The killer among us

Pippi has killed more than one baby robin since moving in with us in March. There's a pair of nesting robins in our maple in the back yard who don't seem to get it that if they want offspring, they really should change address.

But today, for the first time, I had to pry a baby robin from Pippi's mouth. Ew.

Here's what happened: I heard Pippi whining down in the family room, and realized she hadn't been out in a while, so I let her out. She made a bee-line for something, but I couldn't see what. Then two adult robins started dive-bombing her. She retreated and at that point I couldn't see anything in her mouth, nor, after looking around, any sign of a baby in our yard. But I must have missed it, because after another dash to the particular part of the yard where the adult birds were chirping madly, Pippi came back triumphantly with the baby in her mouth. Then, like a good bird dog, she dropped it at my feet.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure that we're correct in our theory that Pippi first belonged to irresponsible hunters who didn't tag her or look for her when she somehow got lost.

Anyway, this is where I screwed up. I praised her for dropping it, but then noticed that the poor thing was still moving. Shit, I thought, I've got to put it out of its misery. And since she dropped it at the back door and seemed to want to go inside (which might have also meant that she'd scoop it up on the way inside), I needed to figure out how to get her in without her bringing the bird in.

Pippi must have taken my dithering as a sign that the bird was hers -- or else she wanted to play "tug" and "fetch" with it -- because she scooped it up, pranced away, and them came back to me, pleased as punch, but without dropping it again. She kept nosing me with the bird in her mouth (ew!) and then sitting in her alert, waiting-for-a-command/treat/reward kind of way. Maybe she was waiting for me to say "OK," which means she can eat it. But instead I kept saying "Drop it! No, Pippi, drop it!" and dancing away from her. This confused her, so she started to gnaw gingerly on the thing, but still kept approaching me with it. And every time she did, she seemed to gulp the thing further into her mouth, so that now all that was showing was a leg and the little head.

So I did what I did when I need to get a broken beef bone out of her mouth: I tried to pry her mouth open while saying "drop it!" But I don't mind touching gnawed beef bones; half dead or, by now, dead baby birds are another thing. So I wasn't getting my fingers in the back of her mouth, where it's most effective. At any rate, after some wrestling with her over it, Pippi gave up and dropped it in the driveway, away from the back door. All of this was going on, by the way, while two screeching adult robins were dive-bombing us both. I praised her -- though probably, at this point, in a somewhat hysterical voice -- and commanded her inside.

I gave her a Greenie, which probably rewarded her for behavior I *don't* want, but I saw it as a) rewarding her for dropping it and coming inside on command, and b) cleaning her mouth, which was now full of bird guts and feathers -- ew!! This also calmed her down somewhat and gave me the opportunity to go clean up the slaughter while she stayed inside.

It was indeed a slaughter now. Having given up on my wanting the thing when I didn't scoop it up the first time, Pippi stopped being the soft-mouthed bird dog who's supposed to give you a whole and unmarred bird and really dug into the poor thing. Blood and guts were everywhere. Well, at least it was now dead and not half-alive and suffering.

I really hope the robins get a clue and move their nest!

Do you hear what I hear?

When I was on the top of the the hillside perch of Castle Carreg Cennen in Wales (pictures of it in this post), I made a little video with my camera not for what you can see, but what you hear. In that video you can hear sheep baa-ing and you can see them move in the field some 400 feet below. You also hear, incidentally, the motorway in the distance and the air moving past my compact digital camera's miniscule microphone.

I wanted to post the video for you, but the direct Blogger video posting tool won't allow over 100 MB, and my clip is just over that (and I don't have any editing program to cut it, alas). It's just as well, since listening to sheep baa isn't very exciting, and you don't really have to see and hear the clip to get what I want to say about it.

At the time we were there visiting the castle, someone remarked that the sound of the sheep was the sound of medieval power -- the lord of the castle could look around below him and not only see what he controlled, but also hear it as well, maybe even hear every word spoken down there. At the time, I thought, "Hm. Yes."

But later, upon reflection, I thought, "Wait. No." If Carreg Cennen was ever a bustling castle, even if it only served defensive purposes, and not as a full time residence (and unlike Kidwelly, it had no town grown up around it), it would have been full of its own noises. Those noises might have easily drowned out the sound of sheep just as surely as modern mechanized noises could. After all, where I stood when I shot that video was where the former outer ward lay. In the outer ward would have been the stables, blacksmiths' and armourers' workshops, the lime kiln (its ruins are still there) and all sorts of general hustle and bustle. Would you have been able to hear the sheep above that clamor?

I've been a little obsessed with the sounds of the Middle Ages lately, not in any way that I'm going to write about it professionally (which is probably good, because I hear Claire Sponsler *is* writing about it), but just in a musing sort of way that I sometimes bring up in class. I think some of my students assume that the Middle Ages was a quiet and still place -- like Castle Carreg Cennen today -- so I like to draw their attention to noisiness in the literature, whether it's noise being depicted in literature (the jingling of the bells on the Monk's bridle in the Canterbury Tales, for instance, both described and imitated by the poetry), or the kinds of environmental noises one might encounter while experiencing medieval literature such as the York plays (church bells, the pageants at the stations before and after the one where they were watching, other playgoers, etc.), or the noise of the literature itself as it was declaimed or read aloud. This interest was spurred long ago by my interest in drama, but also by the "Medieval Noise" cluster of Exemplaria (Autumn 2004, no longer available online, alas), which included an introduction by Jeffrey J. Cohen with a title, "Kyte oute yugliment: An Introduction to Medieval Noise," taken from one of my favorite moments in medieval drama, where the Herod of the York plays breaks down into utter nonsense in the face of Christ's silence.

But only recently has the interest risen to the level of obsession. And lately I've been thinking of medieval sound as ghosts. One of my friends suggested I might mean echoes, but I really mean ghosts. Sound travels in waves, right? So once those sheep baas reached me up on the crest of Carreg Cennen, the sheep who made them might no longer be baaing. They could, theoretically, have uttered their last baa, and I might be hearing it in past tense, so to speak. And so when I or my students read Chaucer aloud in my class, and read of that Monk's bridle "Gynglen in a whistlynge wynd," even though our reconstruction of Middle English is an approximation at best, there's a sense of a very old sound traveling across time and space, perhaps distorted by the distance it has traveled, but reaching my students and me nonetheless, haunting us in a way.

But it's not just medieval literature that's ghostly. In a sense, all poetry consists of ghosts, for all poetry deals in some way with sound (well, good poetry does) and asks to be read aloud. And having already been written, each subsequent reading, even by the poet him- or herself, is a bit of the past coming forth to the listener in the present. Every reading of a poem is a little bit haunted.

What do you think?

Bullock is the man!

Bullock is on sabbatical for the entire year this coming academic year (08/09) and I'm deeply envious. I won't be able to take a sabbatical until 2010/11. I'm eligible starting in 09/10, but I won't be able to schedule it for another year. Seeing him not having to prepare for the coming semester is making the wait that much harder for me.

But that's not why he's the man. He's the man because he's just been invited to be a (modestly) paid keynote speaker elsewhere and because he's going to some hoity-toity small conference in the winter where each of the speakers are having their travel costs totally paid for.

Bullock is, for the moment, leading that mythical professorial life, where he's being paid to do his research and only his research (though granted, at RBU, a full year's sabbatical means a pretty significant reduction in pay) and is being paid honoraria by others to fly around and present it. He's like a social science version of a David Lodge character or something.

See -- he's the man!

More pics of castle bits - Part II

Here's my follow-up to yesterday's post.

Carreg Cennan Castle
(Go here for more impressive pictures than mine, as well as some historical background.)

Carreg Cennen wasn't as well preserved as Kidwelly, but it had that Romantic picturesque thing going for it in spades. Here you'll see I was so impressed and excited that I started snapping pictures from the bus with still quite a ways to go to get there:


Here's the approach by foot, about half way up the hill the castle commands:



Tired of all that climbing? Here, why don't you set a spell while we cook something up in the castle kitchen:


I am obsessed with arrow slits. It may be because I was an archer in college. But at any rate, here are two pictures of well-preserved ones:




If you thought the castle had an impressive perch from the way we approached it, wait until you see the drop on the other side:


Here's one of the few pictures I took of the layout of the inner parts of the castle, perhaps because I couldn't get as depopulated a shot as I could at Kidwelly:


Carreg Cennen had a special attraction, a tiny cave carved way down in the hillside underneath the castle. The page I linked to above has good shots of the entrance and the vaulted passageway, as well as the cave itself. The only picture I took down there was this one, of the graffiti of the date 1873 (or was it 1875?) carved into the rock, which you can just barely make out in the center-right of the picture:


Tourism of castles is of course nothing new. Though we were 21st century medievalists visiting the remains of a medieval site, in many ways we were performing a very Romantic/Victorian act. There were multiple pasts and presents speaking to us from those stones, which seems all the more appropriate given the attention to medievalism at the conference itself.

Pics of castle bits, Part I

From the NCS conference day trip to Kidwelly Castle and Carreg Cennen Castle, some bits and pieces of castles, part I --

Kidwelly Castle
(For some professional pictures that give you the sense of the whole structure, and for historical background, go here.)

The gatehouse:


I don't know how, but I managed to get a lot of depopulated pictures, despite the medievalists everywhere. This one is of one the towers of the inner ward and, in the foreground, the hall added later in the castle's building history:


This medievalist thinks he's king of the world (or is he threatening to taunt me with a silly French accent?):


I thought the opening in the following picture was an oubliette, but upon consulting my guidebook later, found out it's just an entrance to the store room. How disappointingly mundane!


But this is definitely a murder hole:


Mise-en-abyme? -


I like the creepiness of the face-like quality of this one:


But for those of you who prefer your ruined castles more picturesque, here's a pretty flower:

Home, sweet Rust Belt

I'm back home and rested and on US EST time again (I think), after forcing myself to stay up unti 9pm last night. Since I got up at 4am London time, that's 22 hours of being awake. But Pippi graciously didn't wake up until 6:30 am, so I got 9 1/2 luxurious hours of sleep in a comfortable bed. Oh glorious memory foam mattress topper! Oh pillows with actual pillowiness!

And every time I go to the UK or Europe, whether I'm there for a week or a year, upon my return I'm alway astounded by the size of things in the US, especially in the midwest: houses, rooms, yards, cars, streets, and trees. The only things I can think of off the top of my head that are either similarly sized in the UK or bigger are food portions (I think we inherited that one from the Brits) and the giant rhodedendrons and hydrangeas in London's big parks. Oh, and all the mile high ferris wheels (the London Eye, the Yorkshire Wheel, and whatever the one in Windsor is called).

So while the house Bullock and I share is modest in size (both house and yard) by US standards, and very close to its neighbors, as well, after spending time in the UK, I feel like we live in a small palace on vast grounds -- or perhaps a royal hunting lodge. Even the 1930s part of our house has larger proportions than most of the places I was staying in the UK, including my friend's mid-century home.

And now, if you'll recall, I have an insanely busy August ahead of me, so expect light posting. I'm about to upload my pictures, finally, so I may just fill August with photo blogging if they're any good.

Go, Speed Researcher, Go!

12 manuscripts in 3 days.

Granted, I wasn't reading or transcribing large chunks of any of them -- this nascent project is all about bits and pieces added in margins, on blank pages, and on flyleaves. But still, 12 manuscripts in 3 days is pretty good, especially considering it wasn't 4/4/4, but 5/1/6.

And I'm really proud of the fact that I managed the BL MS request system perfectly: I ordered three MSS in advance by e-mail for the first day, and another three on Monday afternoon for Wednesday, and whenever I was down to 2, I put in additional orders, so I was never sitting around waiting for one.

And can I just say one of the gentlemen working the request desk has a prodigious and impressive memory. When I came in on Wednesday after not having been there since Monday, he simply handed me my pre-ordered manuscripts with asking for my name or my reader card. Wow!

But now, having spent the last three days squinting at mostly 15th and 16th century amateur handwriting, I'm ready to go home. Of course, if this nascent project turns into something bigger -- just what, I'm not yet sure -- I'll have many hours of such squinting in my future. Maybe then I should slow the pace down just a wee bit. Because if I spent four weeks here, for instance, and saw an average of 4 manuscripts a day, that's 80 freakin' manuscripts, and only if I take Saturdays off. The mere thought makes my head explode.

Castles and manuscripts and semi-automatic weapons, oh my!

I made it to Windsor today to look at an eight-line poem written in the fifteenth century in a blank space in an earlier manuscript. And though a small bit of text, it was a fruitful trip in many ways. Yay for successful fact-finding missions, however marginal they may at first glance seem. But my, what a process to get there! For eight lines!

To get where I was going at Windsor Castle, I didn't have to go through the usual tourist entrance, but instead was told to enter through the Henry VIII gate and ask the policeman there to direct me to the pass office. Easier said than done. I will spare you the detailed story about how just getting to Windsor was an adventure because I stupidly took the wrong Tube line and so missed the 08:23 train from Waterloo and got to Windsor a half hour later than intended (it involved the Northern Line -- I now loathe the Northern Line, for it is wicked), and skip to arriving at the Henry VIII gate to be faced with a kevlar-armored police commando holding a semi-automatic weapon across his chest. It's bad enough to enter through the Henry VIII gate -- will I be divorced? beheaded? or will I survive? -- but *you* try explaining to a heavily armed policeman that you're here to look at a medieval manuscript. It's rather intimidating!

Actually, he was very nice, as was his less armed partner, and they both directed me to a yet kindlier policeman inside a vestibule, who seemed to be the Copper with the Answers. It was a bit like a set of nesting dolls -- you had to get past the big imposing one, then the medium sized one, to get to the adorable one at the center. And the ones on guard in the afternoon were equally friendly: when I "surrendered" my pass, one made sure I wouldn't be coming back, and when I said yes, he said, "Well, our loss then!"

And once I was directed to the pass office and came back with my pass and showed my passport for ID (which the man with the gun had trouble with because apparently US ones have the picture in a different end than UK ones -- "trust you lot to be different," he said in a jovial way), everything went smoothly until I was confronted with a chain across the stairs leading to the archives. What with the heavily armed policemen around -- not to mention all the ceremonial swords on all the traditional guards -- and, I'm sure, CCTV covering every nook and cranny, I didn't really like the thought of ducking under it. So I went back to the kindliest of the three bears, er, policemen, the one with the Answers, and asked him, "Yo, dude, what up with the chain?" OK, not in so many words. Kindly police officer that he was, he left his post and walked back with me to figure out what was going on, and undid it for me, telling me it was just to keep the general public out. Awesome -- I'm not the general public! (Do you now have "Tenderness" [Link = YouTube clip] going through your head? Yeah, me too.) Later, when I was exiting that part of the castle, yet another chain was up across another space, but that time, knowing that I was not the mere general public, I very cavalierly undid the chain myself and walked out, as curious tourists wondered who I must be. OK, maybe they didn't care, but I thought I was pretty special.

It's not like I saw anything fabulous that tourists couldn't see from other vantage points, but I was in a part of the castle that's its own little world, separate from the tourists and State Rooms and changing of the guard and all that royal ceremony hoo-ha. In the Horseshoe Cloister, which I passed through to get to the Vicar's Undercroft, it seems there are living quarters, presumably for residential castle staff. I took a picture of the unusually curved building (hence the name "Horseshoe Cloister"), but as you may recall, I can't upload my pictures at the moment. It's a half-circle building in the style now called "Tudor" (only here it was obviously the real thing) -- brick on the bottom, beam and plaster on the top -- and has a continuous covered walk around its length over the entrances to all the residences (hence "cloister"). I know it was residential for two reasons: there were signs that said "Residents Only on Grass"; and as I left I caught a glimpse of the inside of one of them. They reminded me of the "rooms" (that is, apartments) that some Oxbridge dons have "in college." And beyond the Horseshoe Cloister, near the Vicar's residence and on the back side of St. George's Chapel, a whole little village seemed to open up. As I was leaving, a man and woman with a baby carriage were entering, presumably to go home.

In other words, I was in a living modern-medieval castle, bustling with life and activity on a grand scale, and not just because of the mad swarms of tourists. I know the traditional guards have horses somewhere, but here there were cars parked in reserved spaces in the Horseshoe Cloister and in the next court yard. The castle was guarded by modern versions of knights and infantry - some with swords, some with guns. The tourists were the courtiers and visiting statesmen, while the residents and staff and various and sundry went about their daily business, and I and the other "clerks" were busy doing things with manuscripts, and, in this case, microfiche, photocopies, Word texts, and PDFs, too. Meanwhile, the royal household was a presence without actually necessarily being present.

Plus ca change...

Post script: given all the fire power and other security (I had to apply for my pass in advance, presumably so they could look me up on watch lists and also see if I had a record), I was pretty surprised that there was no bag check. Nope, not one bit. In the *archives* I had to leave my bag in a vestibule inside their locked door (entrance by buzzer only), but no where outside of the archives was my bag a problem. After the archives, I even wandered around the tourist parts of the castle for awhile. (No one asked to see my entrance ticket -- there was 12 quid wasted on the discount ticket I bought with my train fare. D'oh!) I went in and around St. George's Chapel with my bag strapped to my back, and wandered around the middle and lower wards with it as well. Very strange.

Conference paper title changes -- or not

In his final post on NCS, JJC writes:

The typical NCS performance began by announcing a change in title. The speaker would then make reference to the very long version of the paper from which this tiny and insufficient piece was being extracted. He or she would last apologize for not having a sufficient number of handouts.

The pique"mildly amused observationalism" with which Jeffrey writes this explainsfails to explain something to me. At my own presentation, I cheerily pointed out, to my own great amusement, that on my handout I had *accidentally* changed my title. There was a word that begins with M that was different from the original title, but made just as much sense -- hence the reason why it found its way into my handout without my catching the mistake. I thought this was kind of hilarious, given the rampant purposeful title-changing at the conference, but my audience didn't even seem to smile.

But for some reason they absolutely guffawed when the next speaker crowed triumphantly that he had not changed his title. Hmph, I say, hmph!

Oh, and for the record, I did worry out loud that I didn't have enough handouts, but actually I did, and I finished my paper *under* time. Ta-da!

*****

In other news, I've settled into London now -- in the world's narrowest hotel room, not counting those "pod" hotels -- after visiting friends in Yorkshire. Blogging may be light as I've got to make good use of my scant three days here to do massive manuscript consulting. But I do want to revisit some things I've been thinking about all that posing, posturing, and prestige-chasing that I perceived at NCS and why it annoys and bores me so much. It may not be until I get back to the States, though, that I'll have time to write that post.

Drat! - Plus how I did NOT steal a famous medievalist's credit card

I forgot to pack my USB cable for my camera, so I cannot yet post pictures of cliffs, castles, sheep, or a friend standing in the "privy exit," or video clips of sheep baa'ing hundreds and hundreds of feet below a castle or of the charming Welsh men's choir singing in Welsh. So go look at Jeffrey Cohen's pictures, one of which I took.

So instead, I'll tell you the story of the Incident of the Purloined Credit Card, which features the only crabby Welsh person I've ever met.

So. At a castle called Carreg Cennen, there's a dark and slimy passage into the mountain that takes you to a rather small and anti-climactic cave. The journey is more fun than the destination -- and will definitely give you the willies if you've seen The Descent -- although it's kind of cool to see graffiti from 19th century tourists who were there before you (I'd show you a picture, but...well, you know why not). To get down there you need a flashlight. If you don't have your own, you can rent one from a hut at the base of the castle, or the tea and gift shop at the foot of the castle's hill if the hut is closed.

My friend G. and I attempted to rent one at the tea shop and were told to go to the hut. At the hut we were told that they were all out. And I swear on my mother's ashes this is what that lady then advised: she told us we could gather with a group going down or wait for someone to come up and use theirs. Ultimately, we did the latter, borrowing a flashlight -- a rather shitty one, by the way -- from someone who had borrowed it from someone else.

Somehow I ended up with the custody of the flashlight because G. is a smooth operator and knows when a menial task is too menial for him. Typical. When I got back to the hut, it was closed, with a sign directing us to return all "torches" to the cafe. I followed the directions. I always follow directions. Refer to the paragraph above and remember that one of the instructions I received was to borrow someone else's torch.

When I got to the cafe, I dutifully queued up (my English ancestors would be so proud) to return the flashlight. It had a number, which corresponded to a page in a notebook of plastic sleeves, which contained, to my growing horror, credit cards left as deposits. (Why anyone would want to steal a crappy flashlight of awkwardly large proportions when there are awesomely powerful ones that fit in your pocket is beyond me. But I digress.) As I got up to the front of the line, I said, "I don't know who this belongs to. I borrowed it from someone who borrowed it from someone else."

The crabby lady behind the counter screeched at me, "That's NOT allowed! You owe us a pound fifty!"

"What? But, but, the other person paid the pound fifty."

"It's a pound fifty PER PERSON," she exclaimed angrily.

"But, but, the lady at the hut told us to do this -- they were out of torches."

The lady wasn't completely mollified, since she kept rather dramatically flipping through the credit cards, although she stopped demanding payment (which I would have given, actually -- I was more horrified at having accidentally broken the rules). Finally she found the right card and slapped it down on the counter.

"But that's not mine! I don't know what to do with it!" I protested.

"That's your problem, isn't it?" the woman snarled at me.

I looked at the card. I recognized the famous name (indeed, I own at least one of her books) -- hooray! -- but to my chagrin realized I had no idea what the scholar in question looked like.

I asked Jeffrey what she looked like. He suggested I buy a round of drinks for the house, or something to that effect. And then he gave some ridiculous, obviously untrue description of the scholar in question. In effect, he was starting to remind me of my annoying big brother, teasing me instead of being helpful. Sigh. Boys. Finally he relented and described her.

At that very moment she was coming down the hill from the castle, coincidentally in the company of G., so I went up to her, told her it was a pleasure to meet her and I was an admirer of her work, and then presented her with her credit card, to her great relief.

But I have to say, I'm still traumatized by the fact that there's a crabby woman in Wales who thinks Americans are petty, rule-flouting thieves cheating castle tea shops out of their pound fifty! Or worse, she just thinks that of "that American girl with the Medusa hair who came with that otherwise lovely group of scholars."

Sigh.

Score!

I'm now in Yorkshire visiting friends and while in Ikley today I was reminded of a glorious thing called the Clarks' semi-annual sale. I heart Clarks for their combination of funkiness and comfort. And today I scored a pair of gladitorial/80s punk-style sandals for 15 pounds.

That's right, I said 15 pounds. That's even cheap in dollars! Woo-hoo!

Tomorrow I will walk around in their funky comfort at Kirkstall Abbey and the Royal Armouries.

This conference

This is the first time I've been a participant at this particular conference, though I was once an outside-ish observer (the very green grad student assistant for the campus organizing it), and I'm noticing something about it that may or may not be characteristic of it. Perhaps those of you more in the know can tell me if I'm wrong or right.

While there are lots of very good things about it, it's also very full of anxiety, insecurity, and posturing. It's as bad as MLA, and yet there are no job interviews here. But for some stupid reason, people are acting as if there were, like they have to be "on" all the time. Not everyone (not any of the friends of this blog), but a lot of people.

I don't think I want to come back. Even Medieval Academy is mellower than this (especially when it hooks up with the Medieval Association of the Pacific -- then it *rocks*).

But still, there's one very awesome thing about this conference this year: castles. Got to climb all over two of them today. I'll post pictures when I get them up.

PS -- More small world stories: on the first morning at breakfast, I tried to sit and eat alone because I was still very, very tired, but I was joined by a complete stranger, and so had to make small talk. Turns out she was born and raised in Rust Belt! So small talk was easier than I thought it would be. Hooray for Rust Belt -- bringing strangers together!

Train station blogging -- it's an even smaller world edition

OK, now I'm blogging from Paddington Station, where I'm sitting around with time on my hands because I was over-anxious in allowing for time between my plane's arrival and my train's departure, since the last time I did the plane-to-train thing it took me nearly 4 hours to get from Heathrow to King's Cross. But of course this time, having planned ahead for all possibilities, I got here to Paddington in nearly record time. Sigh.

But back to the small world of plane trips from Big Rust Belt to London. Not only was Grad School Colleague on the same plane, but she was sitting right in front of me! So we chatted and caught up while waiting for the rest of the passengers to board. And later I noticed that she and I both chose to watch The Devil Wears Prada on the in-seat entertainment system. I have no idea what that says about us except that, obviously, neither of us saw it when it came out.

And then, if that weren't coincidental enough, who should sit in front of GSC, but Medieval Woman and the Dutchman! Now *that* was a little weird and unexpected, because I can assure you, MW lives *nowhere* near Big Rust Belt. I could not see what MW or TD were watching on their little TVs. MW - care to share? Perhaps your taste is more highbrow than either mine or my GSC's?

OK, I'm feeling very sleepy now and it would be bad if I fell asleep in Paddington with all my stuff. I think I better get up and walking around a bit.

Airport blogging - it's a small world edition

I'm in Big Rust Belt airport, at the gate for my flight to the UK, and who do I see a few rows away? Grad School Colleague from the nearest R1. Once I saw her, I thought, "Of course, this is her airport, too, and I know she'll be at the same conference." But for a split second it surprised me. There I was, in my own little world, saying goodbye to Bullock a few moments earlier and expecting a trip to a land far away on a plane of strangers. It's a little weird seeing someone you know in an airport, but it has actually happened to me many times in my life, in far more unlikely and coincidental circumstances. I also ran into someone I knew on a ferry from Dover to France once.

Anyway, I notice GSC from the R1 is reading a fun book. At least, from this distance, it looks like a general market paperback. Stupid me, I brought work and only work. So I'm blogging to make up for the fact that fabulously successful and ambitious-in-a-good-way GSC is reading for fun, and so should I! Maybe I'll go buy a paperback at the Borders 20 feet away. Then again, maybe I really do need to be reading that book I'm reviewing! (See previous post.)

Well, I shouldn't be blogging and using my battery just to say obvious things about fellow medievalists who are *of course* on the same plane as I am. In fact, I just turned on the computer to turn *off* the wireless. Besides, double chocolate Milano cookies are calling my name (thanks, Bullock).

Oops...boarding!

Not looking forward to August

On the day before I leave for the UK for two weeks of Famous Medieval Author conference, visiting with friends, and whirlwind manuscript consulting, I am getting anxious about what faces me upon my return, one item of which I just learned about 10 minutes ago.

As you read the following August to-do list, keep in mind that our school year begins on the 25th. Thank god I got my syllabuses done at the beginning of the summer (though details need to be fine-tuned).

So here's what my August will look like:

• Re-write article due August 15th according to feedback from collection editors -- some of which feedback I got orally at Kalamazoo, and have been working on, but most of which I just got about a week ago.
• Finish academic book (on planes and trains while away) and write review for - gulp! - Speculum (my first ever for them).
• Read dissertation and prepare for as yet unscheduled August defense. Thank god I'm the outside reader. Note: my first dissertation committee position ever.
• Read MA thesis and prepare for early-August defense.
• Correct proofs of article (possibly with stolen time at Famous Author conference if editors won't give me a 5-day extenstion). I just got the PDF of the proofs 10 minutes ago and they're due July 25th. I'm leaving tomorrow and I'm still fine-tuning my paper, doing laundry, packing, etc.
• Prepare for and organize department orientation for non-TA students.
• Meet with colleague with whom I will be the dramaturge for a 2010 production of medieval drama (he needs to plan the season this far in advance and we have to settle on which plays and what form of text -- simply modernized or truly translated).

Oy. Feel for me.

But right now I have to take Pippi for her walkies and get back to getting ready to leave. Expect little to no posting in the next two weeks. Happy July to you all!

A request for transubstantiation clarifications

I'm confused about something. It was inspired by recent blogospheric events (as recounted here, where you can see some of my confusion in the comments), but also, more importantly, by a medieval text I'm thinking about in other contexts. And it all has to do with the ritual practices of transubstantiation in the medieval church. The concept I get -- it's the practice I'm not clear on.

Let me put it in terms of the medieval text, because that's more germane to this blog and to my interests than the brouhaha that PZ Myers has stirred up. In The Croxton Play of the Sacrament, a Christian merchant named Aristorius procures a eucharist wafer for a Jew named Jonathas. Jonathas wants the wafer to test whether it's true that, as he's heard told, that "Cristen men... /beleve on a cake... / [and] seye how the prest dothe it bind, / And by the might of his word make it flessh and blode /...how that it shuld be He that deyed upon the rode." (For the non-medievalists reading this, I think that Middle English is mostly clear, but in case you don't know this, "rode" means cross, so the last phrase is "died on the cross.") Once he gets it, he puts it to all sorts of tests that mimic and parody Christ's Passion as well as the mass. Then grotesque and slapstick violence ensues -- the host bleeds, Jonathas loses his hand -- Christ appears and heals Jonathas, the Jews convert, and the whole thing ends in a Corpus Christi procession into the church, headed by the Bishop.

Suffice it to say it's a weird and disturbing play. My questions, though, are about the status of the eucharist wafer at the point when Aristorius procures it for Jonathas. The merchant gets his personal chaplain drunk, takes the church key, and gets the host while the drunk priest sleeps. In doing this, Aristorius says, "Ser Isodere [= the priest] shall nott know of this case, / For he hath ofteyn sacred, as it is skill. / The chirche key is at my will; / There is nothing that me shall tary." Bevington, whose edition I'm quoting from, glosses "sacred" as "consecrated the host." One other thing that pertains to my question is that in this play, prior to the grotesque bleeding of the host, Jonathas and his friends enact a parody Last Supper/mass in which Jonathas speaks the words of the mass (and the Gospel), "Comedite, [hoc est] corpus meum" -- eat, this is my body.

OK, so here are my questions, which I know I could get answered by re-reading Rubin's Corpus Christi, but it's more fun to ask the blogosphere. Besides, I don't want the answer for research reasons right now, I just want to clarify my own muddled head.

In medieval doctrine, at what point is the eucharist host the body of Christ? Is it Christ's body when it's in reserve, ready for the mass, or is only Christ's body at the re-enactment of the words of the Last Supper during the mass -- the "hoc est corpus meum" moment? In the play, is Aristorius stealing Christ's body or something not-quite-yet Christ's body? And what does "sacred"/"consecrated" here mean in context? And, for the record, is there any difference in modern Catholic doctrine?

And if you're thinking, "You're a medievalist! You should know these things!" Well, I'm a medieval *literature* person, and even when I've studied and written about religious texts, it's often been through the lens of lay people's social and devotional practices, which don't always align with official doctrine (contrary to the popular notion that medieval people only could or did believe what the Church told them to believe). Plus, having been raised Catholic, I think I have some kind of Pavlovian response to the "this is my body" moment of the mass. That's THE moment -- the eucharist is raised, bells ring, incense is sometimes wafted (it's all very dramatic) -- and I've never thought about the status of the wafers before that moment. It's not really that important for anything I'm thinking about this play -- I just want to get it straight. I'll go back to Rubin when I have time, of course, but for now, you can help.

And the other reason I'm blogging this is that I may not have time to blog in the next few days as I get ready to leave for the UK, and I don't know if I'll have much time to blog over there. So I thought I'd put something serious and medieval-related at the top of my blog, even if it means admitting my lack of knowledge of something so central to the period I study and the religion I was raised in!

Crankiness

First, the kind of crankiness you might expect: I am vexed, terribly vexed by continued craziness at my institution and by a certain electronic output by some of my colleagues, which has devolved into something from the bad old days of the UseNet. It's embarrassing. I wash my hands of it. I will no longer read or comment on it (in my lame attempts to raise the level of conversation to, uh, actual conversation about the subject of the posts). Oh, and some of you may remember that I held a last minute workshop for the parties involved to help them make it better -- more readable, more useful for their message, more interesting to a wider audience. ONE person showed up. And that person thought that only the registered bloggers could see it, so you can imagine the learning curve I was facing there.

Oy.

Can I just say, for those of you who know what I'm talking about, that there are a lot of fantastic people at my institution among the students, faculty, and staff -- fantastic thinkers and creative artists and teachers and scholars (from students to faculty) and researchers and visionaries and organized minds who keep it all going. But it's always the squeaky wheels who get heard.

In other cranky news, but not my *own* crankiness...

Did you know there are *two* Cranky Professors? Seriously, there's the medieval art historian, The Cranky Professor, whom I already knew. And then there's one in English, too! But she goes by the shortened nom-de-blog of Cranky Prof and blogs at Cranky Epistles. Who knew? Did you?

Why are we all so cranky?

Btw, the word "cranky" has now become completely weird to me. Does that ever happen to you -- that is, you say or write a word over and over and it becomes alien in the process?

PSA

If you're looking for that post about the thing that annoyed me that I was promising to post about, I stupidly posted it over the holiday weekend. It's four posts down, or here. I draw attention to it in case you missed it, and because, these days, a substantive post from me is a rare thing.

UPDATE: Another PSA: Carl at Got Medieval is asking people to sum up the Middle Ages in a list of seven words (or phrases -- some of us are cheating, including me, as "flying buttress" and "trial by jury," both on my list, are more than one word each) in a kind of word-association game. It's fun and informative -- go play!

Tales from Rust Belt

Bullock and I spent the evening of the 4th of July eating ribs and drinking fine wines on the front porch of Will and Beck's place in Rust Belt Historic District.* Being a Historic District of 19th and early 20th century homes, a lot of them have huge, room-sized front porches (although the one I posted about here does not). W & B frequently have dinner and drinks out there. The friendly neighbors two doors down, who are also the Eyes of the Neighborhood, have a beer keg on theirs and frequently invite passers-by up to imbibe.

And while we were eating, the family next door came home from the official fireworks. Everyone exchanged greetings and Will said he missed their old ritual of unofficial neighborhood fireworks. But alas, neighbor dad is now a VIP employee of the city and a public figure, so he has had to mend his law-breaking ways. He seemed a little grumpy about it. I don't know why, but this cracks me up, in part because the fireworks are probably the *only* skeleton in VIP's closet in a town full of politicos with shady pasts and wheeling and dealing. It's like the big bangs and pyrotechnics were an explosion of Mr. VIP's id all at once, and now he's got to keep it all contained. I don't usually approve of launching fireworks in residential neighborhoods -- not to mention ones full of historic Victorians! -- but I felt a little sad for Mr. VIP.

****

The other day I was walking from my office, backpack in tow, across the main drag that serves as the boundary of campus, when something shiny caught my eye. I knew it was a lavish and fancy car bejeweled with chrome, but I wasn't sure which kind, so I took another look. I'm not usually good at identifying cars, but the tell-tale hood ornament told me it was a Rolls Royce. That's not something you see around Rust Belt very often, so then I snuck a glance at the driver. Given the fact that I grew up down the street from the founder of Rival Manufacturing (the Crock Pot people), who lived in our neighborhood to keep an eye on his grand-daughter and great-grand-daughter, and was driven around town in a huge Rolls, I tend to associate Rolls Royces with super old white dudes with "help." So I was a little surprised to see a Boomer-age black guy driving this one.

It pleased me, so I grinned. He saw me checking out his car and he saw me grinning. So he caught my eye and said, "Can I carry your books for you?"

I have to say, that's the most innocent sounding non-innocent come-on I've ever heard, so I gotta give him some credit. I laughed and said, "No thank you, but you have a lovely car."

I heart Rust Belt.







*Will and Beck are pseudonyms I haven't used in a long time. I named them after William Shakespeare and Samuel Beckett because it suits their professions and specialties and tastes (though Beck is actually a woman).

Blog roll updating

I've finally spent some time updating my blog roll. Since I use Blogrolling and have a "Blogroll It!" button on my browser, it's really easy to add blogs, but I have a tendency not to keep up on cleaning out the defunct and discontinued links.

But while deleting dead links has a kind of satisfaction to it, it's not nearly as fun as adding new ones. So, if you read this blog -- even if you don't comment here -- and you've got a blog of your own and it's not my blog roll, leave me a comment with your URL and I'll add you. Likewise, if you've moved and I haven't found your new blog, or if there's something wrong with the way your blog is listed here, let me know.

Say what? Or, the tiresome tussle of linguistics vs. literature

So. About that blog post that annoyed me...

Way back in the ancient time of June 17, Mark Liberman at Language Log wrote a post in which he said the following:

In fact, in my (admittedly limited) experience, English departments are among the last places on campus where you're likely to find any indication of interest in any form of linguistic analysis whatever.

I'd be very happy to find that I'm wrong about this.

Mark Liberman, you are wrong about this. There, happy?

The problem with Liberman's broad generalization (aside from being a broad generalization -- not usually a persuasive move in argumentative writing), is that he then proceeds to back up his claim with the example of the Yale English department and what he could find on their web site.

OK, before I go further, can I just announce to the world at large that using Yale (or Harvard, or Stanford, or Oberlin, or any other elite school) as a stand-in for academia at large is poor evidence, no matter what the subject of your argument is. American higher education has a plethora of institutional types with an equally diverse set of missions, funding sources, student bodies, faculties, curricula, and organizational structures. And we do not all even aspire to be or model ourselves on the elite private universities and colleges. Heck, institutions like Yale aren't even in the majority of types of institutions in the country, let alone anything like an average model.

But back to the people-in-English-don't-care-about-linguistics thing. I'd reckon that in the majority of 4 year colleges and universities in the country, the linguists are actually IN the English department. Again, Yale is a poor example, because it's elite and wealthy enough to support an entire linguistics department. Oh, and look, Prof. Roberta Frank, renowned Anglo-Saxonist has a dual appointment in Linguistics and in English at Yale. Liberman didn't mention that, for some reason (although a lone medievalist commenter did). But I'll come back to the medieval angle in a minute.

Most places, however, aren't as lucky as Yale to have a well-staffed and independent linguistics department. At my own university, most of the linguists are in my department -- including people who don't necessarily work on specifically *English*-related issues -- and some are in the foreign language department (yes, we just have one -- they're all lumped together). So actually, our English department is either the first or the second place on campus where you'd find people interested in linguistic analysis, depending on where you decided to start your search.

And it's not just the people who are identified as "linguists" and specialists in linguistic fields who are interested in linguistic analysis. Hello! {Raises hand} Medievalist here! I teach Old English and Middle English, both of which are cross-listed with Linguistics, and the students in there are a mix of English majors, linguistics majors, various foreign language majors, and English graduate students. We use the IPA and talk about all sorts of heady linguistic goodness like phonology, morphology, syntax, and the like. And I bet this year's crop in particular will never forget the genitive of time in part because it was a recurring obsession of mine across Old and Middle English, and at the end of the latter, I came into class one day and triumphantly announced that the final scene of No Country For Old Men featured an American example of it. (You should've seen how giddy I was about it.) See, medievalists have always needed a knowledge of and interest in linguistic analysis, and always will, including those of us who are interested in all sorts of other theoretical developments in the field. Are we not part of the English department?

What's more, our English major here at RBU requires an intro to linguistics class. Why is that? Aside from all the good, sound reasons that the study of literature may have something to do with the study of language, many of our English majors are also Education majors, and the state requires language arts and English teachers in the public schools to have had an intro to linguistics class. I bet that's true in a lot of states. Our MA then requires history of the English language, again because we feel that a knowledge of language enhances the study of literature. Cuz, you know, literature is made of language. (I know! Whoda thunk it?!)

But where Liberman's post really, really gets my goat -- or rather, the writing teacher goat in me -- is the way he uses Yale as his example. After noting that "transformational grammar" doesn't appear on their web page, he adds:

also among the missing are phoneme, vowel, consonant, Lakoff, Whorf, "noun phrase", transitive, adverb, iamb, trochee, dactyl, pentameter, hexameter, and metrical.

(To make it clear that Google has actually indexed some text there, post-colonial occurs 22 times.)

Oh for goodness sake. Why would most of those terms appear on the freakin' web page of the department? Take out "Lakoff" and "Whorf" and the remaining words are all terms that have come up in my classes -- including many of my "purely" literature classes -- but they don't appear in any of my course descriptions because they're all too specific. I even have one forthcoming article on historical linguistics issues that involves both prosody and phonology, but none of Liberman's words are in its title.

But the parenthetical claim makes it clear what the real subject of Liberman's complaint is: you English lit people pay too much attention to the post-colonial. Oy. Are we really still fighting the culture wars? Really? Look, you can care about *both* the political forces that shape literature *and* the linguistic ones that do. They are not mutually exclusive. And in terms of the logic, Liberman's complaint is problematic: "post-colonial" is a much bigger category than "adverb." It's also a theoretical approach that would apply to a multitude of literature courses in a way that "hexameter" wouldn't. I bet the verse writing courses that Yale offers (intro and advanced) include discussion of iambs, trochees, etc. And the description of the "Renaissance Lyric" course says it will focus on "poetic forms." I bet meter has something to do with that course, too. (Oh, and if you search "verse" on the site, it comes up 19 times.)

In the comments to Liberman's post, only one medievalist speaks up, as I recall. And one person from a regional comprehensive points out that linguistics is within their English department. And I don't think Liberman responded to either of them.

So as an English department medievalist at a regional comprehensive, who teaches linguistics courses and linguistic issues, I felt I had to pipe up on behalf of my many identities: Hey, what about us?

We will resume our regularly schedule programming shortly

One of my favorite people in the world is coming through town tomorrow for about 24 hours, so I won't be posting for a few days. And since I haven't been posting for quite a few days already, it'll just be more of the same.

In the meantime, I'll try to think of something substantive and academic to write about. So here's a question: if a blog post that annoyed the heck out of me is weeks old by the time I get around to posting about it, is it too 'old news' for me to post about it? Discuss. (And no, it wasn't by any of you.)

Costco muffins are dog crack

What the frak are they putting in those Costco muffins? Whatever it is, Pippi finds it abso-frakin-lutely irresistible.

Now that may not seem all that unusual, but you have to understand that Pippi is probably the best-behaved dog ever when it comes to food impulses and behavior: she doesn't beg and under normal circumstances doesn't counter-surf. I can sit on the couch and eat over my lap something as seemingly irresistible as a salmon burger, and she'll lie politely at her end of the couch without so much as sniffing my way. (And believe me, she absolutely loves salmon.) We can even set our dishes down on the coffee table, with food on them, and she won't disturb them. She sits to receive her own food and won't eat unless she has sat and then been told "OK." (We get some of the credit for this, but I think we lucked out in terms of her eager-to-please and quick-to-learn personality.)

But when it comes to the Costco muffins, we have to guard them with our lives. Her one instance of counter-surfing came in the first weeks we had her and involved a lemon-poppy seed muffin which she managed to get out of the still partially plastic-covered tray and then devoured in seconds. And then last night, Bullock left the mere wrapper from his just eaten blueberry muffin on his plate on the coffee table, and the second we got up from the couch, she snatched it from the plate. I had to pry her mouth open to fish it out. (We haven't worked on "drop it" yet, though I was repeating the phrase as I forced her mouth open, hoping she'd start to pick it up.) Thank god she's a gentle soul who lets me pry around in her mouth like that.

Seriously, what's in those things? Why does Pippi have such an uncontrollable impulse for them? It's a little troubling!

RIP George Carlin, 1937-2008

When I was in junior high, my best friend Maria and I used to sneak off to a corner of the playground to listen to a cassette tape (on an office tape recorder) of George Carlin's then current HBO special, which her older brother had made with the same the recorder, microphone held up to the TV.

We would listen to that show over and over and over again. We loved it. It was the one where he expanded the 7 dirty words into a list of 100. We were fascinated by that list, partly because we weren't even sure what some of those words meant, at least not in their dirty versions (I think "jellyroll" was on there). But mostly we just liked the sheer rhythmic, poetic quality of it, and its taboo qualities. We would chant parts of it on our Catholic school playground as if it were a jump-rope song, and our teachers never seemed to notice.

And that wasn't the only bit we liked. We loved his screed against the word "nice" or his "football vs. baseball" bit ("Baseball is played on a diamond; football is played on a gridiron"). We loved his fascination with language, its oddities, and our odd attitudes about it. In many ways, I think George Carlin is responsible for my having becoming an English professor. I'm pretty sure he's responsible for why I love the medieval play Mankind so much. And he definitely gets credit for my willingness to say "ShitPissFuckCuntCocksuckerMotherfuckerandTits" -- onetwothreefourfive...just like that Jesus* -- in class when I want to talk about issues of register. (Truthfully, I haven't done the whole string in awhile...I usually stick to the first three, especially "fuck." It's enough.)

*OK, that bit between the dashes is from e e cummings, "Buffalo Bill's defunct." He's also someone responsible for helping me, at an impressionable age, to hear poetry in ordinary speech and expletives.

In Carlin's honor, I'm including a clip from about the same time as my introduction to him. It's about the 7 dirty words, but they don't make an appearance until the end. But it's definitely about language and language taboos. And because of the end it's NOT SAFE FOR WORK!

RIP, George Carlin. I hope no one is asking you to "Have a nice day" and no one is telling your mourning family that you've "gone to a better place."

Still here, but a little scattered and dysfunctional

Sorry for not having posted in over a week. Bullock and I have both been in one of those states where you find yourself having a hard time motivating to work or do much of anything, but you feel too guilty not to work or get other things accomplished, and so then you deprive yourself of the things you think distract you from the work and household tasks -- like the internet -- but you *still* don't get anything done because the root problem is something other than having things distract you. And so then you feel worse because you still aren't getting back in the swing of things, but you're also not giving yourself your usual leisure activities.

You know what I mean? It's bad enough when you live by yourself and it happens, but when it's two of you going through the same vicious cycle, the other person's presence and guilt -- usually vocalized, at least in both our cases -- just makes you more anxious about your own guilt cycle.

Argh!

Bullock is now trying to snap himself out of it by working in his shop. I am blogging the problem. And then I'm going to clean my wreck of an office to feel like I've accomplished *something* this week.

I know it's Sunday, btw. But I didn't work on Tuesday because I'd had a bout of insomnia the night before, so I'm making myself make up the lost time. Except that I'm not getting much done. This is f'ed up, isn't it? I should cut myself some slack, right? But I'm all stressed out about the fact that I have all of the following due in July and August:

• A conference paper
• MS research in the UK that I have to accomplish in a timely manner (which means being really, really prepared to do it)
• An article (drafted, but needs much work)
• A book review
• A PhD defense
• An MA defense
• Countless little grad-director tasks
  

And school starts again at the end of August! And June is almost over! Ack! Ack!

You can feel the anxiety oozing from this post, can't you? God, even my personal life feels like an untackled to-do list right now. What do I need to calm the frak down and get back in the swing of things? Chamomile tea? A 10-mile run? (Yeah, like I'm in shape for that right now -- another source of anxiety is the fact that in the last 6 months I've run as many miles as I used to run in a single week!) A short-break holiday?

And is this somehow related to post-tenure depression? Does Bullock's similar state have something to do with the fact that he's got a year's sabbatical in front of him?

All advice and anecdotes welcome!

Oh, so *this* is what tenure is about

I may be part of a committee meeting next week with the highest official in the state university system. And, more locally, I'm on the department's Personnel Committee next year, which means, among other things, I'll be voting on my friend Victoria's tenure application.

Associate Professor powers, activate!

*****

Apropos of nothing, btw, I've now done over 500 posts and had over 100,000 visitors to the blog.

Graduate student authority

Every now and then when I can't concentrate on my research work, I start fiddling again with my syllabus for my Research in English class. Btw, thanks again to all who gave article suggestions in an earlier post. I think I'm using at least one suggestion from everyone who made one, plus a few more articles of my choosing and my colleagues' recommendations. I've now got a nicely eclectic mix of well-written articles that students can choose from for various practical bibliography assignments on writing annotated bibs, paraphrasing and quoting, etc., as well as for use in class discussion about what a journal article does and how it does it, and even about the history of the journal in the academy.

My major goal in this class is to teach students how to do basic research in English well, in particular, how to find and judge secondary sources, how to emulate their structure and rhetoric in their own papers, and how to quickly get up to speed in the highlights of a critical conversation. But along the way I also want to teach students not just to find and use the "authorities," but how to build their own authority in the process. I've been trying to do this since I took over this class two years ago, but I'm not sure I'm entirely successful. I see students in subsequent classes who still say to me that they have a hard time understanding why anyone would care what *they* thought, for instance. Or, they say something like this graduate student at the blog Meanderings wrote in a post called "There's a different me inside this student":

Those ahead of us in academia--farther down the road, however you want to put it, tend to be rather intimidating....I don't know where this complex comes from, but it must be part of the mandatory bipolarization of a graduate student--to be completely humbled by our professors and published authors, yet able to enter in and converse with them intellectually.

I'm not sure that I want my students to be humbled by me in any way, though I do want them to recognize the hard row to hoe ahead if they want to go on to the Ph.D. and hope for a tenure-track job. And so I assign Semenza's A Guide to Graduate Study for the Twenty-First Century, which pulls no punches in letting you know what it takes to get through grad school successfully, and I give them the scary statistics (beginning with how competitive Ph.D. admissions are -- many of my students don't know that). So I tell them my path to the Ph.D. and job -- including numbers of applications at every stage -- but I also tell them others' stories, including those who got MAs at institutions like ours, since I didn't -- I want to them to know there's hope for them! My favorite pair of stories is about two real life people I know, one who went to Fancy Pants U but couldn't get a TT job (partly because he's a smug bastard, but never mind that!) and one who went to an MA program like ours and then a solid Ph.D. program and has a TT job she loves.

But mostly, I want them to understand that I wasn't born a medievalist with a book and some articles and a good knowledge of my field. Heck, I was pretty much an idiot in my first year or two of graduate school. Everyone is. The ones who think they aren't are smug bastards and often they're the ones who make deadly mistakes along the way. (Learning how to recognize the smug bastards and not following their example is a life skill in and of itself, but a subject for another post.) What I try to teach them, anyway, is that building knowledge of one's field -- both of the primary texts and the critical conversations about them -- takes time and work and dedication. It doesn't happen by taking a class or two. You have to keep at it. And you do that because it's the knowledge and the creative thinking about your subject that gives you authority -- not your place in the hierarchy. I think one of the best examples of that is the kinds of conversations that happen on blogs -- so I suggest students read some of them, too.

But still, I see too much shyness, too much deference, too much fear of asserting their ideas with authority. So clearly I need to do more. Tell me, oh wise readers, how it is you developed your own authority, and how you seek to teach students how to develop it.

Local color

This weekend is the big festival weekend for my old neighborhood, Rust Belt Historic District. Weirdly, I don't think I've blogged about it, even though I lived in the midst of it three years in a row and have gone back for festival every year since.

Anyway, I love festival weekend. There are home tours of the Victorian and Arts and Crafts homes of the neighborhood; fantastic street fair food at both the official vendors and the many unofficial church and individual barbecues around the neighborhood (and some of those guys have the most enormous semi-portable smoker-barbecue set-ups you've ever seen); and a crafts fair that seems to be getting disappointingly smaller every year but always features a booth with gorgeous fabric purses to which I'm utterly addicted (I now own three of the same small but functional size: one in various shades of eye-popping green polka dots, one with an autumnal pattern of nearly-abstract flowers with a bubblegum pink lining, and now one with a black/gray/neon orange/electric blue striped pattern and an electric blue lining).

There's also a parade, which I missed this year, that's the trippiest, most homemade, bizarro parade you've ever seen. One the "decorated" cars that's in the parade every year is this doozy (picture from last year):


Click on the picture to "embiggen" it and get a closer look at the bizarre doll heads glued all over the thing. We saw it at a gas station on the way to the festival this year and the doll heads have multiplied.

The home tours are a little less bizarre (though one house one year had a basement room dedicated to the guy's Star Wars toy collection) and tend to be all about the owners' loving refurbishment of their old homes, either to restore original characteristics or to adapt it to modern living. Some of the home owners take Victorian or Arts and Crafts "authenticity" a little too far and their homes look like museums. I don't like Victorian style myself, so the Victoriana-obsessed homes don't do it for me, but even the shrine-like Arts and Crafts ones are a little sterile to me, and I *like* that style. Who wants to live in a museum? But Bullock and I like home tours for getting design ideas or just oohing and ahing over the exquisite details of original woodwork or molding or what have you. And this year we saw the Most. Awesome. House. Ever. It was a 3500 square foot 1912 Arts and Crafts style stucco house with an English country/Tudor-ish exterior, and it had been beautifully and expensively re-done in all sorts of good ways without messing up its original details.

Here's the outside (the tile roof is original):


There was some painted woodwork inside, but only the door jambs on the second floor. Everything else looked like the oak it was made of, including the center hall staircase, the window seats throughout the house, and the door jambs and other oak on the first floor. And the improvements and additions they did were to die for -- a Florida room with a heated tile floor, and a wall removed between the den and the formal living room to make one great room, plus bumped-out "green house" windows in the kitchen and the "studio," which used to be an attached garage.

Here's the Florida room, which was the owner's addition in place of a side porch, I think (note wet bar in the far right corner):


And *oh* that kitchen! The guy who currently owns it is the head designer of a famous kitchen-ware company -- the kind that serious foodies buy from -- and his kitchen was full of professional and industrial quality stuff. It was also a *helluva* lot bigger than the original kitchen, the walls between old cold porches (for the iceman) and breakfast nooks having been removed, and more heated tile floors put in in parts of it (not the parts showing in the picture).

Here's one shot of the fabulous kitchen:


Add 5 bedrooms, all of decent size (unlike the older Victorians), plus two full baths -- one of the first floor and one still with the original pedestal sink and gigantic tub, as well as original subway tile (and an impressive size, too) -- and the most gorgeously landscaped, private, fenced-in 1/3 acre backyard, complete with an amazing outdoor kitchen, herb and vegetable garden (cleverly hidden from the more decorative parts of the garden and yard), and intimate nooks and crannies, and this house is the most fabulous thing I've ever seen, especially in Rust Belt.

Here are the bathroom with the original fixtures, one part of the park-like backyard (they must have hired a professional landscaper), and the outdoor kitchen (the table was made from re-claimed floor boards from a warehouse, with legs made of re-claimed porch columns!):




And get this: it's for sale. And since this is Rust Belt, it's under $300,000. I kid you not.

I heart the Historic District Festival. I heart Rust Belt.

Wuthering - wha?

Via The Cranky Professor, here's an interpretation of Kate Bush's "Wuthering Heights" that is so very wrong it's *hilarious*. (If you don't know the original, you might want to watch it first -- it's below.)



This is another video posted in part for the Pastry Pirate. Back in college, she and I and another one of our friends had a love-hate relationship with this song. It gave us all the creeps. The Pirate could send shivers down my spine just by chanting in a high-pitched voice, "It's meeeee, Catheeeee, let me in" (especially effective if she was knocking on my dorm room door) or saying she was "soooo cooooold" in chilly weather. Brrrrrr. Creepy.

Now, I'll admit, the Puppini Sisters here are borrowing all their silly gestures straight from Kate Bush, but in the context of Andrews Sisters style close harmony (and those hair nets!) it seems all so much more cheery and full of imitation American can-do spirit (especially on "let me grab your soul"), much less spectral and melodramatic. For your further viewing pleasure, here's Kate's video for the song, with its own quality of camp creepiness and melodrama (not unlike the novel itself, actually):



And now for something completely different, the semaphore version of Wuthering Heights, by Monty Python:



Hmm...There seems to be a similarity of gestures here.

My job is cool

I mentioned in an earlier post that while I'm doing my scant three days of research in London this summer, I'm going to add in a trip out to Windsor to look at a manuscript there. I am now totally psyched to do this.

First of all, with a little research detective work I was finally able to track down more about the manuscript and it's chock-a-block full of the sub-genre I'm looking at (not just the one piece I knew about), so even if it doesn't quite have the provenance I think I'm concentrating on, it's an interesting manuscript and so I'm still going to go see it, and look at the bits that haven't been edited. At this point I'm not sure where this project is going, but now that I'm tenured and feel less pressure to produce a certain outcome, I feel the leisure to follow leads and tangents and hope that they'll end in serendipitous discoveries.

But what's really cool about this is that I'm going to be spending the day with a manuscript in a freakin' castle, which also still happens to be an active royal residence. How awesomely cool is that? I mentioned before that I have to pay for entrance to the castle, but I'm not entirely sure that's the case anymore. But I did have to fill out a day pass application form in advance so that they can do a security check on me (because it's a royal residence and all), and on the day of my visit, my pass will be waiting for me with a police officer. OK, I know it's not top level intelligence classification, but I still feel kind of wickedly special. And did I mention it's a castle? And the archives are in a part of the castle called the "Vicar's Undercroft." And the archivists all have very English names of the Rupert Giles type. And work in a castle. In a castle!

So next time some random person asks me what I do for a living, I'm going to say I read medieval manuscripts in castles. And if they want to think I slay vampires, too, that's cool with me.

Medieval "Catholics" part 2

Thanks for the comments on the last post. After seeing references to medieval "Catholics" in *two* scholarly books, I thought maybe I was the only one who thought this was wrong. But now I see that it's not just me. And Janice's comment summed up nicely why it's problematic.

Richard Scott Nokes linked to the post and mentioned that it's one of his pet peeves, as well as something his students commonly do. My students do it, too, but usually it's only one or two per class. This may have something to do with the large Catholic population of Rust Belt; if the students went to Catholic school, they probably got some church history (well, I did in Catholic school). But at any rate, one or two students per term is enough to notice. Usually it's in papers and I write in the margins that the term is anachronistic for the period, that it's not used until much later, that "Christian" is the appropriate term.

But maybe I should bring this up earlier? I spend all semester referring to "medieval Christianity" or "medieval Christians," and yet "Catholic" still pops up every now and then. Meanwhile, once in a while (although not often) an evangelical Protestant student assumes that medieval people were also evangelicals since for some people "Christian" has a narrower meaning (one not operative in the Middle Ages). Or they get confused in some other way because I keep talking about "medieval Christians."

So...I'm wondering if there's some way I can head this off at the pass. Every now and then I point out that medieval Christianity was different in many ways from modern Christianity in any form, so no one should feel at either a disadvantage or advantage if they come from a Christian background or not. So I tell them to think of it the way they would ancient Greek or Roman religion -- as narrative. I do this mostly for the non-religious students and for the students who've been anesthetized by too much religious school (as I was), to free them from their discomfort or knee-jerk aversion. Too often the non-religious students either don't think they have standing to talk, or else are too automatically dismissive. But also, I want the Christian students, whatever their denomination, to know that they may have some useful knowledge, but their beliefs and practices are not exactly the same as medieval ones. I want them all to see things fresh.

But anyway, now I'm wondering if I need to make that talk a regular feature and elaborate in some ways about the continuities and discontinuities between medieval Christianity and later forms, including why we don't talk about medieval "Catholics." Or should I just deal with it when it comes up? What do you all think?

In the meantime, I'm reviewing one of the books I mentioned, so now I feel more empowered to bring the issue up in the review if there's space.

Medieval Catholics or Christians?

I'm reading two scholarly books right now that refer to the religious practices and beliefs of the Middle Ages as Catholic, capital C. [ETA: I want to add some information to clarify a few things, partly in response to something a friend ask via e-mail. Both books are dealing only with medieval English culture and literature, so there's no pressing need to distinguish the Eastern from Western Christian Church in this context. But they do have to sometimes talk about early modern English culture, and one of them is talking about present day manifestations and uses of medieval texts, so the need to distinguish pre- and post-Reformation English Christianities *is* necessary in some way.]

In one case, the book is by a British scholar writing for a British press, and I suspect the practice is standard to both, and reflects all sorts of legacies of the Reformation still alive and well, if muted, in England. In this case, the word signals something like 'In the Middle Ages, they were Catholic. Now we are proper English Protestants."

In the other case, the book is published by the Catholic University of America Press, so if it's house style, it's of a different ilk, claiming continuity rather than difference. But actually, flipping about, I see this author uses the generic "Christian" more often and seems only to rely on "Catholic" when needing to distinguish it from Reformation denominations and practices.

But I have to say, I've always found the use of "Catholic" with a capital C anachronistic for the Middle Ages, especially if all or most of what you're talking about in a work is the Middle Ages, so both of these examples strike me as wrong in some way. Not hugely, grossly wrong, but wrong in the way a slightly out of tune piano note is wrong -- something's off.

But maybe that's just me. What are your preferences and practices?