The sound of silence

Sorry I haven't written much this week -- I've been running around like the proverbial chicken with its head cut off, doing a very disorganized job of keeping up with everything and also still trying to get over this cold. Perhaps I'd be a little less unfocused and anxious if I could just clear my head and lungs enough to get back into running, if only just for 3-4 miles.

Anyway, I want to thank Dr. Crazy and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen for linking me in reference to the men and feminism musings below. I'm especially honored to have been noted in the same paragraph in which Jeffrey says this:

I suppose this is just a long way of saying that the community which electronic communication fosters is, well, important -- and is often not deeply enough considered when we think about what shapes our scholarly lives.

And yes, Jeffrey, I will get you on my blog roll as soon as I get around to updating it. Once again it is woefully out of date. I am the second worst blog roll updated in the blogosphere after Michael Berube. (I'm too lazy to insert the accents today.) Anyway, I do want to get back to following up that post and discussing why I was so surprised by anyone saying a man couldn't claim he's a feminist. And I also want to respond to Dr. Crazy's post, with which I found so much to identify. But it will all have to wait a little while.

Also, lately, I've been getting a lot of traffic from Geoffrey Chaucer. I cannot truly express how delighted I am by being able to write that last sentence. But it also makes me realize that this blog is lately a medieval blog in name only and I really should write something with medieval content. So, when I get around to it, I will write about the following two topics: 1) Visiting an 8th grade class of "at risk" students and teaching them runes right before they start reading The Hobbit (and on my next visit I'm going to teach them about Angl0-Saxon Riddles) and 2) thinking about how students' tendencies to call Margery Kempe "crazy" or "a freak" (the last from one of my own students yesterday) might actually be a surprisingly productive way to get students to talk about the text and not just Margery Kempe the person, and to think about how texts construct their readers. I'm promising these posts in writing to make sure that I'll actually do them.

But now I have to finish my morning's thinking about my Zoo paper and seque into teaching mode to translate some OE and ME for my linguistics classes and grade papers on Marie de France that aren't going to be as good as they could be because I wrote paper topics that were too difficult. (And that in itself could be a post -- and perhaps will be soon.) And I also have to go to my office hours this afternoon. And maybe, just maybe, I'll feel clear-headed enough by the afternoon to go for an easy, short run.

I also have to call my poor mom now that I finally have a voice again.