Posts filed under 'Littademia'
Geoffrey Chaucer is back on his blog after a hiatus almost as long as Lost’s, with a comment on the television writers’ strike. He proposes some shows of his own which sound a tad familiar, perhaps - but in literature, what is wholly new? And the first proposal in particular is oh so tempting:
Sectes in the Borough: This hot and explicit showe wil handle religious dissent yn a more free and open way than evere bifor. Carrie Baxter is an underground writer of Lollard tractes in Norwich and the oonly thynge she loveth moore than questioning the validitie of the institucional church is her III best freendes: sexie Samantha, who seduceth many a preeste, intellectuale Charlotte, who speketh out ayeinst women being unable to preche, and Miranda Kempe, who receiveth visiouns from God. Thei meet every week to rede of the Bible in Ynglisshe and talke smacke about pilgrymage sites. Carrie is alwey resistinge the temptaciouns to submit to the orthodoxie of the Church, personifyed by Archbishop Thomas Arundel, whom she clepeth “Mr. Big.” (Paraventure for a cabel network, by cause main-streme audiences aren not redi for frank depicciouns of heretical practice?)
Cashmere Mafia begone! What could a heretical city girl enjoy more, than talking smack about pilgrimage sites? (If “pilgrimage sites” means “happy hour venues,” and I think it must, I did that every day last week!)
January 17th, 2008
Over at his blog, Jeff Prucher has challenged readers to think of five major LIVING poets. Can you do it? No cheating, no Googling, no looking at your bookshelf or New Yorkers! For verisimilitude, pretend Alex Trebek is staring smugly at you: doo DEE doo doo, doo DEE doo. . . Write down your answers, then see if you agree with mine (after the fold).
This was a little sad, since two poets I had the pleasure of hearing in person, whom I’d like to list, the charming Agha Shahid Ali and Stanley Kunitz, passed away recently.
Among living masters, Seamus Heaney plainly rules the roost (and would hold his own against the greatest dead poets, I’d wager). I can have only four others, so this list is biased: Louise Gluck, Jack Gilbert, Mary Oliver, Li-Young Li. Not necessarily the biggest names, but they’re the ones I want on my list of “major” (whatever that means) poets. Who would you choose?
October 31st, 2007
Apparently Karl Rove considers himself both Beowulf and Grendel. How strange. And to think I always thought he was the smartest of the bunch. . .
Via In the Middle
August 29th, 2007
Ah, the British Library. In one room: Shakespeare’s First Folio, Thomas More’s last letter to Henry III, Lewis Carroll’s diary, the Gutenberg Bible, a letter from Darwin to Wallace, a letter from Newton to Hooke, Shakespeare’s mortgage, Magna Carta, a page from Edward VI’s diary (very bad handwriting), the manuscript of Jane Eyre. I got goosebumps! The British Library is also holding a special exhibition of religious texts, called “Sacred.” The Lindisfarne Gospels alone are worth the tour, but I began to go into shock after an hour of world-class illuminated manuscripts.
My favorite document - and this surprised me - was actually a little 1609 quarto of Shakespeare’s sonnets. It lay open to 116, probably his most famous sonnet, and one of my favorite poems. Have a guess at the first two lines?
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
admit impediments. . .
Sonnet 116 is actually mislabeled in the British Library’s copy - the 6 is flipped, to read 119. But there was no mistaking one of the finest love poems ever written:
Sonnet 116
William Shakespeare
Let me not to the marriage of true minds
Admit impediments. Love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove:
O no! it is an ever-fixed mark
That looks on tempests and is never shaken;
It is the star to every wand’ring bark,
Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.
Love’s not Time’s fool, though rosy lips and cheeks
Within his bending sickle’s compass come;
Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks,
But bears it out even to the edge of doom:
If this be error and upon me proved,
I never writ, nor no man ever loved.
July 29th, 2007
Self-described “exhibition of weirds” Farrago’s Wainscot has a suspiciously convincing webpage for Associate Professor of Sanguinary History Anna S. Oppenhagen-Petrescu, from class syllabi to CV - including the preface of her new book, snarky footnotes, and slightly ambiguous encomiums from her adviser/mentor/maker:
In my 250 years of scholarship, I had never met such an ambitious, ravenous, or charming young classicist as Anna. As work on her dissertation progressed, it became clear to me that I could serve the Community in the most profound way by Converting this young creature, despite my reservations regarding her gender. Nevertheless, I felt that my duty to the academic world was greater than my duty to personal taste, and with a clear conscience I brought Anna into the fold. My expectations have been exceeded time and time again by her exceptional career.
Via
July 5th, 2007
Hey. . . where’s that essay I wrote twelve years ago on narrative unreliability in Monty Python and the Holy Grail? I think its time has come!
(They also need a chapter on the reification of puns.)
Cultural Studies of the Modern Middle Ages
Table of contents
PART I: MEDIEVAL, REALITY, TELEVISION
Models of (Im)Perfection: Parodic Refunctioning in Spike TV’s The Joe Schmo Show and Geoffrey Chaucer’s “Tale of Sir Thopas”–Kimberly K. Bell
“She appears as brightly radiant as she once was foul”: Medieval Conversion Narratives and Contemporary Makeover Shows”–Angela Jane Weisl
Outwit, Outplay, Outlast: Moral Lessons from Handlyng Synne and Survivor–Cynthia A. Ho and James Driggers
Back to the Future: Living the Liminal Life in the Manor House and the Medieval Dream Vision–Betsy McCormick
PART III: MEDIEVAL, REALITY, POLITICS
The Crisis of Legitimation in Bush’s American and Henry IV’s England–Daniel T. Kline
Torture, Inquisition, Medievalism, Reality, TV–Steve Guthrie
Wolves, Outlaws, and Enemy Combatants–Michael E. Moore
Exteriority Is Not a Negation But a Marvel: Hospitality, Terrorism, Levinas, Beowulf–Eileen A. Joy
July 3rd, 2007
Iliad Cenotaphs: Echepolus
acrylic on wood
Jonathan Gabel, 2007
Poring over the hyper-detailed text of the Iliad, Jonathan Gabel has envisioned each soldier’s death-wound, recreating the negative space of the wound as an anatomical model.
The result is striking: each model represents a tiny fraction of the human body, but a part essential to its integrity as a whole. The wound that killed Echepolus, above, was a direct hit to the front of the skull:
Antilochus was the first to kill a man—
a well-armed Trojan warrior, Echepolus,
son of Thalysius, a courageous man,
who fought in the front ranks. He hit his helmet crest,
topped with horsehair plumes, spearing his forehead.
The bronze point smashed straight through the frontal bone.
Darkness hid his eyes and he collapsed, like a tower,
falling down into that frenzied battle.
The model is shaped like a speartip, as if it had been cast directly from Echepolus’ gaping wound. Spongy white frontal bone and the wiggly profile of the cerebral cortex are clearly visible. Each of the five pieces in the series match Homer’s account: the slightly larger track of Democoon’s temporal deathblow transects his eyes and nasal sinuses; unfortunate Leucus got it in the groin. . . Gabel appears to proceed chronologically; if he intends to finish the Iliad, he has a couple hundred more soldiers to go.
Such careful reconstruction of the medical details of an epic battle may make Gabel the classical equivalent of a rabidly picky fanboy. But it’s also an effective way to shift the romanticized, rhyme-encrusted deaths of literary heroes into a less glorified space: the ER. Films like the 300 make ancient war look like a dance. But war, in any time and place, involves chopping people into meaty, exposed chunks. It’s appropriate to be reminded of that.
*****
As I was putting this post together, the Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society called my attention to another remarkable instance of the body as negative space: the plaster casts of Pompeii. In 79 AD, Pompeii and its twenty thousand inhabitants were buried by toxic gases and ash from the eruption of nearby Vesuvius. The hot ash hardened, and as the corpses of its victims decayed, they left body-shaped hollow cavities in the ash.
Composite image of the first twelve body casts from Pompeii
from “From Fragments to Icons” by Eugene Dwyer, Interpreting Ceramics 2005
Beginning in 1863, the agonized forms of Pompeii’s dead were recaptured, as a series of plaster casts made from these negative spaces (the ash “molds” were destroyed in the process). Some casts are detailed enough to capture contorted faces and folds of clothing. In the 1980s, a translucent resin-epoxy material was tried that would not conceal any bones or other objects still in the cavity, resulting in a gruesome wax-like representation of a young girl, her teeth and bones exposed to view.
But most poignant are the nearly featureless casts, almost cartoon-like, in which the position and angles of the body are more than sufficient to convey signify terror or resignation. The suprisingly graceful cast of a desperately writhing dog, unable to escape its chain, is perhaps as close as art can get to capturing death without a trace of self-consciousness.
Watchdog (”chained dog”)
plaster cast, 1874
photo: G. Sommer
from “From Fragments to Icons” by Eugene Dwyer, Interpreting Ceramics 2005
June 1st, 2007
If the word “Kalamazoo” prompts you to imagine a child’s musical toy, skip this post. But if it makes you hyperventilate and run to double-check obscure citations, the cruel wit of Herr Professor Doktor Boethius P. von Korncrake may divert you as May 10 approaches:
Yes, I am complicit in this enterprise, but to my credit I have taken the honorable route of making my presentations unusually unintelligible. My papers, when read out loud, are nothing more than 20 mintues of unadulterated tosh, a fact which saves me incalcuable amounts of time in the writing, and confounds my audience into utter silence in the hearing.
One would imagine that my listeners would rise up as a body and cast me from the academy as a charlatan, but show me a single academic who is brave enough to say, in front of his colleagues, “I don’t understand,” and I’ll send immediate notice to my friend Diogenes to extinguish his lamp.
If Herr Professor waxes too cynical for you, revive your tarnished idealism with an optimistic medieval pick-up line (”Woldstow haue me shyfte thyne voweles?”) from one of my favorite bloggers, Geoffrey Chaucer. (Where have you been lately, Chaucer? I miss your posts).
May 5th, 2007
SCQ tells us how to write a paper! If only I’d learned useful stuff like this in grad school, I’d have already appeared on a History Channel documentary about The Da Vinci Code, spewing some sort of bombast about Merovingian mitochondrial DNA. Ah, the road not taken. . .
TEN BASIC HEURISTIC PRINCIPLES FOR ACADEMIC TEXT CRAFTING, OR HOW TO PUBLISH A PAPER IN A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL
April 30th, 2007
Le Mont Solaire
Mont Saint-Michel, 2006
Things are getting away from me, so here’s a list of especially good art & book links I’ve collected from the past week.
One of my favorite blogs, Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, posts about a stunning giant sundial constructed at Mont Saint-Michel, off the French coast. This video, “Le Mont Solaire”, from the project website, shows the sundial in action. The hours are indicated by reflective panels in the sand, while the spire of the abbey itself is the gnomon (the pointer casting the moving shadow).
Proceedings also has a fascinating but disturbing post on books bound in human skin. Apparently the term for this is anthropodermic bibliopegy. (Because we really, really needed a special term just for this.)
In the “disturbing books” category, our runner-up is this post from Street Anatomy about a renowned anatomical atlas whose illustrations may have been based on the dissected bodies of Holocaust victims.
3 quarks daily is like that fascinating but garrulous friend whom you find yourself dizzily talking to until 3am, despite knowing you’ll go to work the next morning sleep-deprived and sallow. I can barely keep up with its feed. In the past week or so it’s called my attention to Bookforum’s review of A Natural History of Pragmatism by Joan Richardson, which scared me, as I did not realize Jonathan Edwards went to Yale (trust me, that’s scary for personal reasons); and a truly enjoyable NY Review of Books article on Shakespeare and power, by Stephen Greenblatt, and an article on atheism and academe that I’ll have more to say on later.
Then there’s novelist Jonathan Lethem, currently popping up all over the blogosphere with interesting things to say. He’s chatting with Janna Levin at Seed , interviewed at Salon , and, if you are really interested in his perspectives on plagiarism, copyright, and creativity, you could read Lethem’s 12-page article “The Ecstasy of Influence” from the February Harper’s (which, alas, when I went to get it, has disappeared into the subscribers-only realm. Harper’s redid their website on April 1, so any old links you have may no longer work).
I don’t begrudge Harper’s their subscription fees - I’ve been meaning to subscribe for a while, but it’s ostentatiously ironic that Lethem’s article on the future of open source (and how he’s giving away film rights to his latest work) is now behind a paywall. Naughty Harper’s!
Update: Harper’s has fixed the Lethem link already (see comment below). I take the naughty thing back.
And over at the Valve, Amardeep Singh suggests peer review for blogs. Read the comments, too; they touch on some of the major problems with peer review in general, and the fundamental differences between blogging and formal publishing, which reminds me that Bruce Sterling has, if you missed it, given blogs only 10 years to live. Uh-oh. I’ll never be caught up with all the things I want to post by then. But it will be nice when my feeds dwindle to some manageable number - so I can read my New Yorker backlog. These days, life is TMI.
April 3rd, 2007
I haven’t posted nearly enough procrastinatory quizzes lately - so here’s one from Geoffrey Chaucer, especially for my dear friend mdvlist.
Everyone else, I warn you, it’s hard. I haven’t done this badly on a quiz since calculus I!
January 23rd, 2007
This is the poster for the 2008 Australian and New Zealand Shakespeare Association (ANZSA) conference:
Possible topics might include, but are not limited to: Shakespeare and histories and theories of the body, representations of the body, the actor’s body, cultural appropriations, Shakespeare and the senses, phenomenology, embodiment and gender.
Pluses: it’s in New Zealand! Get thee to thy computer and write a proposal, if only so you have an excuse to go there and worship at the shrine of Peter Jackson.
Minuses: if Shakespeare weren’t already dead, I’d be very concerned for his health. I mean, he’s a marble torso with a dollop of entrails. Is it wrong that I find this just as disturbing as anything by Susini?
ANZSA Conference - Home
January 13th, 2007
It’s all over the news now that the weather is abnormal and shockingly warm. Well, duh. Although it’s been unusually warm for months now, and 2006 was predicted to be the third-warmest year on record in the US, many news organizations waited until the end of the calendar year to report this, as if they thought a few last-minute frigid December days might lower the mean. (It actually got warmer).
Between repairing my back fence (victim of an abnormally rough windstorm) and waiting for my internet connection to revive (victim of a storm several hundred miles away), I ran across two poems that are not exactly about global warming, but seemed apropos.
From a Discarded Image, Franz Wright
The Beforelife
The world’s wordless beauty’s
intact and can never be other than
intact no matter what
harm we perpetually do
and have done
and will I can I assure you everyone
do,
forever,
as they say
World’s wordless beauty, and the word’s
worldless liberty
The champagne shopping binge
is over
The check is about to arrive
and nobody knows how much it will be
I know I don’t give a shit not now
The world’s
wordless
beauty intact, indeed
it can never be other
than
radiantly intact
like the stars, like the stars
when the stars have no names once again.
Night, CK Williams
Collected Poems
1.
Somehow a light plane
coming in low at three
in the morning at a local airstrip
hits a complex of tones
in its growl so I hear mingled
with it a peal of church bells,
swelling in and out
of audibility, arrhythmic, but rich and insistent, then,
through I try to hold them,
they dissolve, fade away;
only that monochrome
drone bores on
alone through the dark.
2.
This is one of our new
winters, dry, windless
and warm, when even the lightest cover is stifling.
A luxuriant flowering
pear tree used to shelter
the front of our house,
but last August a storm
took it, a bizarrely focused
miniature tornado never
before seen in this climate,
and now the sky outside
the window is raw, inert
air viscous and sour.
3.
I was ill, and by the merest
chance happened to be
watching as the tree fell,
I saw the branches helplessly
flail the fork of the trunk
with a great creak split
and the heavier half scar
down, catch on wires,
and hang, lifting and subsiding
in the last barbs of the gale
as through it didn’t know yet
it was dead, when it did,
and slipped slowly sideways
onto its own debris in the gutter.
4.
When Ivan Karamazov
is reciting his wracking disquisition
about the evils perpetrated
on children, opining whether
human salvation would be worth
a single child’s suffering,
you know he’s close to braking
down, sobbing in shame
and remorse, and I wonder
if he’d imagined our whole planet,
the children with it,
wagered in a mad gamble
of world against wealth,
what would he have done?
5.
What do I do? Fret
mostly, and brood, and lie
awake. Not to sleep
wasn’t always so punishing.
Once, in a train, stalled
in mountains. In snow,
I was roused by the clank of a trainman’s crowbar
on the undercarriage of my car.
I lifted the leathery shade
And across a moon-dazzled
pine-fringed slope
A fox cut an arc; everything
else was pure light.
6.
I wanted it to last forever,
but I was twenty, and before
I knew it was back in my dream.
Do I ever sleep that way
now, innocent of everything
Beyond my ken? No,
others are always with me,
others I love with my life,
yet I’ll leave them scant
evidence of my care, and little
trace of my good intentions,
as little as the solacing shush
the phantom limbs of our slain
tree will leave on the night.
January 10th, 2007
Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog reminds me why I didn’t do my PhD in medieval lit:
So it befel in dede that a volvo did pulle up and a voys from it seyd, ‘You going to Philadelphia?’ And thys creatur seyd, ‘I go to MLA,’ and the voys seyde that MLA was part of Philadelphee and thus sche cam with hem. And in the volvo was a cumpany of thre yonge scolers, to wit I woman and II men. And thys creatur spak to them and seyd, ‘Tell me what maner ffolk ye aren.’ And oon the men seyd, ‘My dissertation addresses the pressing question of the relation of the Owl and the Nightingale to the paradoxes of materiality and to changing ideas of spirituality at the same time that it questions what I would call outmoded models of allegoresis. Essentially, I propose that this heavily mediated text engages with debate poetry not as a generic exemplar but rather vis-a-vis an interstitial combination of truth claims and bestiary passages about cephalopods.’ And thys creatur was soore confusid, and sche prayid to ower lord and wepid gret teares for the passioun of the child Jesu who had been born in a maunger to taak awey the synnes of all ffolke and also to deliver her from MLA.
The most amazing revelation here is not that the MLA is frightening (duh), it’s that cephalopodmania has infiltrated humanities circles. I thought this was a strictly scientific affliction. What IS it with the damn squid (and octopi)? Somebody? Anybody??
January 7th, 2007
Inspired by McSweeney’s, my friend Sylvia “discovered” this previously unknown poem by ee cummings (who apparently had a foot fetish).
1225
stockings are hung
lovingly (my love
and i are bare
foot & quietly wait for
our stockings - gently
to be filled) with
love, my love
i do not stir
my heart bare & your
bare heart
two hearts (our stockings full
Thanks, Sylvia!
December 14th, 2006
Previous Posts