20160209.0627

Work continues, as ever it must. I still have grading to do, because I was unable to attend to it in any meaningful way yesterday. I also have the tutorial session I mentioned yesterday, although I feel more or less ready for that. Classroom work yesterday ran into some of the same things that I mean to discuss with the tutee today, so I got a bit of preparation without having realized I would do so. Additionally, a freelance order has come in; I have bought the book for it, but I have not started working on the project in any serious way. I am debating whether or not to do so before attending to the grading. I get paid more for doing more freelance work, which is not true of marking papers, but if I push back the grading further, then I will end up having it pile up on me, and that produces its own set of problems. Again, echoing the Claudius of Hamlet, "like a man to double business bound / I stand in pause where I shall first begin / And both neglect" (3.3).

That I would reference Shakespeare, and perhaps the most notable of his plays, makes sense enough. I am among the professoriate in English, after all; if anyone would reference the Bard, it would be someone who teaches English languages and literatures. More, I work with the old stuff, and Billy Shakes is old English, but not Old English by any stretch. Show me þ or ð in his work, for example. (I know that æ can be found therein, but Latin loves that digraph, too, and the Cæsars are in his corpus.) He is after Gower and Chaucer, the old standard of Middle English and the shining example of what that language could do, borrowing from both liberally. But it would be expected that I would rail against the assertion, too often heard, that Shakespeare is in Old English; I am among the professoriate, specializing in Englishes older than that of the Swan of Avon, primed for pedantry pointless among the quotidian.

I am not the only one who makes such references, of course. There are many who seek to cloak themselves in intellectualism and elitism, and references to (problematic) literary canons can help with that. (This is true irrespective of the canon deployed. Referencing falling as Huor did is no less snobby than claiming to be the Don Pedro to another's Dogberry.) They are rightly decried. But there are also many who exult in the love of language and literature, or who use references to things to situate themselves among them, or to indicate for the attentive reader what is to come--as the Shakespearean references in Station Eleven do, for one example among many others. They use them to tap into what they think is a common cultural bond and thereby reaffirm that bond--and it may have problems. Solving such problems, though, is but one way in which work continues.