Hi students

Yes, I know you're here. More on how in a minute, but first, can I ask a favor of you? Feel free to keep reading -- heck, add me to your RSS feeder. You're totally welcome here. *But*, for the time being, please don't tell anyone outside of the Middle English class about my blog. Some people think blogging, even academic blogging, is a silly waste of time -- even though I've made all sorts of fantastic professional connections through blogging -- and some of those anti-blog folks could be the ones deciding whether to give me tenure or not. So it's important to me to remain pseudonymous, at least until the end of this year, when -- fingers crossed! -- my tenure process is complete.

Oh, and if you don't know what tenure is, just ask. But to make a long story short, if I don't get it, it means I'm fired. (But you probably knew that.)

So, here's how I know you're here. I have something installed on my blog called "Sitemeter," and it tells me how many visitors I have each day, where those visitors are located -- or at least where their Internet Service Provider is located -- and how you got here, whether directly or from another blog or web site. For instance, this afternoon, two of you -- or the same person twice -- got here from the link on the Chaucer Blog, and you did so from one of the computers in the lab in our department's building, so I'm guessing you're one (or two) of the graduate students. I'm not telling you this to freak you out, but just to let you know that you're only slightly more anonymous than I am. The first lesson of blogging is that you're never really anonymous, which is why I'm not really that bothered that I've outed myself to you. But you should keep that in mind.

So since I know you're here, leave a comment and say hi! And then maybe I'll introduce you to all the other academics that come around here, just like I would if you saw me at a conference.

Of course, if you have better or more pressing things to do, I understand. I won't be hurt if you don't stick around. Speaking of having more pressing things to do, I promise to grade your last assignment this weekend!

PS -- Also, I think it tells you something (though not everything) about the academic blogosphere that the two posts with the most comments of those currently on the front page are the one in which I talk about accidentally outing myself to you guys in class and the one in which I show everybody the boots I ordered from Zappos. Yup, that's what we professorial types like to talk about -- you guys (and what you think of us) and our shoes.

It has begun

One of my students was on my blog for an hour and 20 minutes last night at about 2 am. (Yes, students, I know when you've been here. Actually, I know when people with area ISPs have been here and I'm assuming it's you.)

I don't know everything they read, but I do know they likely read about the last time I thought students were reading the blog -- and where I assured them I don't say mean things about them -- and they also read about my Mom dying, about Kalamazoo, and about other events in my life both major and minor. They may have also read some substantive posts, like the one about calling Margery Kempe crazy, which I've always liked. So, as Bullock says, they know a lot about me now (and about him), but that's not necessarily a bad thing. One of the original purposes of this blog was to add to the voices making professors' lives more transparent, and since my students see me for only a few hours every week, it doesn't hurt them to know that a) I have a life, b) I have other responsibilities besides their class and have a lot of work in general, and c) I'm not just a "brain on a stick," as Bitch, Ph.D. says, and I have other interests, desires, and activities, not all of them cerebral. (Of course they already know I'm silly -- I showed them the pork video!)

So welcome, students. Stick around if you like and comment if you have something to say.

Oops. I just outed myself to my students today.

So there I was in my Middle English class, messing with the new computer system to figure out if it has a way to make the screen dark when you want to switch back and forth between the board and the projector (it doesn't, but that's a rant for another time), and since we still had 5 minutes to go before official class time, I decided to amuse the students and show them the insane pork cartoon (because I'd mentioned in the last class -- don't ask why) and then, since it was more germane to class, Chaucer's blog.

Now I've done this before and worried a little bit about the fact that my blog is the second link in the Rotulus Bloggorum. But this time I really asked for it. We were talking about what was and wasn't Middle English syntax, lexicon, etc., and then I pointed out the little uses of French and Latin on the blog and asked them why he did that, since we'd recently talked about the broader linguistic environment and uses of English in the period. And so I showed them the Rotulus Bloggorum and how the titles of various blogs had been Latinized or Anglicized medieval style (and it's interesting, btw, which blogs get which). Then someone noticed "Anothir Damned Medievaliste," which they thought was funny, but they seemed skeptical that the implied complaint of the name was necessary. So I said, "Well, there are a damned lot of medievalists in the blogosphere -- you'd be surprised."

And that prompted one of them to ask, "So, do you have a blog?"

Crap.

As you may or may not know about me, I am congenitally incapable of answering a direction question with a lie, especially if it's a yes or no question. So if they'd said, "What's your blog called?" I might have managed to make something up.

But no. I was trapped. Wanna guess what I did?

I freakin' blushed and then dropped my head on the computer desk!

Of course, then all my students squealed with delight and one exclaimed, "That means you do have a blog! And I bet it's on that list! And I'm going to find out which one it is!"

Oh well, I was going to become less pseudonymous after the end of this year anyway. But students, please, if you're reading this, keep it under your hats for now. Don't tell anyone outside of that Middle English class. I'm up for tenure this year and I'm a little paranoid, and the provost is brand new, the president only in his second year, and I have no idea what they think of nutty blogging academics. There's a reason why I've been pseudonymous up to now, and I'd like to keep it that way until the university's Board of Directors signs off on my tenure.

So thanks in advance for your discretion.

The one in which Virago grumbles about being misunderstood

So yesterday I got the "Literature" catalog from the press that published my book six months ago. I immediately flipped to my series to see my work in all its advertised glory.

It wasn't there.

I read through the titles again, more carefully, just to be sure. It still wasn't there.

And yet there was the book by an acquaintance of mine, published in the same month as mine. And there was the book by another acquaintance, published two years ago. And there was the forthcoming book by yet another friend of mine. (Yeah, it seems all my friends publish with the same publisher, but really, it's just that I've got a lot of friends and acquaintances.)

So, darnit, where was mine???

I've been kind of half-convinced that the series editor and the acquisitions editor stopped believing in my book somewhere in the process, even though they were very enthusiastic at the proposal stage. Did they get bored? Did the finished product and the somewhat critical reader's report (which thought the book, while accomplished and scholarly, wasn't quite sexy enough for my press) diminish their enthusiasm (even though my counter-argument to the series editor seemed to convince the press to go ahead)? This seeming failure to promote my book seemed to solidify my somewhat paranoid impression.

I was heartbroken. My book was doomed for obscurity, to be purchased only by family members. (Oh, and also by Bullock's family friend who's never even met me -- I find this utterly charming and a testament to the halo of genuine midwestern niceness that surrounds Bullock and his whole family. But I digress.)

And then I realized something....

This was the *literature* catalog. And my book has a bleepin' HQ number (cultural and social history) even though it's a literature book. *That's* why it's not in there.

This is still a problem, but one that has nothing to do with my press not believing in me, but rather with the Library of Congress catalogers misunderstanding my work or else not bothering to read the introduction and thinking that the first noun in the title was a metaphor rather than the literal subject of the book. See, my book is called something like The Romance of Happiness and Early Modern Scottish Shepherd Society (heh -- that's a funny title), and in the word "Romance" I'm playing with the genre term -- the subject of the book is that genre -- and also its multiple metaphorical meanings. But clearly the cataloger thought the main subject was "Early Modern Scottish Shepherd Society" and the rest of the title was expressive but not substantive. Or rather, that the rest of the title was secondary (despite coming first), since they did manage to put Romance - History and Criticism as the *second* category in the list of standard LOC categories assigned to it. Sigh.

Of course, if I'd published with a smaller press, maybe the editorial side would have communicated to the marketing side that my book belonged in the literature catalog, despite its HQ number.

So, question to the wise and experienced ones out there: should I contact the marketing department at my press to see that my book gets in the Literature catalog next time? Or should I just go on making sure they send it out to the right journals for review and sending it out myself to various book competitions, just to make sure it's getting read by lit people, and hope that word of mouth and citation and review and so forth get it noticed? I also, btw, sent the necessary info and material to the MLA bibliography to make sure it got indexed, which it hadn't so far -- I'm sure, again, because of the HQ number.

Oh, I also have to make sure that our flagship campus buys it, which they haven't done so far, because the Med-Ren center there has a "new acquisitions" section of their newsletter, which I know I always read.

Anything else I could do to get the word out?

I hab a code in my node

Translation: I have a cold in my nose.

I've been sick for a week now*, which partly explains the silence and/or bad writing around these here parts. And the Pastry Pirate may be stopping through tomorrow night on her way to her next adventure. And then on Wednesday, it's dinner with Job Candidate #3 (yeah, we're doing a search and I'm excited -- yeah, new hire!). So forgive me (and don't worry) if nothing new pops up here for a few days.

But then I want to do the "Why Do I Teach ______" meme that New Kid tagged me for, and that was inspired by Dr. Crazy's posting on why she teaches literature. I think I have things to say that haven't already been said, especially since New Kid specifically tagged people who study pre-modern subjects.

OK, now to go give my nasal passages a saline wash. TMI, huh? Sorry.


*Btw, I blame the 2007 Boston Marathon. Until then I got sick maybe once every 2 1/2 years, and then for only a couple of days. But I ran that damn thing with the tail end of a cold, and then came out of it and its freakin' Nor'Easter with a worse sinus infection thing that made my teeth hurt, too. And now I get sick if someone around just says the word "sick," I swear.

Serendipity

I tell students all the time that they can't do a Google search and call it research. They have to use library and academic database resources. I teach them the differences between intranet sources and internet sources. And I teach them that if they do find things on websites, they need to consider who the author is and what their expertise is, whether the product is peer reviewed, and whether it's an academic site. If they can't figure out the answers to those three elements, they can't use the source. And so on and so forth.

That said, sometimes I use Google or another search engine (but usually it's Google) as part of my research. When I'm do, though, it's usually as a supplement to more academic search engines and databases, and it's usually because I'm looking for scholarly websites on a particular subject that might lead me to traditional sources I've missed (if, say, they have a bibliography on their site).

So the other day I decided (on a lark, really) to enter the name of one of the 15th century dudes associated with the manuscript I'm studying and working on. He wasn't the owner, but he witnessed the ownership -- as attested in a statement in the flyleaf of the manuscript. I don't know what I thought I'd find, but I thought I'd try it. One of the things that came up was an abstract for a conference paper I gave, so that didn't get me anywhere. But what also came up was a resource I didn't know existed: British History Online. I really should've asked my historian friends about resources, because knowing about this site would've saved me a lot of time. It has digitized, searchable versions of the Calendar of Letter Books and other records that I'd taken manual notes from some months ago. Cutting and pasting would have been a lot faster, not to mention the fact that I also had to drive to another school's library to use some of these sources because they were non-circulating.

But also, in doing my random Googling -- which, btw, ranked the BHO site first -- and then using the BHO site, I discovered a few more little tidbits about my dude that I hadn't previously found. Nothing earth-shatteringly amazing and nothing that really relates directly to my project in any real substantive way, but I did learn when he died and where he was buried, in the chapel of the Grey Friars. And it turns out that last summer, while walking back from the City to my room in Bloomsbury, I'd taken a picture of the public garden that now stands on the ruins of the Grey Friars and I had pretty much stood on the spot where my guy had been buried (or close, anyway). Again, no real major discoveries, but at least I got a blog post out of it! And I find some sort of charming serendipity in the fact that I took a picture of a rose garden in a ruined chapel just because I thought it was pretty, and it turned out to have a connection to one of the people I was researching. Here's the picture:


I feel like I should write something deep about memory and the aesthetic, or the ghosts of the past that haunt London, or something like that, but I've got a terrible cold and can't think clearly. All I can think about is the various periods of cataclysmic change and destruction this site has experienced, from the Reformation to WWII, and whether or not my guy's bones are still under that concrete or soil (was I standing over him as I took the picture?), or if they relocated the burials at some point in history -- in the Dissolution? After the Great Fire? When Christopher Wren rebuilt the church? After the Blitz? When they planted the garden? This is where Google fails me and it's not worth me tracking down. But the interwebs did serendipitously give new meaning (for me, at least) to my picture of a pretty rose garden.

Virago blogs boots

Update (because I know you're just dying to know): The boots below didn't work out. The toes weren't as rounded as they looked in the pictures (even in the many views Zappos gives you). They were more tapered & rounded, which just made them look too 1980s. And they looked a little too costume-like -- sort of like a very piratical granny boot. Were I my costumey, punk 1987 self I might have fallen head over heels (heh) in love with them. But now...meh. They're going back.


Although one of my intentions in redesigning my blog was to get rid of some of the fluffier stuff, and slowly turn this into an only nominally pseudonymous blog I can be proud of, nevertheless into each life some levity should fall. (Wait, can levity fall?? I think not. Well, whatever -- it's blog for pete's sake.)

Thus, on this holiday Monday (which isn't a holiday for me at all because I teach T/R and therefore have to do the usual stuff...including distracting myself with blogging about boots), I give you the boots I ordered last night from Zappos.com.

I was specifically looking for black boots that would still look interesting even if there were under pants and also pretty damn cool with skirts and cropped pants. And if you look closely, you'll see they have a wing-tip design on the vamp, low enough to show under long pants. And even though Stacy and Clinton are always putting their charges in pointy-toed shoes, I'm addicted to the vintage adorableness of the round toe. And I love the granny-boot-on-steroids quality of these. (They don't really lace -- they zip up -- in case you're concerned about me taking 30 minutes to put on my boots in the morning.)

Now, let's keep our fingers crossed that they fit (or if not, that the next size up does), because it was hard to find a boot that satisfied all my requirements! (Well, there were some $350 ones that also satisfied my needs, but I don't want to spend that much.)

Conference whiplash

OK, so it looks like I'll be going to the Big Single Author Conference in Wales in the summer after all, but the story of how it happened is kind of crazy.

First I was rejected by the panel I applied to and heard about that in the fall. I wasn't too bummed out -- I was in good company and the panel had gotten an extraordinary number of submissions. I didn't have high hopes for getting placed in the general sessions since my paper was particular to that panel's subject and also not directly related to the primary subject of the conference. So I pretty much assumed I wouldn't be going. And about a week ago I got an e-mail confirming this assumption.

So much for that, I thought. At least I wouldn't have to plan a big expensive conference trip.

But wait, there's more! A few days after that final rejection I got another message saying that there was room for my paper after all, along with a few other previously rejected papers. there are 7 of us on this panel, so, we were told, we'd be giving papers of 7-8 minutes. Wow, that's short. But that was OK with me because my project is in such initial stages that 7-8 minutes allows me to present the stuff that I'm most confident about and leave the rest for the Q&A. Although I have to say that going overseas for an 8-minute paper is kind of funny. Of course, a conference is much more than about just giving your paper, and that's one of the main reasons why I wanted to go -- I'm really out of the loop of the current conversations in this area and I'm excited just to hear people present their work and listen to them talk in more informal conversation, as well.

But *now* the organizer is thinking about moving me to yet another panel! Well, at least I know I'm going, so I can put in the application for travel funds and apply for our more competitive international travel award, both of which I'll need. And while I'm over there, I'll probably do some research in London as well. But there's a National Humanities Center Summer Institute that I want to apply for that's two weeks before the conference, so I'm not sure what my summer schedule is going to look like just yet. I should probably start figuring that out now, I guess. I hate always having to have my head in the next segment of the academic calendar just when I'm trying to wrap my head around the current one, but it can't be helped.

Anyway, for those of you making plans for your summers, if you're going to the Welsh conference or going to be in the UK for research, pencil in a blogger meet-up!

PS -- I don't know why I'm being coy about the conference subject and title here, especially since I'm about to make a tag for it!

Still here

Although my last post talked about inspiration, for some reason I haven't felt all that inspired to blog in the last week. Things are kind of busy around here, too -- job candidate visits, a book review that I need to finish (and that's causing me a bit of "imposter syndrom" anxiety), an article due in March that's in progress, and the usual teaching and advising stuff.

In the meantime, you may not have noticed this if you read me in an RSS feeder, but I redesigned the blog over the holidays. I'm still fiddling a little, which you may have noticed by my constantly changing avatar. First it was a South Park style image of me -- or close enough -- that I made some time ago when everyone was doing those things, but never used. But that was just a place holder until I decided which photographic image of myself to use. I settled on a picture that the Pastry Pirate took back in 2004 when we did a week's hiking trip around the Isle of Man. The fact that my back is turned is useful and functional for a pseudonymous blog (although if you know me you'd probably recognize me in an instant, even with my hair in braids -- but that's OK, too), but I also like its somewhat melancholy, wistful, or at least contemplative spirit and its suggestions of journeys, stopping places, horizons, and points of view.

Oh, and if you haven't noticed it, the picture at the bottom of the front page of the blog is one I took in Cumbria in 2004. There was this old stone mill house that had been renovated into a modern home, and in addition to its general coolness, the owner had a great talent for gardening in a limited space. This particular planting was in a hole in the garden wall. I just think it's pretty -- it doesn't really mean anything, except that it's English.

Anyway, I've got some things to post about and will start back up again today.

Inspired

Today while doing the reading for my Chaucer class, I felt inspired not only in my teaching but also in my research (hey, I was "inspired in every holt and heeth," te-hee!).

This might not seem like such a big deal, but it was a really pleasurable experience and a bit surprising, too, especially on the research side of things, since I don't work on Chaucer. Usually when I prepare to teach Chaucer I feel enthusiasm -- because, after all, Chaucer is fantastic fun to teach -- but it's usually not at all connected to my research, which is all focused on a different century. But today I realized that my newest research may have a Chaucer connection, at least in an abstract way. And that's exciting to me because until now I've always felt like I didn't have anything new to say about Chaucer, and the idea of wading into the Chaucer conversation was awfully daunting. But now, maybe I do have something say, and maybe, just maybe, I'll finally have a reason to go to an New Chaucer Society conference!

And then, on the teaching side of things, I realized I was thinking about the material in a new way, writing out approaches and discussion questions I'd never thought of before. (I'm sure *someone* has, but they were new to me.) And this was pleasurable, too, because it meant that I wasn't forming any pedagogical or intellectual ruts. In fact, the things I was thinking were somewhat new approaches for me in general, and it made me happy to realize I myself am still learning about these texts.

See, it's moments like these that make me remember what's so cool about being a professor.

A world turned upside-down?

I have 40 students between Chaucer and Middle English, pretty evenly distributed between the two classes.

Bullock has 27 between his two classes in subjects you might describe as "Life! Liberty! The Pursuit of Happiness!" And "American Issues that Really Matter RIGHT NOW!"

While I want Bullock's enrollments to be better because a) I love him, b) he's a great teacher, and c) his subjects ARE pretty important in an "every American should know this" kind of way, especially in an election year, still, I can't help but say...

Score one for the medievalist!

But to console Bullock, I offer him this song and cartoon about his favorite meat, pork. Actually, you should all go watch this video -- it's hilarious. Warning for the squeamish (or in Karl's case, a heads up): it features porcine cannibalism. (H/T Profgrrrrl.)

*facepalm*

Yesterday I copied all the syllabuses and assignment handouts for my Chaucer class. And just as I was putting the last stapled bunch of handouts on the pile, I noticed a glaring typo at the very top of the page, in the header, in bold for pete's sake.

D'oh!

This is what I get for being a medievalist who turns off her spell-check function (lest her spell-check lose its mind from all the Middle English).

Teaching by the seat of my pants

This semester (which, uh, starts Monday, God help me), I'm completely redesigning one of my courses. In fact, I'm still doing it right now. (Yup, still working on syllabuses; haven't photocopied anything yet.) And I don't mean I'm assigning slightly different texts or doing different assignments -- which is what I'm doing in my other class -- but I mean re-conceiving its form and content in such major ways that I'm even (gulp) tossing out the textbooks I've used and designing the content through handouts, reserve reading, and web sites. About half of the semester is going to consist of me coming in with lecture notes and handouts, with them having done maybe some background or introductory reading, but nothing else. Given that I'm a literature person, this is not usually how my courses go. Usually the class is about a text and it's the center of attention -- I'm there to teach students how to read it more deeply. But this is one of my historical linguistics courses, and this time I'm going to be the "content delivery method" myself. Scary.

And even scarier is the fact that I'm really not sure what I'm going to be doing every day. Some of this I'll be doing as the semester progresses. It's not the ideal way to go about things, but I was so busy planning ahead the new assignment sequence in the other class that I've only been able to sketch out this one. I have notes to myself for some days that say things like: "Bring in an interesting text." Yikes.

But the thing is, I think sometimes when I teach like this I'm a more lively, exciting teacher, because my adrenaline is pumping and the material is about as fresh as it can be. It keeps me from merely looking over old material rather than really preparing it. So actually, in a perverse way, I'm looking forward to this!

Here's hoping I can pull it off.

Get ready for National Trivia Day!

For those of you who, like me, have self-diagnosed as having Trivia Tourette's, have I got a holiday for you! Tomorrow is is National Trivia Day! As the writers of the Bizarre American Holidays blog say:

National Trivia Day is a day to annoy your friends and enemies with all manner of trivia. One good piece of trivia to know is the fact that [Jan. 4] is National Trivia Day!

******
And on an unrelated, and totally trivial, note, how does the Bizarre American Holidays blog's advertising widgit know to advertise Wilco CDs and the Garmin Forerunner 305 to me? That's really creepy.

"Intense but delightful" (on the conversational modes of academics and philosophies for the new year)

The phrase in my post title describes my experience of 2007, which seems to have gone by in a bigger blur of business than most years. I'm hoping 2008 will be a little less intense and a little more delightful.

But the phrase was also used to describe *me*, by the Pastry Pirate's friend Shorewoodian, who, like me, attended the Pirate's graduation from Cookin' School and was pretty much forced to spend about 36 hours in my company. Ever since the Pirate told me this is how Shorewoodian described me I've been mulling over the "intense" part. Was it good or bad? Was it a euphemism for "thinks too much?" (something a stupid boyfriend once said about me)? Was it because I pretty much came to the land of Robber Baron mansions directly from grading graduate student critical histories of canonical works of literature, and so had the weight of so many misunderstood literary scholars on my shoulders and felt the need to make our kind understood at all costs? Or was it simply because I was still in a "teacherly" mode and hadn't had the time and space to decompress before being social?

So I asked Bullock what he thought it meant since he thought it was a pretty good description of me, though he insists I'm more parts "delightful" than "intense." But to explain his explanation, I have to give you a back story first.

Background: I have a little-known and yet-to-be-diagnosed problem that Bullock and I have dubbed "Trivia Tourette's." (I think Bullock coined the phrase, but I can't remember now.) Bullock has recognized this problem before, but I only became self-aware after a conference a few months ago at Neighboring Flagship U. There, in the midst of scholars of medieval literature whose work I respect and whom I desperately wanted to impress, I kept randomly spouting bizarre and thoroughly uninteresting trivia at intervals throughout the day. Someone said, "You can't drink too much water," and I felt a compulsion to reply, "Actually you can, at least if you're also sweating profusely. It's called hyponatremia and it's more life-threatening than dehydration!" Later, someone remarked to me that they didn't realize Rust Belt was so close to Flagship Town, and I burst out with, "In fact, it was originally part of Neighboring State, and Flagship U was even slated to be in our downtown, but there was a war -- a skirmish really -- and Neighboring State lost its claim to Rust Belt's part of our state." Why, oh why, do I do this? Given that every time it happens there's a voice in the back of my head saying, "Oh god, please stop!" I can only chalk it up to unconscious compulsion.

So, back to "intense but delightful." Bullock said that when I exhibit "Trivia Tourette's" around academics, the tidbits I burst out with do seem trivial, or at least something akin to footnotes, the function of which academics understand. And so it goes little noticed, easily incorporated into academic ways of thinking and organizing information, including conversations. For academics, it's small talk, trivial.

But, according to Bullock, when I do it with non-academics, as I did at the Cookin' School graduation -- spouting off, among other things, about strong and weak verbs, semantic splitting, and why there's a "hung" and "hanged" but "hanged" is generally only used for people who have been hanged on the gallows (there was a context that inspired this outburst) -- it doesn't seem trivial or footnote-y. Instead it seems professorial, the kind of stuff "regular" people don't think about. Indeed, "regular" people don't think in footnotes at all! To them it's not small talk -- it's deep or serious or "intense." It's classroom talk. (Actually, the Pastry Pirate encouraged me in these moments -- egged me on even -- so obviously, there's a non-academic audience for the footnotes of academe. But that doesn't discount Bullock's analysis of its different perception by non-academics.) And so, as classroom talk, it's perceived as belonging to a different order of conversation and thought. It's not ordinary. It's "intense."

I think the distinction of "classroom talk" is important here. When other professionals do the kind of talking and thinking the kind of thinking that's specific to their profession -- say, for example, when the Cookin' School graduates and their foodie family members rattled off the temperatures at which sugar becomes "soft ball" or "hard crack," etc., or debated how much added value a particular sushi chef brings to a piece of sashimi -- it's considered shop talk. And it can be inviting or off-putting to the extent that it includes or excludes others at the table or the party or whatever. Too specialized and it leaves others out, but it can involve the non-specialists to the extent they have experience with the profession. It can be fascinating and illuminating to hear what goes on in the kitchen of fine restaurants, or to hear how doctors think when they're diagnosing, or to understand what a lawyer considers a good or bad witness and why. Indeed, there's a reason why we have TV shows -- sometimes many of them -- about these professions, among others. There's also probably a reason -- for good or for ill -- why we don't have TV shows about professors, and why popular culture often gets our profession so wrong. (There have been many more TV shows about high schools, including ones with a focus on the classroom, so this isn't just about the classroom in general.) And I think one of the reasons -- perhaps among many -- is related to the perception of professorial talk as "intense." Our talk isn't perceived as mere shop talk -- although we may perceive it as such -- but as something other, something extraordinary, for better or worse.

I'm of two minds about what this all means. On the one hand, I would like to go forth in 2008 and work harder to encourage my students to continue the way I teach them to think and to write not only in other classes, but outside of the classroom as well. I'd like to convince them that to think about language, literature, and culture "intensely" can also be "delightful" and can be a habit carried through the rest of their lives, one that transforms the way they see the world. In other words, I'd like to break through that mindset that sees classroom talk as fit only for the classroom and as (too) intense for other situations. I'd like to break down the boundary between the classroom and the rest of their lives, and to help students see what's studied in the classroom, and the way it's studied -- even if it's literature of the very distant past read through the lens of specialized languages of literary interpretation and theory -- does not necessarily have to be limited to the classroom. My own college education did that for me -- I was "intense" and professorial before I was an academic -- but I'm not sure my own students realize that their educations can and should do the same for them.

On the other hand, I think the reason why people such as my own university's president can be so dismissive of the humanities and the people who work in it, is precisely because we've done a good job, at least among certain populations, of making people realize you can continue to read and think about humanities subjects and with humanities methods beyond the college classroom walls. And thus we give the illusion that anyone can do what we do once they've learned to do it in college. And that's problematic for the respect that the humanities and humanists get not only in the general population, but in our own institutions.

I think for my own solution to this either/or conundrum, I'm going to work harder to make my classroom, my subject, and myself -- and a professor and a person -- not "intense but delightful," but instead, "intense and delightful." After all, intensity is all about deeper pleasures, fuller flavors, more saturated colors, more memorable moments, and more thrilling experiences. And intensity of thought and study should therefore bring greater intellectual pleasure, in the classroom and beyond.

Another med-ren manuscript web resource

Many of you probably already know about this, but I was just cleaning out my file of stuff from 2007's Kalamazoo conference (yeah, OK, I've been a little disorganized this year), and I ran across a flyer for The Free Library of Philadelphia's Digital Collection of Medieval and Renaissance Manuscripts. The home page is here.

I don't know their collection well, but the highlights page is mostly religious and very high-end courtly works, all with illuminations, of course. (That's a topic for a post in and of itself -- the digital bias towards pretty pictures.) But what I found immediately useful was the one-page "Manuscript Basics" introduction -- good for giving students a quickie overview of how a manuscript was made (although, again, with an emphasis on religious texts).

Just thought I'd pass on the info.

Via Chicago

I'm coming home, I'm coming home, via Chicago.*

Actually, I'm already home, but I did get here via Chicago, after a whirlwind tour that took me from Rust Belt on December 19th to the land of Robber Baron mansions for the Pastry Pirate's graduation from cookin' school (detailed here, complete with pictures from my camera) and lots of fine dining, to Cowtown for a few days including Christmas Eve (which in the Virago family is the traditional time of present-opening), then to Chicago's suburbs on Christmas day to meet up with Bullock and his family, and then into the city on the 27th by way of O'Hare to pick up my bestest grad school friend D. and to eat at Frontera Grill and catch up for a few hours before heading off for the fabulous MLA blogger meet-up (thanks Dr. Crazy for organizing it!), and then back to Rust Belt the next day -- whew! (Yes, that was all one sentence. That's how it felt to me, too.)

I am exhausted. I'm also way behind on all things bloggy -- indeed, Dr. Crazy chastised me for falling down on the blogging job! Ack! -- as I had internet access only once in those 10 days, and that was on Christmas day in the Cowtown airport. I purposely got there early to use the free wifi and check my e-mail (how sad am I?) but didn't have time to blog or read blogs.

But one of my goals for the coming semester is to better organize my time, or at the very least to take control of it a little bit, and to build in more time for blogging (including reading yours). I'm going to do a little blog maintenance and get rid of some of the sillier posts from the early days, and then in a few days I'll start back in with some quality posts, which have been sorely lacking around here lately.

Our semester starts up pretty quickly and already I feel busy, so I might not be the most prolific poster, but I'm going to make my posts count more (I hope, anyway). This is all in a lead-up to my plan to move from a pseudonymous blog to a persona-based blog (where my real life identity will be known, but "Dr. Virago" will still be the author of the blog) after my tenure process is complete. (Quick update on that: all that's left in the process are the approvals of the Provost, President, and Trustees, and around here that's really just a rubber-stamp process. Knock wood, of course.) But for the rest of today all I'm doing is unpacking, straightening up for our New Year's party, and playing with my Garmin Forerunner 305 GPS-enabled trainer and heart-rate monitor (my Xmas present from Bullock) and going for a run to try it out.



*For those of you who don't get the reference, the buildings in the picture are featured on the cover of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot (as seen here), and "Via Chicago" is a song on their earlier album Summerteeth.

Teaching the critical history essay

I'm in the midst of grading the last batch of my graduate students' critical history papers from my research methods class. Given that it's 4pm and I'm leaving the house in just over 12 hours to catch an early morning flight to go to the Pastry Pirate's graduation, and I still have half a dozen things to do before I leave, including grading the last 3 papers, I really shouldn't be blogging. But the following just occurred to me and I kind of wanted to throw it out there before I forget.

Anyway, one of the recurring problems of many of these papers -- whether they're otherwise well-researched or well-written or not -- is that the writers don't do a very good job of summarizing the critics' arguments. They have a tendency to tell me the topic of an article, book, or chapter without really telling me the argument of said work. They'll even say critics X and Y address the same general topic without giving me any idea if X and Y agree with each other in their assessment or interpretation of the topic. And some of the more problematic essays don't even quite make clear what the general subject of a critical work is because they're too busy identifying a theme in the primary text and lining up a critical work that seems to address that theme. So they're putting their reading of the primary work -- usually a somewhat hazy one -- first and slotting in the criticism.

And therein lies the problem. They don't quite realize what it means to write a critical history and that's my fault. We talked all semester about entering the critical conversation, of "listening" to it for awhile before offering your own contributions. And we dissected the structure, form, and rhetorical moves of a number of journal articles. And I told them where to find models of a critical history and wrote detailed directions of what they needed to be doing in this paper, making it clear that it was summary and synthesis, but that they were the shaping force of it. *But*, I didn't explain to them what a history was. I didn't make clear that they needed to shape a narrative from the critical sources, that they were telling a story of the conversation thus far. I didn't explain that while obviously the primary text was the driving force behind what critics wrote, nevertheless the driving force behind what the students wrote would be the criticism, that that was their subject, that that was what a reader of a critical history wanted most to know about. I assumed it was obvious, but it isn't, so many of the students are falling back on what they're usually asked to do in a research paper, or the methods they've usually fallen back on -- i.e., the 'tell me about X subject in Y work of literature with research' paper. They're also ignoring the connections between the arguments; no one, not even the best students, are addressing X's influence on Y. I'm not even sure they're noticing where critics are in each others bibliographies, even though I did teach them that following bibliographies is one of the ways to tell if a critical work is being cited over and over, or to find works that imperfect electronic searches have missed.

Part of the problem is that I didn't use the term "critical history." I came up with something else that I thought would be less intimidating -- bibliographic essay -- and I did so also because I'm not expecting them to be comprehensive (I asked them to look for major trends in the criticism). But mainly I need to be more explicit about how to go about this kind of writing. I have to tell them that they must digest and explain the main argument(s) of each work they address. I have to tell them that they need to be aware of influence and argument -- that they need to look to footnotes and bibliographies for the players in the larger conversation. And that, above all, *they* are telling a history, that their major task is to interpret the interpretors and present them for their audience.

Next time I'll do this and see if the results improve. In the meantime, I'll go easy on the grades, but make some of these things clear in the comments.

Job alert: Asst. Prof. in Medieval British Literature at UM-Flint

To all of you medievalists in English on the market this year, I just got a flyer for a job at University of Michigan-Flint that may not have made it into the JIL yet. I'd like to think that my getting this flyer means that I've been invited to apply for a job, but really, I think they probably sent flyers to every medievalist in English in the Great Lakes region in the MLA directory because they're not interviewing at MLA they're trying to spread the word about a late advertisement and an extended deadline. So I'm doing my part for a fellow Great Lakes region branch campus.

If you want all the details, the Michigan system has a job posting website here. Once you're there, you can search as a "guest" without registering -- click on the "external candidates and temporary staff job search" link and the "visit as a guest" button. Search for Job ID 13109.

It looks like a good job: 3-3 load, all literature and mostly medieval, with opportunities to develop medieval literature courses for their new MA program. The online ad says the deadline is today, but the flyer I got shows January 18, 2008 as the deadline, and says on-campus interviews will be conducted in February (no MLA interviews).

Anyway, just wanted to spread the word.

RBOC: Things that make me wanna go "Er. Um. No."

The following list of bullet points are paraphrases of things students of various levels -- undergrad to grad -- have said, asked, or told me about in the past two weeks. I offer them mostly without comment, although "Er. Um. No." serves as a fine blanket response to them all despite their very different characters.

• I'm surprised your Chaucer class is an undergraduate class. Isn't Chaucer too advanced for undergrads?
• I'm graduating next semester and I need a certain required course that's slightly related to the class you're teaching. Only I can't make that class because of other commitments. And I can't make yours, either. Can I sign up for yours and do the work on my own without having to come to class? And then will you sign off on my having completed the required course?
• Hi, are you [insert mispronunciation of my first name]? I'm in Interdisciplinary Grad Program. I need to sign up for thesis credit. Please sign this form so I can enroll in English department thesis credits. [Long, painful interval follows in which Dr. Virago explains over and over that our thesis hours are for our students and I'm certain her program has its own, all while student interrupts again and again to insist that I'm wrong.] But I *am* one of your students -- my thesis is on [insert vaguely literature oriented topic]. [Another long interval of Dr. Virago explaining what a degree program is and how interdisciplinary programs draw on faculty from other departments, but have different degree programs of their own.] But my advisor said I could sign up for hours in any department I wanted!
• I missed the workshop you did the other week, but do you have any handouts on a totally unrelated topic that I could have?
• I know the assignment for our research methods final paper was a critical history of one of the texts on the exam list, but I was wondering, could I just write about how I think one of the most prominent critic approaches to this text is completely wrong?
• My high school teacher said that she wasn't going to teach Beowulf, even though it was in the textbook, because we wouldn't need it, since no one reads it in college, not even English majors, except for a few who are going to grad school in English. Can you believe that?
• Is 7 pages long enough for a critical history of the last 30 years of scholarship on a major text?
• I just realized our final is on Friday of finals week. I was hoping to leave for home on Thursday. Can I reschedule?
  

Move over Cranky Professor, because I may joining your cranky ranks! I am so glad the semester is almost over. Two more days to go and then the grading commences . Then after that I can refuel for the onslaught of next semester which begins a cruel three and half weeks from now.

Insomnia + blog meme = 7 random things

I'm definitely going to have to take an Ambien tonight because it's 11 p.m. and I feel like it's about 7 p.m. But first, before I make offerings to Morpheus, Dance has tagged me for a meme. If I do it right away, I won't let it slip like I generally do all other memes.

So, forthwith, here are 7 strange and random things about me. (Note: I think that's "random" in the colloquial sense -- seemingly unrelated, perhaps quirky -- and not in the technical sense, because if I'm deliberating coming up with these things they're not random, right?)

1. I freak out when any TV show, book, or movie mentions internal bleeding or organ failure. Since I like police procedurals, this happens more often that you'd think.

2. I remember the very first moment I consciously realized what emotional intimacy was outside of a family relationship. (Or maybe it's just the first moment I remember.) I was in 2nd grade and playing with my friend Teresa. She was showing me something to do with one of her dolls or stuffed animals that only she knew -- some bald patch in its hair or something like that -- and I was suddenly struck with a sense of the two us being alone in the world, but connected. I don't remember the external details very clearly, but I remember the feeling of warmth.

3. I can't say the word "breadth" right. I can't make it sound different from "breath."

4. I have been flirted with by an orangutan named Bruno.

5. I once briefly had a crush on a friar named Brother Mike. (Hey, he was smart and funny and not at all like the butt of medieval anti-fraternal satire.)

6. I sometimes play Scrabble by myself; it's a habit picked up from my mother. [Updated to add: Not the online kind, but the old fashioned three-dimension kind with the wooden letters.]

7. I love the logic games on the GRE.

The rules of the meme:
1. Link to the person that tagged you and post the rules on your blog.
2. Share 7 random and/or weird things about yourself.
3. Tag 7 random people at the end of your post and include links to their blogs.
4. Let each person know that they have been tagged by leaving a comment on their blog.

OK, I'm going to break rules 3-4 and just say that if you haven't done this meme yet (and I know many of you have at one time or another) and you want to, consider yourself tagged.

Dr. Virago: superhero, spiritual advisor, and therapist. Only not.

So Sisyphus has a post in which she worries about the job market and then distracts herself with the bizarre search strings that bring people to her blog. As you all know, "Beowulf nudity" (or its variant, "naked Beowulf") is a recently popular draw to chez Virago these days because of this post. But I bet you don't know the top three search strings that regularly bring random visitors to these here parts on a regular basis. These are the searches that show up multiple times every time I check the "referral pages" section of my SiteMeter stats. Seriously, these hits won't go away.

They are:

3) What's my superhero name? That one gives you this post as the very first hit. (OK, I was new to blogging and still amused by silly quiz things.)

2) Then there's this search string: I think I'm depressed. I'm the third hit for that one. It just makes me even more depressed that people are searching the web for advice about depression and coming to my fraking blog for advice. Man. On the bright side, I haven't felt what I described in that post in a long time.

And finally, the top search string:

1) In nomine patris et filii et spiritus sancti. That one puts my post on the Latin mass as the second hit and is the single most common way random visitors come to my blog. Kinda ironic for an agnostic chick who's only barely culturally Catholic anymore.

Seriously, these search strings are regular appearances. Yeah, I get the ones from people clearly writing papers on various medieval literature that I've talked about here, but none of them are as common as these. Weird, huh?

So *this* is what being a professor is like

I've mentioned before that I'm editing a couple of texts for inclusion in an anthology of literature. And I've mentioned that I've had fun doing it over the course of the semester, and that I've even discovered things about the texts I hadn't noticed and that I can use in the classroom. So all in all it's been a good experience. This is also one of those tasks where all those years in graduate school and one's expertise in a particular area really matter, and where research and teaching are connected. I was asked to do this job because I've written a book on the texts I'm editing, and the anthology is a traditional, undergraduate-driven anthology of literature, so my expertise is being used in service of student learning. Unfortunately, at a lot of places editions don't get one as much credit as original scholarly work does under the "professional activity" column of merit and promotion; but at my school it counts for something at least. And it's also the first time I've ever been paid something other than my base salary for my work, so that definitely counts for something.

But that general sketch of what this project is for and what it gets me is not what my post title is about. No, what that title refers to is the part of the task I'm working on right now. I've finished the glossing and footnoting and I've finished writing and revising the introduction. Now I'm doing something that I should've done while I was working on other elements, but which somehow slipped my notice in the directions for formatting my submission. Since this is a late medieval text, it's being presented somewhat in its original language, but the editors of this anthology have asked for modernized spelling, punctuation, and capitalization, where possible -- in the mode of what we do to Shakespeare when he's edited for students. And so I have to mark all the words that I've changed from the original. I have to highlight them on the photocopy of my base text, the scholarly edition, and bold them in my copy.

So right now here's what I'm doing: I'm clicking on words and making them bold. One after another, through 600 lines of text. God, I'm so bored. Yup, this is why I spent 8 years getting a Ph.D.

*headdesk*

If the DVR says so, it must be true

Last night the DVR schedule showed the following information for BBCAmerica on Tuesday, December 11:

8pm (EST) Life on Mars, New
9pm (EST) Life on Mars, New


Still no description of the episodes, but...YAY!!

I know none of you are as excited about this as I am, but...

...it seems that the BBC show "Life on Mars" is *finally* returning to BBC America for its second and final season on December 11 (about 8 months after it finished airing in the U.K.).

I want to jump up and down and say "woo hoo!" and urge you all to watch while American shows are on strike (and before the sure-t0-be-not-as-great David E. Kelley American version of the show finally makes its debut), but I'm skeptical, in part because it was hard to find this information. But in case it's right, do set your DVRs or mark your calendars if you have BBC America and you're at all interested in shows smart about class, gender, and genre.

The Dec. 11 debut of season 2 is what all the newsgroups and tv blogs are showing. And there's an "Life on Mars: Episode 1" and an "Episode 2" listed on the BBC America schedule on Tuesday, Dec. 11, at 8pm and 9pm. I doubt they'd give over weekday prime time slots to reruns of the first season, right? But the weird thing is I haven't seen any advertisement of the show during "Torchwood" (the other BBC show we're watching right now on BBC America) and the BBC America website doesn't say *anything* to announce the upcoming season (though granted, that website *stinks*).

I really really hope the blogs and newsgroups are right. Not only do I love show; not only am I dying to see the resolution; but it's also nearly impossible to avoid spoilers when you're googling to find out air dates, given that the show ended in the U.K. in April! Argh!

So, dear BBC America, *please* tell me for sure that Season 2 is starting on Dec. 11. Run some ads! Update your web site (and hire more people to keep it up to date)! Do *something*!

And PS -- Speaking of "Torchwood," man is that show dark and, frequently, depressing. And yet I can't get enough of it. I was late to the whole new "Doctor Who" phenom, in part because I'd never watched the original shows and didn't have nostalgia to draw me in (and I'm not a natural sci-fi fan, actually -- crime is my preferred genre, so I come to sci-fi by way of crossover genres like "The X-Files") but Bullock finally got me hooked (I still have to catch up with the Christopher Eccleston episodes) and now I'm hooked on "Torchwood," too.

Thank you, Pastry Pirate

Not too long ago we thought Thanksgiving at Chez Bullock and Virago would include not only Bullock's family but also my sister Virgo Sis, which posed quite the culinary conundrum for us, since Bullock's sister is a vegan, her daughter is vegetarian, and Virgo Sis has celiac disease, which means she can't eat any gluten (the protein in wheat and barley). Add to that the complication that Bullock really, really likes to bake pies and cakes and, given his druthers, not only uses animal by-products in all his baking (eggs, butter), but also uses lard in his pie crusts. So as far as he was concerned, a gluten-free/vegan desert wasn't possible.

So the Pastry Pirate took pity on us and adopted our needs as her project in her advanced-special-dietary-needs-complicated-high-maintenance-baking class and developed a gluten-free, vegan devil's food cake good enough for a dessert purist like Bullock and sent us the recipe, modified for a home baker and the non-commercial kitchen. Wasn't that cool of her?

The result was really quite yummy -- no surprise there since she got a grade that was mere decimal points away from perfect. (I'm still wondering what lost her the less than 7/10 of a point. And my students think *I'm* an anal-retentive grader!) In the end Virgo Sis decided to visit Cowtown for the holiday instead of Rust Belt, so we didn't need a dessert that was both gluten-free and vegan, and since the Pirate gave us specific instructions of how to do a merely vegan one, that's what we did. It saved us some time scouring the local health food stores for the multiple flour-substitutes we would've had to use, and saved time in the kitchen, too. So we don't know what the full gluten-free/vegan effect was. But I have to say, in the midst of the process we were kind of skeptical of even the merely vegan cake -- in part because we thought maybe our home equipment, despite Bullock's tool addiction, wasn't producing the desired effects, but also in part because a lot of the ingredients and techniques went against Bullock's ingrained habits and experiences. The soy-based products used in it smelled kind of nasty, the flax-seed paste looked like snot (as the Pirate had warned), and the cake batter was a rather Halloween-like pitch black. It reminded me of the black gook that turns into the black Spiderman suit in Spiderman 3. Frankly, it freaked me out.

But the whole ultimately added up to more than the sum of its weird parts and the final creation was full of chocolately goodness and traditional cake consistency. And it was a big hit not only with Vegan Sis and Veggie Niece, but also the non-vegan/non-vegetarian crowd, so much so that Bullock didn't even send all the leftovers home with his sister, but kept some for us.

So thanks, Pastry Pirate!

And happy Thanksgiving Recovery Weekend to everyone!

Last word on Beowulf

One of my students forwarded me the link to this article in Salon by Gary Kamiya, in which the author laments the failure of tone and spirit of the Beowulf movie by comparing it to Beowulf-scholar J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Peter Jackson's movie adaptation of that text. So far this is the best analysis I've seen of why Beowulf the movie was so disheartening for those of us who love the poem; and it's a wonderful antidote to all those annoying reviews, good or bad, that start with a reference to "the poem you were forced to read in high school" or "the poem you hated in high school." Here's a sample:

"Beowulf" doesn't fail because it changes the story: It fails because it is so busy juicing up the story that it does not create a mythical universe. It has no transfiguring vision. It seizes upon an ancient tale, whose invisible roots run deep into our psyches, and uses it to construct a shiny, plastic entertainment. It takes a wild fable and turns it into a tame story. But "Beowulf" is the kind of story that is meaningless unless it is part of a cosmology. It is, in short, a myth.

Thank you, Mr. Kamiya, for an elegant and thoughtful article.

I've been reprinted!!!!!!!

I just found out, via a Google search of the name under which I publish, that one of my first two articles has just been reprinted! It's appearing in a multi-volume set that's part of a series on critical approaches to literature and cultural studies from an established academic press. The set that my article appears in is devoted to the particular genre that my first book and those early articles addressed. I'm in a chapter called "Critical Paths for Understanding [fill in the specific genre here]."

Woo-hoo! My work is a "critical path"! I've been reprinted! My name will live on! I AM BEOWULF!...er, sorry, got over-excited there for a moment. And OMG, you should see the list of names whose company I keep. OK, if you know what genre my first book addresses, think of every famous scholar ever to have written on the subject. Yup, they're all there. And so am I!

Weeeeeee!

Here's the weird post-script: I found this book, with its table of contents, on a Japanese web site. Using the ISBN, I also found it in Amazon, but I can't find it on the publisher's site. Huh. That's weird. Oh, and for those of you who might be wondering how my work can be reprinted without my knowing it: I don't own the copyright to that article; the journal where it original appeared does. Still, they could've e-mailed me, for pete's sake. I would've put the info in my tenure file! Well, that seems to be going well without it, so I'll save it for when I go up for Full Professor.

More on Beowulf

If you want a less idiosyncratic review than mine, and one from an actual Anglo-Saxonist who likes comics, video games, and other genres of pop culture that I'm less versed in, but who still didn't like Beowulf the movie, go read Dr. Nokes' review. He also has a round-up of other medievalists' reviews here.

Updated to add: I hadn't checked my Sitemeter stats in some time and decided to check just now. Turns out I've gotten twice the normal number of hits in the last two days and all the new hits have to do with Beowulf, of course. But what's really funny is that majority of the hits are from search engine searches for the following: "Beowulf nudity." On Google, my Naked Beowulf? WTF? entry is the fourth hit for that search. So, to all of you searching "Beowulf nudity" who want to know why Beowulf is naked in the fight with Grendel and if that's really "in the poem," as Roger Avary claims, my post probably addressed your needs, right? But if you were looking to ogle either Ray Winstone or Angelina Jolie, I apologize for delaying your gratification. That is all.

A diminished Beowulf, a shrinking Grendel, a wussy Wealhtheow, and Grendel's MILF

(Credit to Richard Scott Nokes for coining "Grendel's MILF.")

I hoped to have a hilariously good time seeing Beowulf with my students. I hoped that the movie would be of the so-bad-it's-good ilk. Unfortunately it was more painful than that, and not because it was so terribly bad, but because there were moments that were smart and interesting and effective, but they were buried in a mess of a movie. And even in the mess, I could see some of the seemingly odder choices were still informed choices -- they were attempts at doing something based on interpretation rather than the literal elements of the poem -- but in going so wrong, those choices were all the more disappointing. The movie reminded me of a smart student's B- paper. You know the type: the paper that has these wonderful moments of insight that show so much promise, but they're buried in a sloppy disaster of disorganization, hastiness, illogic, and misreading.

It's clear that Gaiman and Avary have taken the question about the interpretation of last word of the poem -- lofgeornost, "most eager for fame" -- and applied it to their characterization of Beowulf throughout. Fine. But in doing so they've also decided to ignore the other three descriptors applied to Beowulf in the last lines of the poem: manna mildust (mildest of men), monthwaerust (most gentle), and leodum lithost (kindest to his people). Gaiman and Avary's Beowulf is an asshole. He's a lying, cheating SOB who strangely likes to get naked in the dead of Danish winter (all the better to show off his six pack abs). He's also not all that impressive of a fighter. In the poem he has the strength of 30 men in his arms, and he kills Grendel by acting like a human bear trap -- clasping the monster's arm and holding him there until the frantic creature yanks his own arm off just to get away. But in the movie, Beowulf first figures out a way to make Grendel shrink to regular man size (don't ask me -- it's one of those moments in the film where I think the creators went on the "wouldn't it look cool if..." principle -- a principle operating way too often in this movie). Then he needs a combination of 2-3 simple machines to rip Grendel's arm off: a pulley-wench combo and Heorot's door used as a lever (or really, a slicing-mashing machine -- a bit more Ronco than simple machine, I guess). And then he squeals like a kid when the severed arm exhibits postmortem movement. This is also the part, shown in the commercials, where Beowulf screams the non-poetic lines, "I am ripper, thrasher, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, I am Beowulf!" The description really applies more to the door he's using.

All through the movie, especially every time Beowulf announced his own name, I thought, "I know Beowulf, and you sir, are no Beowulf." And frankly, I kept waiting for Gaiman and Avary to *really* change the plot and kill the guy off, because he was annoying me so much. A hero -- as he is called over and over in the movie (though I think they were going for some ironic ring there; it really wasn't clear) -- or even an antihero should be, above all, cool. I don't mean hip or with-it. I mean cool. Steve McQueen cool. The movie Beowulf is anything but.

Wherever the movie goes wrong it's in capturing the spirit and tone of the poem and its people. And sadly, they pretty much go wrong with just about every character, whether you're looking at it as an adaptation of the poem or just as a movie in its own right. I had a hard time figuring out why I should care about any of these people, and only once did I feel a sense of great loss -- the famously elegiac tone of the poem -- and that was when Grendel's Mother mourns for her dead son. That was one of the smart moments I mentioned above, because the poem only subtly suggests that the mother's attack on Heorot has a motivation of grief and loss and not simply monstrous revenge -- it takes a careful reader to see that -- and it's reflective of the blood feuds the humans of the poem are constantly engaged in. It's one of the ways that the poem subtly critiques the vengeful behavior of the humans, by equating it with a creature they call a monster. But that point is lost in the movie, since the plot is stripped of human feuding. (To be fair, Gaiman and Avary tried to do something with the "monster within" idea through the plot -- which I won't reveal here -- but again, they get it so tonally wrong that I wasn't moved by it, intellectually or emotionally.)

And in stripping the human feud stories -- many of them frequently referred to as "digressions" -- they also remove a number of the women characters and their stories, including Hildeburh, Frearwaru (Hrothgar in the movie has no children -- a point that's necessary for Gaiman's and Avary's re-conceived plot), and Modthryth. And since Beowulf doesn't go back to Geatland in the movie, there's no Hygd, either. Wealhtheow and Grendel's Mother are the only female characters from the poem to make it to the movie, and then a bevy of serving wenches are added for background and cleavage in Heorot, and a young hottie love interest/damsel in distress, cutely named "Ursula," is tacked on at the end. (I find it amusing, by the way, that most of the screenwriters' changes to the plot, including keeping Unferth around and introducing Wiglaf from the beginning, seemed inspired by a desire for continuity and structural unity, and yet when it comes to hot babes, it's OK to introduce one in the last act.)

But my beef is not with the lack of roles for women in Hollywood, nor is it a simplistic "images of women" critique. Rather, the changes to the women characters is one of the many ways in which Gaimand and Avary get tone and character wrong, and apply a frat-boy sensibility to the story, both as an adaptation of the poem and in the logic of their own movie on its own. Wealhtheow, Hrothgar's queen, is the first woman we meet in the movie, as in the poem. In the poem, she makes her entrance ceremonially presenting the mead cup to the king and to his guests, but not in an act of servitude; she's not Wealhtheow the waitress. My students often make this mistake, and so I turn their attention to the words that describe her: she is radiant with gold (a sign of her status and wealth), wise, mindful of customs, of excellent heart. She also speaks to Beowulf as Hrothgar does, thanking him for the service he is about to perform for their people. Later, it is her ceremonial place to lavish gifts of reward on Beowulf for saving Heorot. In other words, Wealhtheow is queenly -- a regal, dignified woman of status. Later she speaks on behalf of her sons, reminding both Hrothgar and Beowulf of their duties to them, and of the political and social ties that bind them. There's a sense of futility in that wise advice, however, since the poem hints at the destruction to come in the house of Hrothgar, including the loss of its heirs. The one other hint that Wealhtheow's life is not all that glamorous is in her name, which may mean "foreign captive." The poem certainly gives us other stories of women married off to foreigners to settle feuds, and that may have been Wealhtheow's fate. Such suggestions of what has been lost and what will be lost only makes her dignity, her "mindful[ness] of customs," all the more poignant.

Not so in the movie. She has no dignity, nor respect from any of the men. She is in turns ignored, treated a servant -- and here the cup-bearing is servile -- and ogled. She reacts petulantly, with many sighs and eye-rolling. But she suffers in silence. This Wealhtheow has no regal speeches, and her radiance exists not as a sign of her status, but as a reward for the gaze of the men in the narrative and the audience. (And the other servile women with their Ren Fest wench cleavage even more so.) I think Gaiman, Avary, and Zemeckis are tying to say, "look how badly women are treated -- don't you feel sorry for them?" But all I felt was bored by yet another cliched version of domestic drudgery. And in knowing the poem I knew all the ways in which Wealhtheow was being diminished, and how Zemeckis and company were thus actually narratively mistreating this woman. The poem is already sensitive to the price women pay for the desires of men -- for bloodlust, if not sexual lust -- and expresses much of its sense of loss through the grief of women (including, significantly, the lament of the Geatish woman at Beowulf's funeral at the end of the poem -- another woman missing from the movie). In removing most of those stories, the movie misses their point as well, and does a bad job transferring it all to Wealhtheow, who not only barely puts up with and frequently rebuffs her drunken, boorish husband Hrothgar (another character robbed of all the dignity the poem gives him), but then is bequeathed to Beowulf, who regularly cheats on her. But Wealhtheow's inarticulate poutiness through all of this does nothing to make this heartbreaking.

And then there's Grendel's Mother. It might seem at first blush that in expanding her role, giving her language and treacherous conniving, and casting Angelina Jolie, the biggest star in the movie, the creators are making her the center of the film and its most powerful figure. In the right hands this could have been really interesting, and I can tell that Gaiman and Avary are trying. There's this bit in the beginning when Beowulf talks of the sea as his "mother," and images of the dead being carried out to sea repeat throughout the movie -- an adaptation, clearly, of the extra-narrative sea-funeral of Scyld Scefing that opens the poem. And, of course, Grendel and his Mother live in a cave at the bottom of a "mere," a swampy body of water -- both in the poem and in the movie. The movie makers are very obviously trying to make the mer/mere/la mere (sea/mere/mother) connection and perhaps positing that some matriarchal/female sexual power is the most powerful force of all, more powerful than warriors, heroes, and kings.

I think that's what Zemeckis, Gaiman, and Avary think they are doing. But what they actually say is that woman is the downfall of man, especially through her sexuality. According to the movie, if men were left alone to fight naked with monsters, they'd be a lot better off, but when the woman enters and messes with things, everything gets bloodier and messier. There's some of that in the poem -- Grendel's Mother is a greater foe for Beowulf than Grendel is. She does sneak into Heorot unseen and kill, and Beowulf has a harder time fighting her than he does Grendel. But in the poem he actually fights her and she very nearly kicks his ass. In the movie she's naked Angelina Jolie, against whom men's penises are helpless (cf. Brad Pitt). In the movie she doesn't fight with Beowulf; something else happens, though it happens off-screen. And what happens has happened before, and will happen again, the movie shows us. The men will succumb to Grendel's Mother again and again. Her super-MILFness will be their undoing now and for eternity. So instead of monsters descended from Cain, we get Eve. And I think we're supposed to see this as some sort of "girl power." Great.

I think the screenwriters were assuming we'd read this downfall as the product of men's lust, not women's seduction, but it reads both ways. And the puritanical streak this element of the movie exhibits is somewhat ironic given the weird little subtext of anti-Christianity the film also inserts into the narrative. There are lots of ways the movie went wrong as an adaptation of the poem or as a work in its own right -- way too many to get into here, in this already long post -- but its treatment of the female characters exhibits a lot of the problems (and also the potential) of the film. I may even use in the classroom, not as those silly "educational" promotional item suggested I do, but as a "sample" of reading and misreading, and a lesson in the ways that women's history and the history of women in literature is not a necessarily progressive tale. Sometimes an Anglo-Saxon text is better for women than a 21st century movie.

Hwaet the hell?

Frankly, I think the three word title of this post is all the review Beowulf the Movie needs: it avoids spoilers and it perfectly expresses my disappointment in the movie as both a movie and an adaptation of Beowulf the poem. (It also features a weird mixture of Old and Modern English, as did Grendel's and Grendel's Mother's dialogue. Though my post title is missing Angelina Jolie's weird Transylvanian accent.)

But actually, I do want to say more -- I just don't have the energy at the moment and will have to save it until tomorrow. Since I'm sure there will be many other reviews across the medieval blogosphere, I'm also sure you're not waiting with 'bated breath for mine. But to distinguish mine, I think I'll focus on the movie's treatment and adaptation of the female characters. Believe it or not, there are actually *fewer* significant female roles in the 21st century movie than in the 6th-11th century (choose your preferred date) poem, and the poem gives them more dignity and importance than the movie. More tomorrow.

In the meantime, I leave you with one of my students' responses. This particular student is writing her honor's thesis with me on Grendel's Mother, Judith, and Elene. When I asked her what she thought, she said, totally deadpan:

There were moments that I thought were kind of interesting...but I'm still trying to figure out how to work Grendel's Mother's stilettos into my thesis.

Hee!

Manuscripts and the classroom *again*

(Yeah, I know I said I wouldn't be posting again until tonight. I changed my mind.)

A few weeks ago I introduced my graduate students to our rare books and manuscripts holdings and talked about why looking at a text in its original contexts might matter -- whether than means a medieval manuscript, a 19th century periodical, a first printing of a book that was later revised, or what have you.

And today I found a cool little example that I wish I'd had then. But I'll use it in future classes. The best part of this example is that it's only one little word, and yet it reveals so much about manuscript studies, reception studies, and medieval and early modern studies more largely. In a 15th century text (I won't specify which one here) that features Christ speaking about his crucifixion, most modern editions feature a line in which Christ says of certain people that they had pity of his "payns" (i.e., "pains"). But a look at the manuscript facsimile shows that the word was originally "penaunce," which has been crossed out by a later hand, with "payns" entered above it. And there in that little one-word change, you see a post-Reformation reader adapting a pre-Reformation text for his purposes, getting rid of the medieval/Catholic concept of "penance," especially in the sense of the 'satisfaction' element of the sacrament, and replacing it with a generalized suffering. None of the student-used editions of this text show that this substitution has been made, and even in the scholarly edition, it's buried in the textual notes. It's much more obvious and noteworthy in the manuscript facsimile. What a quick and easy way to show the value of manuscript studies! This one little change speaks to major historical and religious changes in the 16th century and also the practice of adapting or rewriting and reusing old texts for new purposes, which in turn speaks to the continuities of late medieval and early modern culture. Awesome!

Medieval news

Sorry for the silence, but here's a few tidbits until I can post again:

• Give a big welcome to Dame Eleanor Hull, and new medievalist blogger. According to her "About" page, "Dame Eleanor Hull was a fifteenth century English woman who served Henry IV's wife, Queen Joan, and translated psalms and commentaries from French to English. Her present incarnation is as a pseudonym for an American woman professor of medieval English literature." Already Dame Hull has written two posts, including one chock full of ideas and information about making quills and using them in the classroom! Huzzah! Welcome Dame Hull!
• I'm going to see Beowulf with about 12 students and their guests this afternoon. I'm so excited! I'll post tonight on the experience.
  

Oh, and btw, this is my 402nd post. Hard to believe.

Textual editing again - a snag

I don't think I'm going to be able to build a textual editing project into my Chaucer class. There are just too many other goals I have for the class and too many assignments to go with them. I want to make sure students comprehend the language and analyze it on a close level, but I've got translation and close reading assignments for that. And from there I want to talk about things genre, readerly expectations, Chaucer's literary world and the "conversations" he's participating in, and the critical conversations today. And I'm going to attempt to do not just the Tales, but Troilus and at least two dream visions, as well. (I have this fun exercise where students write their own "Chaucerian" dream vision, albeit in prose and present day American English. It makes them have to think about the persona of the author and about what contributes to an author's style, among other things.)

But I am going to do this in the Middle English class, where language is the focus, and textuality is important to issues of transmission. And there I'll have a lot more texts that don't have student editions yet available, or, if I choose Chaucer, they can compare multiple student editions and arrive at what they think is "best."

Nevertheless, I'm going to stress in the Chaucer class that their texts are in many ways modern fictions, and that even their medieval counterparts are slippery entities, which sits well with any number of issues and themes brought up in the texts themselves, starting, perhaps with the "Adam Scriveyn" poem. And I'll still show them lots of manuscript page images in various facsimiles.

This Dr. Virago hath a pleasant seat.

Which work of Shakespeare was the original quote from?

Get your own quotes:

Hat tip to History Geek for this fun bit of silliness. I'll leave it to you to judge what "seat" means in this context.

Deep, intellectual conversation in our two-academic household

Me: Did you see the newly redesigned Arts & Sciences newsletter?

Bullock: No, why?

Me: Well, I'm mentioned in it twice.

Bullock: Well, that's good.

Me: Yeah, but a couple of typos have made the Bodleian Library a branch of the British Library -- which I'm sure they'll be surprised to learn -- and have changed the London Metropolitan Archives into the London Metropolis Archives.

Bullock: [Laughing]

Me: I bet you didn't know London has a vast archive of Superman material, did you?

Bullock: If only Clark Kent had crash-landed in Sussex.

Textual editing in the classroom

As I've mentioned before, I've been working on a student edition of a couple of related medieval texts that are eventually going to be part of a larger anthology. And I've had a few epiphanies because of this work, which I wrote about here.

And now I've had another one, related to those earlier ones. And it's also inspired by two other incidentally related things: first, Carrie Beneš's essay in the Medieval Academy newsletter on manuscripts in undergraduate classroom, and second, Michelle Warren's article "Translation" (in Oxford UP's Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, ed. Paul Strohm). The first can be found here on p. 10 of the newsletter. The latter is print only, but the part that I was intrigued most by is the final section of the article (pp. 65-6) where she argues that the Chaucer classroom would benefit from a pedagogy informed by translation theory because, as she argues, "The encounter with the medieval text is a multilingual encounter, even when one appears to be reading 'English' texts in 'English' in an 'English' classroom" (p. 66).

Anyway, all of these texts -- the one I'm editing and the two essays I just mentioned -- have inspired me to follow through on an idea I'd been toying with for many of my courses, and that is: creating a substantial assignment for each course where students have to create an edition of a text for a modern student reader, complete with introduction, glosses and explanatory notes, and a bibliography for further reading. In some classes I may even start with a digitally available manuscript and teach them to read some forms of medieval script, or at least expect them to compare the manuscript to a scholarly edition and write about what they see and find.

This makes total sense for my Old English and Middle English courses, which are courses on the language, and since the transmission of those languages to us is entirely textual, teaching and learning about textual editing is very much a potentially obvious part of the course content.

But it's not as obvious in the literature classroom. I'm not talking about returning to some 19th century style pedagogy and making the English literature classroom a form of the old Classical classroom, where it's all philology and grammar all the time, or about constructing quasi-genealogical trees of sources and manuscript transmission. I only want to make this a small part of all that the students learns, so that that they're at least aware of the work that goes into bringing these texts to them, and, more important, aware of the ways in which the text is mediation -- even if it's "in the original language." I like thinking and talking about readers, too, and making students aware that a medieval reader's experience of a book as a physical object, and a text as an abstract idea might be very different from ours even before you get to issue of cultural differences.

This is for me, in fact, part of a turn towards teaching reading, and of thinking of myself as a teacher of reading (the process) rather than or more than a teacher of literature (a thing). Apparently I'm in good company, too, since even Spivak is talking about teaching reading (as Dan Remein says here, in the third paragraph)! That "concern troll" I mentioned in passing a while back made the old chestnut of a charge that I must teach because I cannot "do," because I'm not working on my own great works of literature (for all he knows, I could be, but never mind that). But of course, I don't teach creative writing; I teach students how to read and write about literature, and that I most certainly do -- successfully, too, if you measure it by academic publishing.

But what does that have to do with textual editing? Well, as I said in the earlier post about the epiphanies I'm having from my own editing project, I'm finding the editing process allows for a more intimate relationship with the text, not merely a familiar one. I think in edition to translation assignments, close reading assignments, and so forth, it will help the student engage deeply with the text, at least for a passage or a section, and hopefully they'll realize how that engagement pays off. Such an exercise, I hope, will make them a different kind of reader, a more intense reader and perhaps an even more appreciative one. And I hope, too, that they'll realize that student editions with glosses and notes and introductions, etc., don't just grow on trees, nor are they all alike. And finally, in my medieval literature and language classrooms, they'll have to engage in a kind of cross-cultural communication, a translation of sorts, that's part medieval, part contemporary. Instead of allowing them simply to read the text as modern readers, or asking the impossible task of reading as a medieval person, I'll be asking them to meet the text somewhere in the middle, where they have to communicate with the past and then communicate that past to the potential readers of their edition (and I may even have them do peer-evaluation of each others' editions to make that even more clear).

And for my non-medieval classes -- the undergraduate intro to literature, the graduate intro to research -- I think I can still do variations on this, because even non-glossed, non-translated texts of recent vintage are edited, introduced, and mediated when they're issued in classroom editions. We have a pretty darn good rare books library here with all sorts of cool, unpublished literary stuff, as well as materials from important cultural contexts for 19th and 20th century literature, and over the summer I could work with the director of the center to create some assignments for both of those classes, which I'll be teaching next year. She's really eager to get more students in there, to be able to say that the collection is indeed a valuable resource for students, so it would be good for her, too.

I've been trying to find a pedagogical continuity between all of my classes -- a teaching philosophy, one might say (a concept and document that many bloggers on the job market and those of us doing renewal and tenure dossiers have been thinking and talking about in recent months) -- and I think this kind of tangible close engagement with the text could be it. Then the next time I say I insist that students read or engage with the text closely, I'll really mean it in a sense beyond "close reading" and "critical thinking" -- phrases that can and do have meaning but that can also be so thrown around in meaningless ways. But by requiring students to produce an edition of, for example, one of Chaucer's short poems, or "Wulf and Eadwacer," or a late medieval lyric, or Etheridge Knight poem, or of contextual reading for "The Yellow Wallpaper," or whatever (depending on the class), perhaps I'll get them closer to having the intimate relationship with at least one text, and to being more aware of the ways they receive texts, in addition to being closer readers of those texts.

I'm too young to be senile

OK, I don't know what's up with my brain lately, but it ain't right. Is this the onset of Absentminded Professoritis? Lately I've noticed the following symptoms:

• I say or write completely wrong words that have nothing to do with what I'm saying, but sound like the words I want. For example, in an e-mail to a distinguished professor with a web site I use often in my classes, I wrote "add" for "had." In another, related, symptom, if a word has one or more words strongly associated with it because they're all related classifying terms, I'll say the wrong one. For example, when I want to say "strong verb" I'll sometimes say "weak verb" by mistake. [FYI, for my readers who don't know this and might be curious: in English, strong verbs are verbs like sing/sang/sung that form their past tense with an internal vowel change. Weak verbs are verbs that add -ed to form the past tense.]
  
• Yesterday I nearly forgot a meeting I needed to attend. It was a meeting I had called because I'm the chair of the committee. I remembered with just enough time to get to the meeting.
  
• A couple of weeks ago, I kept my class 10 minutes late because I thought we ended at 25 after the hour instead of 15 after. It's my other class that ends at 25 after.
• Random songs I haven't heard in years pop into my head sometimes. This morning I woke up to that late '70s/early '80s song that goes something like this: "No matter where you are / I will always be with you / something something something / you, girl / ooh, girl / want you." Can someone please tell me what this song is?!!!! It's a guy singing, but he has a pretty high range. Harmony is involved in the bridge. Wah wah effects may be involved, too, though I can't remember the whole thing. It's driving me NUTS!
  

So what the hell's wrong with me?