mix in an exhibit gallery. Especially when it’s miserable raining outside. But it looked good and the big narrative points seem to be well-made and the whole idea of humanizing this marble man is apparent. I like that. I couldn’t get close enough to see too many artifacts but two items stuck out: Washington’s French and Indian War sword and his false teeth. Yes, his real false teeth idolized in a columnar vitrine the center of a round section devoted to the false teeth story. That’s thinking right there.

The exhibit looked familiar with its large elements and occasionally cartoony graphics and light hearted labels. I checked, and sure enough, it’s a Chadbourne production. Pretty good. The only thing is… I know Valley Forge is a compelling story, and so people focus on it. But the campaign surrounding the battles at First and Second Trenton and Princeton are just as compelling and far more dynamic and Washington’s leadership style and personality are equally important. I wish they’d have talked about that instead. (Covered in David Hackett Fisher’s excellent, Washington’s Crossing).

Oh. And this.

Anyhow, I’m in Silver Spring at a very couchy coffee shop. It’s nice. The hospital is right around the corner so I’ll be going down there soon. Maybe we can get rid of all the visitors and I can get some peace and quiet to read.

Update

At Walter Reed Army Medical Center today. Dad’s laid pretty low. The MDS has been bad all summer and things got complicated this week. He looks better today than Wednesday, but he’s still plagued by a complex infection that’s filling his legs, stomach, and lungs with fluid. That’s what gets ya’ in the end. But he’s fighting it. He’s sitting up and talking and eating and even planning to get back on chemo once this current thing is knocked out. No one really knows which direction this will go. I try real hard to rationalize everything and treat anxiety with facts. My attempts at humor and light-heartedness aren’t avoidance, but a way of getting by.

Walter Reed is a huge place and treats everything. So I walk around and see old veterans with their Korea & Vietnam hats, family medicine area where babies are getting shots, and a dozen or so amputees from Iraq. Saw two boys who essentially had their faces shot off and the doctors have done extraordinary work reconstructing them. My dad loves the military doctors. He wouldn’t want to be anywhere else but after sixteen days, he’d really like to be home now.

Rode home with my sister tonight and we talked about what combination of brain pills work for each of us.

Visitors, thinking it through

Just so you don’t think I’m too one-sided here, I will say that, as a curator, I acknowledge that we have great power over how artifacts are interpreted—that every stage of the process of exhibition changes or ads or subtracts value to objects that the visitor may or may not have expectations for. A skilled curator will balance the requirements of interpretation and the needs of the visitor to achieve something satisfactory to both.

Dan made a good comment below. Sometimes the visitors don’t expect any interpretation and are happy to just see things put out. I believe that’s fine. And that “just putting stuff out” may be the best thing you can do depending on the exhibit, the artifacts, the visitors, and the expectations. That was the idea with the exhibit From the Museum’s Attic I worked on at the Museum and I think it works real well.

And speaking of just putting things out… As much as I like to manipulate visitors with interpretive trickery, I also think unloading piles of artifacts with no curatorial guidance is just as fun. In Chattanooga we visited a house museum of some old lady who collected late 19th/early 20th century glass and they’ve got the entire house lined with pitchers, trays, cups, mugs, butter dishes, beer steins—everywhere. Even on the ceilings. I walked in and rolled my eyes and muttered about the old kook, but after dutifully entering the fourth or fifth room, it all began to overwhelm me and I began to take notice: the old kook had collected some really neat stuff and good gawd, look at it all. This is neat. I’ve never been more interested in a glass gelatin mold with a paper label of the HMS Dreadnaught on the side in my whole life.

I think that works if you’ve overwhelmed the visitor. Crush them with your fetish and they’ll momentarily go along with you. But there is a danger of underwhelming. Not enough and the visitor won’t be convinced. The new exhibit, What We Wore, at the history museum is good, but imagine how much more powerful that gallery would be if it had two or three times the number of dresses.* And the wall case at Duke Homestead with the meerschaum pipes falls short. Instead of twenty cool pipes, think five hundred. Now that would be neat.

*I know, I know. The logistics of conserving, mounting, and moving just what got put out probably strained every resource the museum has. Asking for more is just my imagination at work.

Visitors

Spent a rainy four days in Chattanooga at the Southeastern Museums Conference annual meeting. All boring details aside, I attended a number of excellent sessions. And when I say excellent, I don’t always mean the quality of the presenters was high, just that the topics got me to thinking.

On the collecting plan front (two sessions), its nice to hear from institutions that have--or are attempting to develop--coherent plans integrated with strategic and interpretive plans.

And I saw two sessions on material culture. The first—a basic “this is material culture”—was presented by a group based around a certain state (not NC) Ph.D. program and its associated museum and I found it particularly unsatisfactory. They made a claim to material culture studies being a distinct discipline because it uses a variety—economic, psychological, archaeological,—of analytical styles. Their claim to distinction also depended on an unrealistically tight definition of “traditional” historical analysis. I think they call that a “straw man”. Anyhow, their presentations did nothing to convince me an analytical synergy had taken place and one of the presenters talked about using artifacts to “make the visitor… [do something]” at which point I mentally checked out.

Another presentation focused on this topic: sometimes visitors self-select objects in your museum for veneration—objects that are not what you think are curatorialy important. That is a right-on proposition and contains what the previous session grossly overlooked: that the meaning and value of artifacts to people are as important, if not more, as any theoretical premise.

And right into the middle of this, Elizabeth sent me this story of a repeat visitor to a museum. This writer grasped something that museum people frequently overlook—that visitors (stakeholders, really, in this case) arrive with their own sense of historical importance or relevance. I don’t think it’s as maddeningly diverse as the author thinks, but an extremely important reminder to people who create exhibits and take it a step further by caring how well it succeeds with the visitor.

That is, of course, my concern for the new Civil War exhibit at Historic Tredegar. Kevin Levin reviews it here and in the process, mentions the board of heavyweight advisors. Certainly a high-powered intellectual set that contains the best thinkers about the American experience of Civil War. It follows, naturally, that the big narrative is an academically sound, made-by-committee, satisfactory, snooze-fest. (Again, that’s the impression I get from Levin’s impression. I haven’t seen this yet.) The reviewer even stopped to consider how it will appeal to certain visitors; something that may not have occurred to the advisors.

Anyhow, I should shut my mouth on that one until I see it in person. 

Revivals

I've got my laptop back. Yay! Initially the geniuses estimated an $800 repair fee but when it came back they charged me $294 and they even replaced the battery. I'm so happy with apple right now. I'm going to drive this thing like I stole it. (Which is how I broke it in the first place.)

Did a four hour radio show this morning. I covered Mark T's "Broken Heart & A Glass of Beer" so I really stretched out the twang. Old-timey, string band, honkey tonk, western swing, bluegrass, americana--all on the playlist. It being Sunday morning, I finished with a sermon (I usually leave the gospel to the Louvin Brothers) of my own about how the sins of avarice, hubris, and the like have left us humbled in a valley of despair and grief. But! There is one man who walks among us, a true prophet of the Lord, who is without sin and can lead us to salvation. Of course, I speak of Joe Gibbs, and finished with a rousing rendition of Hail to the Redskins by the Seldom Scene.

Regarding ConvergeSouth

I was among those bumped around at Ganache after the ConvergeSouth conference. Lucky, because I ended up in an intimate dinner with Josh Neas, Jim Rosenberg, Matt Hill Comer, and David Hoggard and his wife Jinni, with whom I discovered I have a number of connections.

Anyhow, after discussing critical items such as Ed Cone’s past as a serial-killer and expressing shock (shock!) that college kids drink, we touched a bit on the conference, but unfortunately, ran out of time to follow it through.

I mentioned that ConvergeSouth had the same problem as our annual NCMC meetings: too many 101-type sessions and not enough—I don’t know—upper level topics. This is being touched on at Greensboro is Talking. (I chose to attend the 101-sessions because I’m not too interested in the journalism aspects of blogging.)

As noted in the comments to that post, Ed wants to keep this ahead of the curve and I’m with him on that. But where to go, is the question. Hell, I don’t what is good or needed for this group of people but the theme of being creative online seems to be the direction.

I suspect more specialized sessions are the answer. (I also suspect this will cause friction with the free and all-volunteer aspects of the conference). Here are a few ideas that might appeal to me.

1. How to blog/podcast from within a conservative environment like a corporation or government. Or rather, how to sell the right idea to your supervisors. Anton Zuiker gave me some absolutely wonderful advice earlier this year about a proposal to create a DCR blog and a department blogging policy. His words to me would be perfect for others paddling that same canoe. Hell, if my podcast works the way I want, perhaps I’ll have some unique insights to share by this time next year.

2. I am a geek, but not a tech-geek. I know how to do this because the software is so damn intuitive. But often I need my hand held when navigating things like servers, and writing the right tag-code to get your audio file fed to iTunes. I’ve learned a lot by figuring it out by myself (adding the banner image to this site was a great personal triumph over technology for me—shows you where I’m at), but that can only take me so far. I need a session—not necessarily for beginners, but not for the hard-core—where technology can be explained and explored.

3. I’d like to see sessions focused on blogging/podcasting topics other than journalism. Anton does science blogging. Others do business blogging. I’ve got my work blogs for history and museums, and Whig Hill is personal, but has a great interest, and an occasional post, on historical topics. I’d love to get together with others interested in history topics. I’m not certain what the purpose would be, or what would come out of it, but the things I want to talk about as a history blogger are probably different from the things science and business bloggers want.

I think I just volunteered for three sessions.

I want to learn and I want the results to be tangible and measurable. (Not saying the intangibles aren’t important, or that I didn’t come away with some value-added information this time.) And I don’t mind listening to an authority. I hated it that Jim R. had to apologize so much that he had prepared information for us ahead of time. The unconference format certainly has its moments of synergy, but the unstructured-ness of it can also mean I’m listening to people ask the same questions I have and getting no answers.

I think I just said the same thing as John Lowder about the need to continue providing hands-on, 101-level turorials to newbies, while satisfying the needs of folks who have been doing this a while.

Anyhow, great conference. I met some real nice people. And I look forward to doing it again.