Written in 2018, but this is sort of my Doll Resume!

 

Experience with writing and dolls:  Currently, I blog about dolls for Ruby Lane and am a guest columnist for the Rock Island Argus/Moline Dispatch newspapers.  Once a year I write an article on astronomy for The Moline Dispatch and Reflections the Popular Astronomy Club newsletter.  I also catalog antique dolls for ebay and pin dolls professionally on Pinterest for Ruby Lane Dolls. Since Age 3, I have collected dolls.

 

My chapbook, Sappho, I should have listened was published by 918studio.  I have won  honorable mentions in poetry contests sponsored by The Lawton Doll Company and The Bettendorf Public Library. I have also had poems published in small publications.

 

I was the expert doll collecting guide for About.com, owned by The New York Times, and maintain 12+ blogs of my own including Doll Museum and Dr. E’s Doll Museum Blog [translated into Greek, Spanish, and Japanese).

 

Besides these activities, I am the author of The Subversion of Romance in the Noels of Barbara Pym (The Popular Press, 1998). I also have chapters in The Gothic World of Anne Rice (Popular Press) and Emerging Perspectives; Virginia Woolf (Pace University Press, 1993).

 

I am a lecturer on dolls and have taught two courses on them for CommUniversity.org.  Two books I have written on dolls included A Bibliography of Dolls and Toys and With Love from Tin Lizzie: A History of Metal Heads, Metal Dolls, Mechanical Dolls and Automatons, Both published by American Doll and Toy Center.

 

The Greyden Press has awarded me a Silver Award for a memoir and two novels , and I have won awards for local poetry contests  sponsored by public radio station WVIK.  I was a guest twice on Art Talks with Bruce Carter and Scribble with Don Wooten and Roald Tweet.  Atlas Obscura interviewed me for a piece on Celebrity Dolls and I have been contacted by Inside Edition and The Today Show about dolls.  I was a guest on an Irish radio talk show, The Sean Moncrieff Show as well.  My Author’s pages are on Amazon.com, GoodReads, and 918studio.

 

Here is a summary of my other writing experience with dolls and other topics:

 

2014-2018: Director of Social Media for Antique Doll Collector Magazine, Puffin Publications.   Maintains Antique Doll Collector Magazine Blog and other social media sites including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, ISSUU, Stumble Upon, LinkedIn, Reddit, Flickr, and Pinterest.   Also contributes monthly column on collectibles.

 

Grant Evaluator for SAU’s Ubiquity of Work. 2010-2011, for Ballet Quad Cities 2004, for Bettendorf Library, 2002.

 

 

Concord Law School Law Day contributor of article, 2017. “Griswold v. Connecticut and the 14^th Amendment”, Concord Law School Website

 

 

November 2013 MMLA, paper presented “The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Automatons,” Theme of Convention: Art and Artifice.

 

November 2012 MMLA; three papers: Rumer Godden’s Adaptation of Iconic Themes in Adult and Children’s Literature; Sarah Crewe’s Financial and Emotional Obligations in A Little Princess; Debt in Popular Culture - Debt portrayed in 2 Broke Girls, Sex and the City, and American Pickers v.  The Grapes of Wrath, The Hunger Artist, and Bartleby the Scrivener.

 

A Creative Writing Primer. Midwest Writing Center 2012

 

Outloud Anthology. Midwest Writing Center 2012.

 

The Legend of Tugfest. Editor and Contributor. LeClaire, 918studio. April 2012

 

Sappho, I should Have Listened.  LeClaire, 918studio. April 2011.

 

Clara and the War: A little Girl’s Story of Fascist/Nazi Occupied Greece 1938-45. Along with 2 other novels, won Silver award from the Greyden Press 2014.

 

“Frank Yerby.” Encyclopedia of The Harlem Renaissance. Routledge, 2005.

 

 

 

Co-contributor to NCA Self Study for KU in pursuit of approval of AAS and BS programs in Criminal Justice and Paralegal Studies. 2001

 

"Every Picture Tells a Story" on Virginia Woolf and Diego Velasquez in Summer 2000 Virginia Woolf Miscellany.

 

"Teacher Preparedness" The MLA Newsletter, Spring 1999.

 

Student Guide and Course Development: Fundamentals of Legal Writing and Research I (Distance Learning Program), Black Hawk College, Fall 1998,      Spring 1999, [using PowerPoint].

 

Student Guide and Course Development: LA 200Administrative Law (Distance Learning Program), Black Hawk College, Spring 1999[using PowerPoint].

 

Review of I, Vampire, in Passing Glances, a Cyber Bibliography of Virginia Woolf. 

 

"Victorian Christmas Dinners: Feasts and Festivities." Hope and Glory: A Journal Devoted to the Eclectic World of Queen Victoria. 1992.

 

Published more than 60 academic and creative articles in various popular magazines and periodicals including online, including Spring 1999 MLA Newsletter; Summer 2000 PMLA Millennium Edition; and “Sandi You Found Me”: Monthly  doll newsletter.

 

Multiple presentations at professional conferences in Law and English since 1985.

 

Guest Blogger for R. John Wright Design Blog.

 

 

Curriculum Development:  Under Bill Weston and Karen Evans, MS Legal Studies Courses in Intro to Law and Jurisprudence; with Robin Throne and Jeff Gettleman, various AAS and BS course for July 2000 and October 2001 HCL Visits.  Under Dr. Ed DeJaegher,  helped design MBA courses, Reviewed Masters Courses in Education, humanities, and Criminal Justice, developed DC 1-1 Diversity and Culture class, and a proposed program of study in Diversity and Culture.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Online Literary Magazine for CM 220, CM 107 Classes and Friends of KU: This Just In; Costco and Dolls

Online Literary Magazine for CM 220, CM 107 Classes and Friends of KU: This Just In; Costco and Dolls:  I just discovered that Mr. Clean magic erasers work wonders on cleaning marks on modern porcelain dolls and on vinyl, with no harm done.  I...

"Nature had Spoken to HIm" by David H. Levy with Roy L. Bishop

 We could call this, Gravity's Rainbow!

“Nature had spoken to him.”

 

 

Woolsthorpe by RLB

Skyward for July 2021.

David H. Levy with Roy L. Bishop.

 

Gravity is one of the most fundamental things in physics. Everything and everyone has gravity. The more massive something is, the more gravity it has. When you jump into the air, Earth’s gravity brings you back down. What you cannot see while you are in the air is that your gravity brings Earth towards you just a wee little bit, off-setting the extra push away from you that your feet gave Earth when you jumped.

Isaac Newton presented the first ever mathematical description of gravity in 1687. I admit that I know nothing about gravitation, except that it is all around me. I do recall the myth that Newton was sitting under a tree when an apple fell on his head.  Supposedly, he then formulated his law of gravity. Did the apple actually fall on his head? I doubt it. But at his childhood home in the village of Woolsthorpe, England, he probably did witness an apple fall from a tree.

During the last half of the nineteenth century physicists realized that Newton's theory of gravity did not accurately describe the orbit of Mercury, the planet closest to the Sun. Mercury's elongated orbit precesses slightly faster than Newton's theory predicts. Several unsuccessful attempts were made to account for this discrepancy.

Newton’s theory, which assumes that gravity is a force, held sway for more than two centuries, until superseded by Albert Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity in 1915. A decade earlier, Einstein realized that mass and energy are two aspects of one thing, and that space and time are interrelated, a blended spacetime. With General Relativity, Einstein treated gravity not as a force, but as the geometry of spacetime. The geometry of spacetime is curved by the mass-energy of matter, and the curvature instructs matter how to move.

Now comes the hard part. When Roy Bishop, emeritus professor of Physics at Acadia University, pointed out to me that gravitation is geometry, and not a force at all, I didn’t believe him at first. But Dr. Bishop is the most brilliant person I have even had the privilege of knowing. Recently he described gravity this way, and he is right:

 

“Einstein spent several years in an eventual successful attempt to include gravity in a modified description of spacetime. Early in his progress toward that goal Einstein had what he called the happiest thought of his life — that if a person were to fall off the roof of a house, while falling she would not feel a force of gravity. Before she falls, she feels the force of the roof supporting her. When her fall comes to its abrupt halt she feels the ground pushing against her. If she cannot feel a force of gravity while she is falling, why pretend that she felt a force of gravity when the roof supported her before she fell, or that she feels a force of gravity when she is lying on the ground?

“When thinking about the falling lady, Einstein had the fantastic insight that perhaps gravity never was a force. By late in 1915 he had that insight in elegant mathematical form such that the resulting theory, General Relativity, can be used to make precise predictions concerning gravitation.”

 

Einstein was elated when, on November 18, 1915, he found that his General Theory of Relativity predicted the measured precession of Mercury’s orbit. According to his friend and biographer Abraham Pais: “This discovery was, I believe, by far the strongest emotional experience in Einstein’s scientific life, perhaps in all his life.” Pais then continues with five words that crystallize that profound experience: “Nature had spoken to him.” After several years of work, on that day Einstein knew that he was the only person on Earth who understood gravity!

Today, there are thousands of people who understand gravity.  Roy is one of them.  Most of us, including me, are not one of them.  But reading it described so well is one of the pleasures we can feel as we try to appreciate the wonderful cosmos in which we live. Not only does General Relativity correctly predict the precession of Mercury’s orbit, but it is essential to the programs used in the GPS navigation system, and it describes the gravitational waves (ripples in the geometry of spacetime) generated by two coalescing black holes, directly detected 100 years after 1915 by LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory.

 

(End)