my first SAA

Cool stuff:

-- Getting to meet up with Bardiac and Flavia! It was very nice, in Bardiac's case, to finally be able to put a face with the name, and in Flavia's case, to have an actual conversation, which we didn't really have time to do the last time we met.

-- My seminar group did not say anything horrible or terrifying about my paper. This was, admittedly, mostly because they didn't have time to say very much at all about my paper, but several people told me afterwards that they liked it, and some of the other topics of conversation gave me ideas about ways this essay could be expanded / folded into the larger argument I'm making in the dissertation book manuscript.

-- Free exam copies! (And a couple of other books that were very expensive even with the last-day discounts, but I figured the expense was justifiable since they are both Useful Reference Texts and Books That Can Be Lent Out To Students. I am slowly building a library of Books To Lend Out To Students, because our actual library is woefully inadequate for just about everything.)

-- Being around several hundred other Shakes-geeks. This does not happen often enough, and I'm starting to feel like I have an actual cohort of people to hang out at conferences, thanks to the miracle of the Internet.

-- Papers about gangster Othello. There really need to be more papers about the myriad ways that YouTube enhances one's appreciation of Shakespeare.

-- Getting to say hello to Advisor and Youngest Committee Member, although I fear that I may have been unintentionally rude to Youngest Committee Member, despite her assurances to the contrary. (YCM is one of those scary-brilliant young female faculty members who always make me go tongue-tied and feel like I'm perpetually wrongfooting myself, although she's quite a decent person who always comes across as very human and genuine in front of grad students, so I'm not sure why she intimidates me so much.)

Not-so-cool stuff:

-- Being gladhanded by the Annoying E---n M----n Representative. (Blanking out the press's name because I'd prefer that this blog not turn up on Google searches, not because it is the academic publishing equivalent of Lord Voldemort, although come to think of it, the latter may actually be true.) Note to publishing reps: using the phrase "peer review and all that crap" does NOT help your press project an air of academic rigor; also, when you approach potential authors, it is better not to use manners that you learned on a used car lot. (Actual quote: "Do you have a father? Do you have a grandfather? Well, I'm the granddaddy of academic publishing." Yes. Really.)

-- Not having the nerve to approach other, less alarming publishing representatives, people whose scholarly work I admire, etc. Really, I suck at this networking thing, and being around masses of Senior Scholars always makes me feel like a jittery bundle of social awkwardness and an intellectual lightweight.

-- The sound system guy at the Lucrece reading. Trust the text, please. Trust your actors, because they're good. You don't need all the fancy reverb and sonic distortion. Honest.

Courseblogging: A Knight ther was

We started Chaucer this week, and it was lovely. I feel like I have plenty to say for a change, and so do the students, and we're all on familiar territory again, although this is the first time I have taught The Knight's Tale, and the first time most of them have read it.

The students didn't entirely take to it, although they were at least willing to wrestle with it and engage with it. Admittedly, it's a hard sell as Canterbury Tales go -- stately and deliberate pace, no fart jokes, and a narrator who has a habit of spending fifty lines at a time describing all the things he's not going to describe. For all that, it's one of my favorites, and has been ever since I first read it as a junior in college.

What blows me away, again and again, is the sheer darkness of the Knight's vision of the universe -- which is all the more bleak for being couched in such lovely poetry. Listen.

My cours, that hath so wyde for to turne,
Hath more power than wot any man:
Myn is the drenching in the see so wan;
Myn is the prison in the derke cote;
Myn is the strangling and hanging by the throte;
The murmure and the cherles rebelling,
The groyning and the pryvee empoysoning...
Myn is the ruine of the hye halles,
The falling of the toures and of the walles
Upon the mynour or the carpenter.



After that -- after we hear what actually goes on in the heavens -- Theseus' own attempts to rationalize suffering, to look at the world and deduce the existence of a benevolent Firste Moevere and a "fayre cheyne of love" -- well, they ring a little hollow. They are necessary fictions, if we are to find the courage to live in a world where young men die painfully and needlessly, but they are not The Truth.

I see the Knight as a bit like the protagonist of The Seventh Seal -- a returned Crusader who has seen and caused too much suffering and too much death, who is maybe groping for redemption as he sets out on his pilgrimage, groping for meaning, but is not at all confident of finding it.

My grad school Chaucer professor regarded all of these opinions as dangerously heretical (on both my part, and the Knight's). We spent half a semester arguing about whether the gods were even gods. (He wanted them to be planets. But planets don't argue, equivocate, or play with human beings as if they were chesspieces. A Saturn who sends furies to knock people off their horses is the Saturn who devours his children, not just the Big Dude With The Rings.) Grad School Chaucer Prof also thought all of this meant I disliked the Knight, which is very far from the truth. I like the Knight. I just think nihilistic Knights are far more interesting than perfect ones.

So anyway, one of my students asked the "gods or planets" question today, and I tried to reconstruct the exact argument I'd had with GSCP, present both of our positions, and ask the rest of the class what they thought. And my very smart and skeptical student, bless her, pointed out that it doesn't make a great deal of sense to pray to planets. (She was, nonetheless, inclined to see more truth in Theseus' final speech than I do, since Love does, in a sense, triumph in the end. Most of the class wanted to see more justice in Arcite's fate than I do -- though they did agree that the ending was problematic in other ways, most of them having to do with Emelye. Somebody made the very sharp point that the Knight has lived most of his life in a homosocial world, and is probably not much used to thinking about what women want; I had to defend him a bit, since the story does register a fair bit about Emelye's wishes and desires, even as it also suppresses them. Someone else made the even more brilliant point that this tale sets up the central question in the Wife of Bath's tale, and indeed, maybe all of other the pilgrims are playing off of the Knight.)

I love this class. They're awesome. I hope we all stay this energized. I hope I can be like the Laid-Back Medievalist who taught my undergraduate Chaucer class and let me pursue heretical ideas as far as they would go.

obsessive

Next semester is four and a half months away. That's, like, an eternity.

So why am I checking Banner four or five times a day to see who is signing up for my classes?

Courseblogging: Differently Logical

We have been reading Walter Map and Christine de Pizan in the medieval lit class (we're sort of in debate mode, and will be for the rest of the semester). The students are having some problems with medieval argumentation, which is quite understandable. I mean, big massive heaps o' examples from classical mythology, relatively recent history, and the Bible all lumped together tend not to do all that much for us nowadays. And Christine, bless her, tends to make matters worse when she makes Lady Reason say things like "Well, there's this rhetorical figure called antiphrasis, in which people say the opposite of what they mean, so whenever you come across a book that dispraises women, you may as well assume that the author is actually praising them, regardless of what his real intentions were." (This inspired me to go off on this weird tangent about what it means when a text destabilizes the whole idea of written authority, presumably including its own authority, which I'm not sure the students really understood. Which is also understandable, because I sure as heck didn't understand it myself.)

But anyway, I felt obliged to point out that what constitutes a good argument is culturally determined, and it's therefore probably not all that productive to go around calling twelfth- or fifteenth-century authors illogical. Just, you know, differently logical. The students laughed at this, because of course it sounds like the most ridiculous of politically-correct euphemisms, although I didn't mean it that way. And then, because I never know when to shut up, I ended class by saying something like, "Whoa, get a load of that story about the cross-dressed monk. What did you make of that?"

One of the students said that there's not very much you can do with stories about cross-dressed monks, except laugh at them and move on. Which was pretty much what we did, since there were only five minutes left in the class period anyway.

Anyway, I think this is one of the biggest things I've been strugging with this semester: there's so much about this body of literature that is, to modern readers, Just Plain Weird. I'm uncertain what to do with the weirdness myself, and I'm never sure whether the laughter it often invites is appropriate, or whether it's exoticizing or dismissive or otherwise nonproductive. Yvain's lion trying to commit suicide? OK, funny. Margery Kempe inviting herself into the Crucifixion and telling Mary she'll feel better if she has a nice hot drink? I'm honestly not sure (although I think Kempe had a more robust sense of humor than she's usually credited with, and there are definitely things in the text we ARE meant to laugh at. "Her wot we wel that sche hath a devyl wythinne hir, for sche spekyth of the gospel" is a line that would not be out of place in Dr. Strangelove, and I believe she knew it.)

I'm looking forward to a month of Chaucer, because I feel like I'm on firmer ground with Chaucer (at least, I feel pretty confident I know which parts are supposed to be funny or ironic). Although, come to think of it, we'll be reading the Clerk's Tale and the Second Nun's Tale and all kinds of things which I don't normally teach, and which are filled with Weirdness, so who knows how it will turn out.

floryshyth and burgenyth

Spring has come to Deep South Town. The Bradford pear tree outside my office window was white with blossoms a week ago; now the green, glossy leaves are unfolding, and the rest of the campus is coming out in many colors. Surprisingly, students here don't seem to spend much time outside, unless they are walking to and from classes. I would have expected to see suntan-oiled girls on blankets and games of Ultimate Frisbee by now, but the lawns are very decorous and very still.

Perhaps they're too exhausted to play. I'm feeling that way myself. The nine weeks between the beginning of the semester and spring break (which starts TOMORROW!) seem very, very long. Spring means a faster tempo for both professors and students, a flurry of deadlines, more urgency in everything. And most of our students have little enough leisure time as it is.

Still, I hope they find a little time to enjoy the sunshine and the daffodils before they're gone.

Influential Writers Meme

Tagged for this by Undine. If you want to be tagged, consider yourself tagged, as I'm not sure I actually know twenty-five people who haven't done it already.

I have adopted Horace's idea of dividing the list into stages of life, and Undine's caveat that not all of these are current favorites. I'm not, for example, totally sure what was up with the Antonia White obsession, but an obsession it definitely was.

Preschool:

1) A. A. Milne

Elementary / intermediate school:

2) Elizabeth Janet Grey
3) Gordon Korman
4) Shakespeare (this particular Unholy Obsession started early)

High school:

5) Douglas Adams
6) Joseph Heller
7) Bob Dylan ("writers" includes writers of other things than books, yes?)
8) Walt Kelly
9) Federico García Lorca
10) Stephen Jay Gould

College:

11) T. H. White
12) Ludovico Ariosto
13) Emily Dickinson
14) Charlotte Brontë
15) Emily Brontë
16) Anne Brontë
17) John Webster
18) Antonia White
19) Sir Thomas Malory

Grad school, and after

20) Dorothy L. Sayers (whom I encountered for the first time in high school, but didn't really get until grad school)
21) W. B. Yeats (again, didn't really get him until grad school)
22) J. K. Rowling
23) Thomas Heywood
24) Wilfred Owen
25) Guy Gavriel Kay

Hmm, this appears to be a somewhat eclectic list. I'm not sure what to make of it.

Courseblogging: Stick-art

My whiteboard art for the Morte Darthur, inspired by Bardiac's recent posts along the same lines. The students seemed amused.