A year ago today saw me in the Texas Hill Country, showing Ms. 8 to her family. Today does not see me there, but it does see family with Ms. 8; a couple of her grandparents are visiting. The Mrs. will be putting in a half day today, as is now her regular schedule, and I will be working on another freelance piece; the order came in today, and another, I am told, is already waiting for me. So things are more or less as they ought to be.
Because I have work and family to which to attend, I will not be saying much here today. I will comment, however, that I appreciate having the readership I have; there seem to be a lot of people looking at this webspace today, which is always a good thing for me. I can hope it will continue, and I will have something more to say tomorrow to help it do so. Perhaps it will have to do with yesterday's footnote; that seems something worth discussion.
Tuesday, May 26, 2015
Monday, May 25, 2015
20150525.0833
Since it is Memorial Day, I probably ought to offer up the usual message. What I have said before remains more or less true, if perhaps adjusted for time and weather. Rain has continued to fall at Sherwood Cottage, leaving water standing in the yard, so I will not be grilling, for example.
More to topic, though, is to follow up on comments made at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies and mentioned once or twice in my discussions thereof. Those in question have to do with the nature of the conference presentation and whether or not it is to be taken as a finished, completed thing, subject to critique and review. That my inclination is to affirm it should be obvious, given both that I have been offering conference summaries for nigh on a week (with others to follow at Travels in Genre and Medievalism as soon as I get the complete set of data for which I am waiting) and that I have made use of my notes from conference talks in my work. (My dissertation and my forthcoming book chapter both deploy talks from the Congress, if in different years.) But that I am so inclined does not mean the discussion is not worth having, and it is entirely possible that I will change my mind about the matter as I work through my part of the discussion.
As I recall, and as I have in my personal conference notes--with the process by which I take them to be discussed elsewhere and at another time--the question came up in discussion of the public medievalism roundtable I attended. One of the presenters, Dave Perry, focused his talk to that end, discussing public intellectualism as an exercise in (among others) transitioning among registers. And what I recall and understand of his comments makes sense to me. The conference paper is something that is used to advance ideas, perhaps in tentative form, and to elicit comment and critique to be used in further development of them.* Papers I have heard--and given--include such phrases as "In a longer version of this paper" and "As this project develops," both of which bespeak work yet to be done. They often are reworked and expanded into articles, chapters in books, or scholarly monographs (something to which I ought to devote more effort and attention), and so they themselves are in several senses transitory.
At the same time, however, conference papers are supposed to represent intellectual effort that is sufficiently polished to be presented publicly. A conference talk is a public event, even if the public is small--but even if it is, that public is composed of interested parties and scholars in the field, so that something similar to the peer-review process through which more formal articles and longer works go is in place at a conference panel. One of the audience at the roundtable also drew the parallel to a poetry or prose reading, in which writers stand up or sit before audiences and present their work. Even if it is to be revised and refined later--and many are in need of much revision and refinement--the reading is a public presentation. It is an exposure to view, and it is too much to think that a thing seen will not receive comment. If that thing is formed badly, then it cannot expect to have its defects ignored any more than it can expect to have its virtues extolled. The same is true with conference work--or I tend to think so. But I may be wrong.
*Admittedly, all intellectual work is of this kind, meant to advance knowledge and serve as a place from which to develop more through critique and revision of it. The roundtable addressed the point to some extent, as I recall; we work to make things a little closer to truth, knowing that our work will be used by others to grow a bit closer yet. If things go as they ought, we will all of us be made obsolete.
More to topic, though, is to follow up on comments made at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies and mentioned once or twice in my discussions thereof. Those in question have to do with the nature of the conference presentation and whether or not it is to be taken as a finished, completed thing, subject to critique and review. That my inclination is to affirm it should be obvious, given both that I have been offering conference summaries for nigh on a week (with others to follow at Travels in Genre and Medievalism as soon as I get the complete set of data for which I am waiting) and that I have made use of my notes from conference talks in my work. (My dissertation and my forthcoming book chapter both deploy talks from the Congress, if in different years.) But that I am so inclined does not mean the discussion is not worth having, and it is entirely possible that I will change my mind about the matter as I work through my part of the discussion.
As I recall, and as I have in my personal conference notes--with the process by which I take them to be discussed elsewhere and at another time--the question came up in discussion of the public medievalism roundtable I attended. One of the presenters, Dave Perry, focused his talk to that end, discussing public intellectualism as an exercise in (among others) transitioning among registers. And what I recall and understand of his comments makes sense to me. The conference paper is something that is used to advance ideas, perhaps in tentative form, and to elicit comment and critique to be used in further development of them.* Papers I have heard--and given--include such phrases as "In a longer version of this paper" and "As this project develops," both of which bespeak work yet to be done. They often are reworked and expanded into articles, chapters in books, or scholarly monographs (something to which I ought to devote more effort and attention), and so they themselves are in several senses transitory.
At the same time, however, conference papers are supposed to represent intellectual effort that is sufficiently polished to be presented publicly. A conference talk is a public event, even if the public is small--but even if it is, that public is composed of interested parties and scholars in the field, so that something similar to the peer-review process through which more formal articles and longer works go is in place at a conference panel. One of the audience at the roundtable also drew the parallel to a poetry or prose reading, in which writers stand up or sit before audiences and present their work. Even if it is to be revised and refined later--and many are in need of much revision and refinement--the reading is a public presentation. It is an exposure to view, and it is too much to think that a thing seen will not receive comment. If that thing is formed badly, then it cannot expect to have its defects ignored any more than it can expect to have its virtues extolled. The same is true with conference work--or I tend to think so. But I may be wrong.
*Admittedly, all intellectual work is of this kind, meant to advance knowledge and serve as a place from which to develop more through critique and revision of it. The roundtable addressed the point to some extent, as I recall; we work to make things a little closer to truth, knowing that our work will be used by others to grow a bit closer yet. If things go as they ought, we will all of us be made obsolete.
Sunday, May 24, 2015
20150524.0735
As I have noted, I still have a few more things to say in this webspace about my decreasingly recent trip to Kalamazoo, Michigan, for the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. Some of it will work towards untangling and unpacking comments made at the conference that I have found interesting. Today's bit, though, will concern one of the two plenary addresses given, that which I attended: Richard Utz's "The Notion of the Middle Ages: Our Middle Ages, Ourselves." I have written in another venue about the man's work, and I know him to be a luminary in the fields of study with which I associate most strongly, so the chance to hear him give a talk was most welcome.
It was also a rewarding experience. What I take from his argument is the idea that the kind of enthusiasm usually decried in formal scholarship as "amateurish" (typically through a pseudo-scientific motion towards an objectivity that even the sciences acknowledge is unattainable, as witness the observer effect) should instead be embraced. Indeed, those who display that enthusiasm, typically medievalists (as opposed to medieval scholars), should be embraced and their methods at least tested. There is, as I understood Utz to assert, value in recreating and reenacting events and likely hypotheticals, and many of the "amateurs" devote more resources to their "hobby" than scholars do to their scholarship. (How much of this is a result of externally imposed budget concerns, though, I am uncertain, and I do not recall Utz addressing the point.) After all, most who enter medieval scholarship--any scholarship, really--do so through an intense love of the subject matter, an affect frequently condemned by those scholars later as leading to blindness and/or sloppy work (and, indeed, such assertions do sometimes prove true; love for a thing should not blind the lover to the failings of that thing) but one that yet exerts a powerful influence.
The talk put me in mind, in part, of Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings," something about which I commented early in this blogroll and to which I seem to return from time to time (including in my teaching materials). There is peril in scholars disconnecting themselves from the love of topic that leads them into the work they do. There is peril in seeking to create distance between the worker and the work; alienation of labor is a thing much decried in its occurrences outside the academy, although it seems that the work the academy does moves in a similar direction. The thought occurs that it is that separation, done deliberately, that helps create or at least lends to the support of the idea of humanities scholarship as a thing not worth doing, as a dry and sucking thing that drains the life and love of the world from those who partake of it. What I take from Utz, and what I have long taken form Edmundson, is that there is a great need to embody the love of The Work that leads to doing The Work. If we as scholars of the humanities expect others to see that our work has value, we need to act as if it does, and we can only do that by embracing love for it, by being "amateurs" as well as professionals.
It was also a rewarding experience. What I take from his argument is the idea that the kind of enthusiasm usually decried in formal scholarship as "amateurish" (typically through a pseudo-scientific motion towards an objectivity that even the sciences acknowledge is unattainable, as witness the observer effect) should instead be embraced. Indeed, those who display that enthusiasm, typically medievalists (as opposed to medieval scholars), should be embraced and their methods at least tested. There is, as I understood Utz to assert, value in recreating and reenacting events and likely hypotheticals, and many of the "amateurs" devote more resources to their "hobby" than scholars do to their scholarship. (How much of this is a result of externally imposed budget concerns, though, I am uncertain, and I do not recall Utz addressing the point.) After all, most who enter medieval scholarship--any scholarship, really--do so through an intense love of the subject matter, an affect frequently condemned by those scholars later as leading to blindness and/or sloppy work (and, indeed, such assertions do sometimes prove true; love for a thing should not blind the lover to the failings of that thing) but one that yet exerts a powerful influence.
The talk put me in mind, in part, of Mark Edmundson's "Against Readings," something about which I commented early in this blogroll and to which I seem to return from time to time (including in my teaching materials). There is peril in scholars disconnecting themselves from the love of topic that leads them into the work they do. There is peril in seeking to create distance between the worker and the work; alienation of labor is a thing much decried in its occurrences outside the academy, although it seems that the work the academy does moves in a similar direction. The thought occurs that it is that separation, done deliberately, that helps create or at least lends to the support of the idea of humanities scholarship as a thing not worth doing, as a dry and sucking thing that drains the life and love of the world from those who partake of it. What I take from Utz, and what I have long taken form Edmundson, is that there is a great need to embody the love of The Work that leads to doing The Work. If we as scholars of the humanities expect others to see that our work has value, we need to act as if it does, and we can only do that by embracing love for it, by being "amateurs" as well as professionals.
Saturday, May 23, 2015
20150523.0803
It seems that I cannot stop writing about the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in this webspace, even as I await the information I need to do more about it on the Tales after Tolkien Society blog (submissions to which and comments about extant posts on which are welcome). Today, I discuss a panel I went to for purely personal reasons: Papers by Undergraduates II. One of my now-former students (he has graduated) presented on the panel, using a paper written for my class and workshopped with me for a year afterwards to try to get it in shape. How could I not sit to hear his talk? And how, then, could I not sit for the other papers on the panel?
The first offering was Kiana Gonzalez's "Staying True to Tradition," which asserted a reason for Egyptian puppet-show writer Ibn Daniyal to adhere to traditional Greek models. In effect, as I understood from Gonzalez, he does so to remain in accord with the Turkish underpinnings of his work with the trickster figures Aragouz/Karagoz and Hacivat. As she approached the topic from an art history perspective, much was made of the craft of the puppet shows, citing visual and recorded performative features rather than texts to make the argument. I found it fascinating, actually, and I found myself asking her for her bibliography, as one of the long-standing research projects I have going may well benefit from it. (I do not go in for puppet shows themselves as a research topic, but they do crop up in the milieu described in one of the series which I do treat regularly.)
Jonathan T. Garner followed with "The Samurai of Leinster: The Heroic Diarmuid in Gen Urobuchi's Fate/Zero." His was the paper that grew from my class, and since his introductory notes announced it to the session, I feel free to discuss it here.* It argues--which I know from having worked with the paper for some time and having a copy of it--that the presentation of Diarmuid in Fate/Zero is calculated to address prevailing audience understandings and needs not only for its original Japanese audiences, but also for Western audiences who are likely to have it only or primarily in translation. Reliance on the shared features of formalized codes of conduct, artificial as they may actually be, does much to bridge the two audiences, as does particular components of the physical depiction of Diarmuid. I imagine that Garner will be doing more with the paper; I hope to see it come out in a more extended form, more developed than the constraints of conference work allow.
The panel concluded with Dylan Matthews's "Intimacy and the Monarch in Thomas Hoccleve's Address to Sir John Oldcastle." Matthews, a student of RF Yeager, argued that Hoccleve's piece must be read in terms of Oldcastle's relationships with his king as well as of Hoccleve's own involvement in the affairs discussed. (My graduate advisor, who focuses on Hoccleve in his own work, would likely be able to say more on the matter than I.) The deployment of Lancelot in the work is telling; he is either a negative example or a parallel, invited to return to his former allegiance because much valued and ultimately undone because the invitation was refused. (The thought occurs that Hoccleve might be making a tacit accusation of adultery, given Lancelot's character history.)
Again, there is more to say about the 'zoo. While most of the rest of what I did has to do with the Tales after Tolkien Society, and so will be discussed elsewhere, there was at least one other event I attended that bears discussion here. Too, there are some ideas that need unpacking, and this will be a good place to attend to them--later on.
*One of the interesting things that will require untangling noted in an earlier post is just how much a conference presentation counts as a "public" event. This is not the place to treat it directly, but I rather think that such a post is coming.
The first offering was Kiana Gonzalez's "Staying True to Tradition," which asserted a reason for Egyptian puppet-show writer Ibn Daniyal to adhere to traditional Greek models. In effect, as I understood from Gonzalez, he does so to remain in accord with the Turkish underpinnings of his work with the trickster figures Aragouz/Karagoz and Hacivat. As she approached the topic from an art history perspective, much was made of the craft of the puppet shows, citing visual and recorded performative features rather than texts to make the argument. I found it fascinating, actually, and I found myself asking her for her bibliography, as one of the long-standing research projects I have going may well benefit from it. (I do not go in for puppet shows themselves as a research topic, but they do crop up in the milieu described in one of the series which I do treat regularly.)
Jonathan T. Garner followed with "The Samurai of Leinster: The Heroic Diarmuid in Gen Urobuchi's Fate/Zero." His was the paper that grew from my class, and since his introductory notes announced it to the session, I feel free to discuss it here.* It argues--which I know from having worked with the paper for some time and having a copy of it--that the presentation of Diarmuid in Fate/Zero is calculated to address prevailing audience understandings and needs not only for its original Japanese audiences, but also for Western audiences who are likely to have it only or primarily in translation. Reliance on the shared features of formalized codes of conduct, artificial as they may actually be, does much to bridge the two audiences, as does particular components of the physical depiction of Diarmuid. I imagine that Garner will be doing more with the paper; I hope to see it come out in a more extended form, more developed than the constraints of conference work allow.
The panel concluded with Dylan Matthews's "Intimacy and the Monarch in Thomas Hoccleve's Address to Sir John Oldcastle." Matthews, a student of RF Yeager, argued that Hoccleve's piece must be read in terms of Oldcastle's relationships with his king as well as of Hoccleve's own involvement in the affairs discussed. (My graduate advisor, who focuses on Hoccleve in his own work, would likely be able to say more on the matter than I.) The deployment of Lancelot in the work is telling; he is either a negative example or a parallel, invited to return to his former allegiance because much valued and ultimately undone because the invitation was refused. (The thought occurs that Hoccleve might be making a tacit accusation of adultery, given Lancelot's character history.)
Again, there is more to say about the 'zoo. While most of the rest of what I did has to do with the Tales after Tolkien Society, and so will be discussed elsewhere, there was at least one other event I attended that bears discussion here. Too, there are some ideas that need unpacking, and this will be a good place to attend to them--later on.
*One of the interesting things that will require untangling noted in an earlier post is just how much a conference presentation counts as a "public" event. This is not the place to treat it directly, but I rather think that such a post is coming.
Friday, May 22, 2015
20150522.0852
As I noted yesterday, I attended other panels than those for the Tales after Tolkien Society at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. One of them bears in on my formal academic specialty, Malory; its title was Malory and Causality. While I did have a bit of trouble getting to the panel--I had initially set up in a room across the hall from it, having misread the program--I enjoyed it greatly, as the papers presented in it were quite good.
The first of them was Marc Guidry's "'He told him not the cause': Motivations without Explanation in Le Morte Darthur." He contested the received wisdom voiced by Vinaver that Malory eschews hypotaxis at the levels of sentence and narrative structure. Instead, Malory appears to deploy the construction in his own native dialogue, rather than presenting it in direct narration or in the materials he retains from his sources. Guidry asserted that the sentence structures mirror the larger narrative structure of the sprawling text, particularly in the overarching structure constructed through presentations of adultery in the text. It was a complex, nuanced work that will do well as a longer version, which I look forward to reading if it is ever put into print.
Scott Troyan's "Chivalric Causality or Chivalric Casualty? Knighthood, Quests, and the Failure of Rhetoric in Malory's Morte" came next. The unity of Malory's work is much discussed and contested, and the conflicting rhetorics of chivalry and Christianity in the text offer no clear resolution to that contestation. The text deploys chiasmus--the closely-placed inversion of the order of key terms and phrases, such as JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country"--to produce tension and promote the perception of causation, drawing the reader along by encouraging repeated recontextualization. Of note was the assertion that the meaning of the text may always already be in place, but uncovering that meaning is far from a given.
Benjamin Utter's "Malory's Secular Pelagianism: Worshyp, Will, and Heroic Destiny in the Morte Darthur," an excellent paper, followed, Utter argued that Malory's text partakes of both the "peculiarly English" Pelagian self-determination and Augustinian predetermination. Self-salvation and worldly salvation are pried in the text, but only those who are born of already-heroic or ennobled bloodlines seem to be able to effect or receive them. A false sense of social mobility, exemplified by Beaumains and others, is thus presented. (The implications for further analysis of the work raised by Utter's excellent reading are somewhat startling. Malory would appear to be asserting himself as orthodox, perhaps as a means to seek clemency or pardon for his misdeeds and political misadventures.)
Leigh Smith concluded the panel with "Two Unhappy Knights and Lady Fortune: What Boethius Meant to Malory." As the title suggests, the paper explicated the Boethian in Malory, which likely derived from both prevailing cultural discourse (one comment noted that "Boethius was in the air at the time") and from Chaucer's Boece (the constraints of conference talk precluded doing more to tie the latter in more fully). In Malory, "hap" refers both to bad luck and the contrivances of Providence; it is both chance and Fortune, and the two are not at all the same. They collude to bring about the tragedy of Camelot, aided by poor decision-making at the Round Table. It is an important concept, although it must be remembered that importance is not the same thing as casuation.
The Malory panel was not the last one I attended outside of Society work, to be sure. Reporting on the conference, though, is outside the other work to which I must attend today. I expect I will offer another installment of conference reporting tomorrow...
The first of them was Marc Guidry's "'He told him not the cause': Motivations without Explanation in Le Morte Darthur." He contested the received wisdom voiced by Vinaver that Malory eschews hypotaxis at the levels of sentence and narrative structure. Instead, Malory appears to deploy the construction in his own native dialogue, rather than presenting it in direct narration or in the materials he retains from his sources. Guidry asserted that the sentence structures mirror the larger narrative structure of the sprawling text, particularly in the overarching structure constructed through presentations of adultery in the text. It was a complex, nuanced work that will do well as a longer version, which I look forward to reading if it is ever put into print.
Scott Troyan's "Chivalric Causality or Chivalric Casualty? Knighthood, Quests, and the Failure of Rhetoric in Malory's Morte" came next. The unity of Malory's work is much discussed and contested, and the conflicting rhetorics of chivalry and Christianity in the text offer no clear resolution to that contestation. The text deploys chiasmus--the closely-placed inversion of the order of key terms and phrases, such as JFK's "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country"--to produce tension and promote the perception of causation, drawing the reader along by encouraging repeated recontextualization. Of note was the assertion that the meaning of the text may always already be in place, but uncovering that meaning is far from a given.
Benjamin Utter's "Malory's Secular Pelagianism: Worshyp, Will, and Heroic Destiny in the Morte Darthur," an excellent paper, followed, Utter argued that Malory's text partakes of both the "peculiarly English" Pelagian self-determination and Augustinian predetermination. Self-salvation and worldly salvation are pried in the text, but only those who are born of already-heroic or ennobled bloodlines seem to be able to effect or receive them. A false sense of social mobility, exemplified by Beaumains and others, is thus presented. (The implications for further analysis of the work raised by Utter's excellent reading are somewhat startling. Malory would appear to be asserting himself as orthodox, perhaps as a means to seek clemency or pardon for his misdeeds and political misadventures.)
Leigh Smith concluded the panel with "Two Unhappy Knights and Lady Fortune: What Boethius Meant to Malory." As the title suggests, the paper explicated the Boethian in Malory, which likely derived from both prevailing cultural discourse (one comment noted that "Boethius was in the air at the time") and from Chaucer's Boece (the constraints of conference talk precluded doing more to tie the latter in more fully). In Malory, "hap" refers both to bad luck and the contrivances of Providence; it is both chance and Fortune, and the two are not at all the same. They collude to bring about the tragedy of Camelot, aided by poor decision-making at the Round Table. It is an important concept, although it must be remembered that importance is not the same thing as casuation.
The Malory panel was not the last one I attended outside of Society work, to be sure. Reporting on the conference, though, is outside the other work to which I must attend today. I expect I will offer another installment of conference reporting tomorrow...
Thursday, May 21, 2015
20150521.0712
Owing to the fact that my dissertation director is Jennifer Vaught, I spend some time at each International Congress on Medieval Studies I attend with the kind and intelligent people who treat Spenser and Sidney at the conference. This year was no different, and so on Friday of the conference, I attended a panel on Spenser's Faerie Queene, one titled The Matter of Faerieland.
After opening remarks, the first paper, Caroline Pirri's "Virtue as Virtuality in The Faerie Queene, Book III," focused on the character of Britomart from Book III, arguing that she functions as a mirror for other characters and thus as a microcosm of the poem as a whole--or that is what I took from it. I also note the comment that "Chastity is a foreclosure of bodily knowledge," a concept that seems fit to consider in future work.
The next paper was Stephanie Hunt's "Pastoral Allegory and the Politics of Nature in The Faerie Queene." Among her discussion was the idea that politics are constructed as reflecting natural order--something still in common use--which becomes problematic not only for the expected reasons--taking something as "natural" means it is unalterably "the way things are," which precludes helpful changes--but also because nature itself is ultimately unknowable. It requires mediation to be understood, but mediation is itself an imposition of artifice and thus an abrogation of nature. If politics reflect nature (and here the comments are mine rather than what I understood from Hunt's), and nature is itself inscrutable, then politics are also impenetrably complex. Whether that is true or not, I leave to others (perhaps a future me) to untangle.
The final paper in the panel was Liza Blake's "Golding, Spenser, and the Physics of The Faerie Queene." I admit that my background is not such that I was able to follow the paper as well as it deserved, although I was able to take from it the idea that Spenser's poem, insofar as it suggests or promotes understandings of the relationships among things in nature and the meanings uniting those things, presents a physics of at least its own world. Poetry, as I understood Blake to say, is a means to approach understandings of the essential forms and their shaping, in which it connects to physics as commonly understood: the study of the essential forces that shape reality.
I did attend other panels during the conference, not only those for the Tales after Tolkien Society (which I am still in the process of writing up, as there are other concerns I wish to address in that work, and freelance writing has resumed). My comments on them will continue into tomorrow, at least, although I do have to consider the difference between today's and yesterday's. Today's follow a more common pattern for conference summaries, I think, giving takeaway notes for papers presented; yesterday's gloss far more, and they do so in part as a response to one of the contested comments made in one of the panels. Said comment remarks on conference work as ephemeral and unfinished; that discussion needs more untangling, more "unpacking" in academic parlance. It is why I am trying to be clear that what I report today is my understanding; I may have gotten things wrong or, more generously, filtered material through my biases more fully than I have understood. It is a complicated thing; as I note, it needs more thinking-through.
After opening remarks, the first paper, Caroline Pirri's "Virtue as Virtuality in The Faerie Queene, Book III," focused on the character of Britomart from Book III, arguing that she functions as a mirror for other characters and thus as a microcosm of the poem as a whole--or that is what I took from it. I also note the comment that "Chastity is a foreclosure of bodily knowledge," a concept that seems fit to consider in future work.
The next paper was Stephanie Hunt's "Pastoral Allegory and the Politics of Nature in The Faerie Queene." Among her discussion was the idea that politics are constructed as reflecting natural order--something still in common use--which becomes problematic not only for the expected reasons--taking something as "natural" means it is unalterably "the way things are," which precludes helpful changes--but also because nature itself is ultimately unknowable. It requires mediation to be understood, but mediation is itself an imposition of artifice and thus an abrogation of nature. If politics reflect nature (and here the comments are mine rather than what I understood from Hunt's), and nature is itself inscrutable, then politics are also impenetrably complex. Whether that is true or not, I leave to others (perhaps a future me) to untangle.
The final paper in the panel was Liza Blake's "Golding, Spenser, and the Physics of The Faerie Queene." I admit that my background is not such that I was able to follow the paper as well as it deserved, although I was able to take from it the idea that Spenser's poem, insofar as it suggests or promotes understandings of the relationships among things in nature and the meanings uniting those things, presents a physics of at least its own world. Poetry, as I understood Blake to say, is a means to approach understandings of the essential forms and their shaping, in which it connects to physics as commonly understood: the study of the essential forces that shape reality.
I did attend other panels during the conference, not only those for the Tales after Tolkien Society (which I am still in the process of writing up, as there are other concerns I wish to address in that work, and freelance writing has resumed). My comments on them will continue into tomorrow, at least, although I do have to consider the difference between today's and yesterday's. Today's follow a more common pattern for conference summaries, I think, giving takeaway notes for papers presented; yesterday's gloss far more, and they do so in part as a response to one of the contested comments made in one of the panels. Said comment remarks on conference work as ephemeral and unfinished; that discussion needs more untangling, more "unpacking" in academic parlance. It is why I am trying to be clear that what I report today is my understanding; I may have gotten things wrong or, more generously, filtered material through my biases more fully than I have understood. It is a complicated thing; as I note, it needs more thinking-through.
Wednesday, May 20, 2015
20150520.0702
Weather around Sherwood Cottage continues to be wet. Water is standing in the backyard; yesterday evening, it flowed through it. Water is also standing between the house and the driveway, as well as in the side-yard. I begin to think that the house itself is the low-point on the property, the work of time and fracking-waste-disposal-induced earthquakes conspiring to have the cottage slowly sink into the earth from which it ultimately derives. It is perhaps a slow sinking, but it is hardly a comfort to think that I might awaken one morning in a basement when I went to sleep in a house without one, only to drown as the water seeps in and rises around my feet.
As noted earlier, I need to continue to report on events at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. While I was there, I presided over a general session and a Tales after Tolkien Society session, as well as attending a number of other panels and presenting a paper for the Society. While Society work will be addressed on the Society blog, the other materials can be addressed in this webspace. To wit:
My first task at the Congress was to preside over a regular session, Looking Back at the Middle Ages; it happened Thursday at 10 in the morning, making it one of the first at the Congress. Given the kind of work I typically do, which traces the manifestations of the medieval in later periods, my presiding over the event makes sense, and I was glad to get to do so. All three papers were good, with the first two serving (among others) to remind that much medievalist discourse is undertaken to serve nationalistic purposes and that many of the complaints that are currently made are far from new. The third served as a reminder of something that became a bit of a theme at the conference: the perceived divide between the amateur and the scholarly is something that needs to be diminished.
That theme was addressed, if somewhat obliquely, by a panel I attended shortly afterwards, a roundtable treating public medievalism. The several presenters laid out what it is that they do, why they do what they do, and the benefits and perils attendant upon their doing so. Medievalism, including public medievalism, is a polyvalent term, having multiple meanings with which to contend, and the reach of public medievalism (as opposed to scholarly) has a number of perils even as it does much to attract attention to the medieval and the study of it (as I comment repeatedly on the Society blog). Writing for a broader public and in shorter form necessarily means that the finer details of argument be elided; one presenter offered an example of an immense citation history that he had to skip because of the constraints imposed on his public discourse. Differing impacts of the public and private work also came up; number of citations made to a work argues in favor of that work and the worker who does it when the time comes for tenure and promotion, and those who do public medievalism are more likely to be cited than those who do not.
I do have my notes from the other non-Society events I attended compiled and ready to translate to this medium, but other things are beginning to demand my attention. I am sure that I will have more to say in the next few days.
As noted earlier, I need to continue to report on events at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies. While I was there, I presided over a general session and a Tales after Tolkien Society session, as well as attending a number of other panels and presenting a paper for the Society. While Society work will be addressed on the Society blog, the other materials can be addressed in this webspace. To wit:
My first task at the Congress was to preside over a regular session, Looking Back at the Middle Ages; it happened Thursday at 10 in the morning, making it one of the first at the Congress. Given the kind of work I typically do, which traces the manifestations of the medieval in later periods, my presiding over the event makes sense, and I was glad to get to do so. All three papers were good, with the first two serving (among others) to remind that much medievalist discourse is undertaken to serve nationalistic purposes and that many of the complaints that are currently made are far from new. The third served as a reminder of something that became a bit of a theme at the conference: the perceived divide between the amateur and the scholarly is something that needs to be diminished.
That theme was addressed, if somewhat obliquely, by a panel I attended shortly afterwards, a roundtable treating public medievalism. The several presenters laid out what it is that they do, why they do what they do, and the benefits and perils attendant upon their doing so. Medievalism, including public medievalism, is a polyvalent term, having multiple meanings with which to contend, and the reach of public medievalism (as opposed to scholarly) has a number of perils even as it does much to attract attention to the medieval and the study of it (as I comment repeatedly on the Society blog). Writing for a broader public and in shorter form necessarily means that the finer details of argument be elided; one presenter offered an example of an immense citation history that he had to skip because of the constraints imposed on his public discourse. Differing impacts of the public and private work also came up; number of citations made to a work argues in favor of that work and the worker who does it when the time comes for tenure and promotion, and those who do public medievalism are more likely to be cited than those who do not.
I do have my notes from the other non-Society events I attended compiled and ready to translate to this medium, but other things are beginning to demand my attention. I am sure that I will have more to say in the next few days.
Tuesday, May 19, 2015
20150519.0731
I am back at Sherwood Cottage from my adventures at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies at Western Michigan University in Kalamazoo. It was, as ever, a good experience, although it is also, as ever, good to be home.* Waking up in my own bed is something I appreciate greatly. Waking up with my family about me is also something I appreciate greatly. Being away from doing both, even for so good a reason as being at the 'zoo, is not the best thing. This is not to say that I do not appreciate having gone and having done as much as I did at the conference (and I was busy, indeed), and it is good to get away from the quotidian from time to time, but it is also good to get back to daily life--at least for me.**
I will likely spend a portion of today compiling my last sets of notes from the conference. Sunday was a day of rest, more or less, and yesterday was a driving day, so neither saw me attend to that particular task. Once I get that done, I can write up my reports for this webspace and the Tales after Tolkien Society blog. I had thought that I would be updating the latter at Kalamazoo, but that did not happen. I will be updating it from Kalamazoo, however, and those updates will necessarily be different than those this webspace gets. Please continue to look at both, and feel free to post comments or send along materials for posting to the latter.
Today will probably also become a reading day. I have a stack of things over which to pore, things neglected in favor of teaching and freelancing and conference prep, and I may be able to catch up a bit on some of them. It will take some doing, but without the work of class prep and grading, I should have a bit more time for things. It remains to be seen if it will work out...
*Comments about earlier conferences can be found at the links below:
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2010/05/201005181140.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2011/05/201105171536.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2013/05/201305141836.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405080857.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405090830.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405101100.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405111126.html
**I am aware that such a statement bespeaks a certain degree of privilege. Not everybody has a good home situation. Not everyone has a home situation.
I will likely spend a portion of today compiling my last sets of notes from the conference. Sunday was a day of rest, more or less, and yesterday was a driving day, so neither saw me attend to that particular task. Once I get that done, I can write up my reports for this webspace and the Tales after Tolkien Society blog. I had thought that I would be updating the latter at Kalamazoo, but that did not happen. I will be updating it from Kalamazoo, however, and those updates will necessarily be different than those this webspace gets. Please continue to look at both, and feel free to post comments or send along materials for posting to the latter.
Today will probably also become a reading day. I have a stack of things over which to pore, things neglected in favor of teaching and freelancing and conference prep, and I may be able to catch up a bit on some of them. It will take some doing, but without the work of class prep and grading, I should have a bit more time for things. It remains to be seen if it will work out...
*Comments about earlier conferences can be found at the links below:
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2010/05/201005181140.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2011/05/201105171536.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2013/05/201305141836.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405080857.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405090830.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405101100.html
http://folgha.blogspot.com/2014/05/201405111126.html
**I am aware that such a statement bespeaks a certain degree of privilege. Not everybody has a good home situation. Not everyone has a home situation.
Saturday, May 16, 2015
20150516.1039
I am still at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, and I have been busy. It has been a good trip so far, and I have been able to get a fair bit from the sessions I have attended. My notes are still in draft, and I am not going to duplicate comments between this webspace and the Tales after Tolkien Society blog, Travels in Genre and Medievalism, so reading both will be needed (and contributions to the latter are still very much welcome). But I will be offering some comments about my experiences here after I make my return to Sherwood Cottage and have a chance to digest those experiences a bit more. I am still busy, after all...
One thing that was brought to my attention, though, and which was quite the welcome surprise is this comment from the publisher of the Tales after Tolkien volumes, in which I have a chapter. It is markedly flattering to be quoted (even if one of the comments is not entirely correctly attributed) and cited as something of a celebrity. I do not know that I am entirely ready for the attention, although I welcome it. Perhaps it will help in the ongoing pursuit of a permanent position...
More later.
One thing that was brought to my attention, though, and which was quite the welcome surprise is this comment from the publisher of the Tales after Tolkien volumes, in which I have a chapter. It is markedly flattering to be quoted (even if one of the comments is not entirely correctly attributed) and cited as something of a celebrity. I do not know that I am entirely ready for the attention, although I welcome it. Perhaps it will help in the ongoing pursuit of a permanent position...
More later.
Thursday, May 14, 2015
20150514.0856
I am currently at the 50th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan. In a relatively short time, I will be presiding over a panel titled "Looking Back at the Middle Ages," which does some of the same kind of work that I have tended to do in my own research. It focuses, however, on earlier medievalisms than I do, which should prove illuminating. I anticipate having many opportunities to take good notes, as well as to deliver them.
It is good to be at the conference again. I have already run into a few people whom I only see at this event--as well as a couple of others whom I have not seen in some time but am glad to have met again. I look forward to many more such meetings, although less to the partings that must inevitably follow. Still, "not all tears are an evil," as one writer notes...and it will be good to be back at Sherwood Cottage.
It is good to be at the conference again. I have already run into a few people whom I only see at this event--as well as a couple of others whom I have not seen in some time but am glad to have met again. I look forward to many more such meetings, although less to the partings that must inevitably follow. Still, "not all tears are an evil," as one writer notes...and it will be good to be back at Sherwood Cottage.
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