Dragon*Con CfP

Call for Participation / Call for Abstracts

Institute for Comics Studies
Comic Book Convention Conference Series

DRAGON*CON 3rd ANNUAL COMICS & POPULAR ARTS CONFERENCE

Atlanta, Georgia September 3-6, 2010

The Institute for Comic Studies and Dragon*Con present their third annual academic conference for the studies of comics and the popular arts. The conference will take place at Dragon*Con, the largest multi- media, popular culture convention focusing on science fiction and fantasy, gaming, comics, literature, art, music, and film in the US. For more info on Dragon*Con, visit http://dragoncon.org/

Please submit a proposal abstract for a 15/20-minute presentation that engages in substantial scholarly examinations of comic books, manga, graphic novels, anime, science/speculative fiction, fantasy, or other parts of popular culture. A broad range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives is being sought, including literary and art criticism, philosophy, linguistics, history, and communication. Proposals may range from discussions of the nature of the comics medium, analyses of particular works and authors, discussions of the visual language of comics, comics pedagogy, cross-cultural and cross-medium comparisons, and more.

This year, we're especially interested in proposals dealing with anime and manga, though we're open to any topics relevant to the study of comics and the popular arts.

This conference at Dragon*Con represents the Institute for Comics Studies' mission to promote the study, understanding, and cultural legitimacy of comics and to support the discussion and dissemination of this study and understanding via public venues.

100 to 200 word proposals due: May 30, 2010

Please submit your proposals at: http://www.hsu.edu/form.aspx?ekfrm=40054

More information at: http://www.utdallas.edu/~mattbrown/DragonCon.html

Send any questions to: thehangedman@gmail.com Participants must register for the convention. Information can be found here: http://dragoncon.org/members.php#DC_Memb

Prospective participants are encouraged to submit a guest application in advance at the following address: http://dragoncon.org/dc_guest_app.php

Acceptance to the academic conference is no guarantee of "guest" status at the convention (and indeed, it is very unlikely).

Matt Brown
Dragon*Con Academics Chair
thehangedman@gmail.com
www.instituteforcomicsstudies.org

Friday Child Sacrifice

Today I Stumbledupon this page of odd facts, at it includes this little gem:

The Anglo-Saxons believed Friday to be such an unlucky day that they ritually slaughtered any child unfortunate enough to be born on that day.

I've never even heard such a claim before. Does anyone know where it comes from?

The Ubiquity of Dante's Inferno and Breasts

In the run-up to the release of the new Dante's Inferno game, even before the marketing campaign hit high-gear, I noticed that the pop culture medieval flavor of the month had moved from Beowulf to Dante's Inferno. The culmination of this phenomenon occured earlier this week, when a student showed me his 19th-century edition of The Inferno, and within three minutes of that I ran into two other non-English majors reading Dante for fun. Of course, in the case of the two non-English majors, each was inspired by the game; one said, "my friends said I'd enjoy it more if I read the book first," and the other had already played the game and said, "the book is really different."

For more on the differences and the ubiquity of Beatrice's breasts, see Got Medieval's review of the game.

As a scholarly graybeard, I'm supposed to be immune to mass market commercialization of a classic of medieval literature in console game format, but I have to confess I'm so completely swept into it that I'm actually considering buying a console system just so I can play the game. I mean, look at this trailer:



I mean, how can I resist diving into Hell after Beatrice (and her breasts) to battle demons?

Beware of D&D LARPers!

Beware! If your colleague plays D&D, and even acts that crap out*, she'll probably open fire at a faculty meeting. Me, I have a shield in my office and a chainmail bowtie, so I'd no doubt survive, except in the unlikely event that she would roll a natural 20.

Really, now. I could understand if she had pulled a blade, or if she were addicted to Call of Duty or some game with a gun, this might, might be relevant. Good job, Boston Herald.


* I'm assuming the "acted that crap out" means she did LARPs, or Live Action Role-Playing.

On Chaucer and Valentine's Day

Friend of the Wordhoard K.A. Laity has a piece about Chaucer and Valentine's Day.

An Idea

As I complained in the comments of a previous post, aside from things like joining Facebook groups and online petitions, there's little pressure those of us can bring to bear outside the UK to save paleography at King's College London.

One thing we can do, however, is create a visual image. If enough of us make images like this, it just might have an effect.

Paleography at King's College London Petition

There's a petition to save paleography at King's College London here. I'm going to sign it, but I would especially urge us to encourage our colleagues in the UK to sign it. I suspect their voices will get more attention than mine.

A Passive-Aggressive Post for Google Reader

Dear Google Reader,

Please stop re-marking all my read posts as "unread" so that I have hundreds and hundreds of old posts to wade through every day, making it impossible for me to keep up on the news. Weeks of dealing with this stupidity has left me out of all the latest happenings.

For example, I just found out today about the threat to the King's College London Paleography Chair, something the rest of the medievalist world has apparently known about for a while. In fact, I just joined the "Save the King's London Paleography Chair" Facebook group about two minutes ago.

I love you Google Reader, but sometimes I don't know if you requite my feelings.

XOXOXO
Scott

RIP: Bruce Mitchell

Word has gone out that Bruce Mitchell has passed away. I have no further information at this time, but I believe he was in his 90s.

Pastist and Presentist

I'm using Kathleen Biddick's The Shock of Medievalism in something I'm writing. Though I generally have little good to say about the book, Biddick offers up terminology useful in establishing a framework for talking about medievalism.

Two of the most useful terms, however, are two of the ugliest: pastist (which “argues for radical historical difference between the Middle Ages and the present”)and presentist (which “looks into the mirror of the Middle ages and asks it to reflect back histories of modernist or postmodernist identities”). They're ugly on the page and ugly rolling of the tongue, and are kind of unsophisticated in their construction.* The terms are, however, very useful.

So, a plea -- has anyone out there run into terms that are roughly synomous with pastist and presentist but have a bit more elegance to them?



*That contemporary sage Ferris Bueller mocked the ugly and promiscuous slapping of suffixes on ideas during his notorious day off. As he teaches, "Not that I condone fascism, or any -ism for that matter. -Ism's in my opinion are not good. A person should not believe in an -ism." I would argue that the same goes for -ists. Also, let us not call this idea "Buellerism" except in the most ironic way.

K'zoo Schedule Up

The 2010 International Congress on Medieval Studies program is up!

Medieval America: Progress Report

Someone asked me recently how my monograph I'm working on, tentatively entitled Medieval America, is coming along. Since I haven't mentioned it in so long, here's a progress report.

Everything came to a crawl in the Fall semester, when a heavy teaching load (5 general education courses) and service responsibilities stopped me from doing much of anything else. I had nearly completed the chapter entitled "Medieval American History" when a technological failure ate most of what I'd done on it.

You would think that I'd be discouraged, but honestly it was a relief. When I write too slowly I lose my sense of voice, and instead turn out that horrible turgid academic prose that relies on footnotes where an explanatory argument would be better. I had all the material down, but I hated the way I had written it.

This semester (God willing) I'll have much more time to devote to Medieval America, and I think that lost chapter will be re-written much better than the first time I did it.

So, as a practical matter, I'm not much further along now than I was at the open of the fall semester, but I'm in a much better place. I'm going to start chopping the chapters up into conference presentations (no venues selected yet), so if you want a preview, by the end of the year you should be able to hear one.

Jewish-Christian Marriage

This is interesting: Archival evidence suggesting that despite prohibitions against it marriage between Jews and Christians in 15th-century Poland may have been more possible than previously thought.

Medieval Queens

Spinning Clio has re-printed an old post on medieval queens, which would be an excellent resource for non-academic medieval history buffs, particularly if you think you might be interested in medieval women's history.

The Six Million Dollar Beowulf

Easily in the top 10 cool things on TV in the 1970s was the episode of the Six Million Dollar Man in which Steve Austin fights Bigfoot, who as it turns out is also bionic and has been created by aliens for some reason that I cannot recall all these many decades ever.

One thing I didn't notice as a kid was the possible Beowulf analogue that we see around minute 6 of the clip below:



Steve Austin rips off Bigfoot's arm, then Bigfoot flees into some sort of underground lair. As I remember (and if anyone has seen the full episode more recently, please correct any of my errors), as it turns out, Bigfoot is just misunderstood, and they end up freezing him in cryogenic stasis or some other such thing.

It's possible that the arm-ripping isn't a Beowulf allusion, and is just a coincidence -- but then I wouldn't get the chance to post something so awesome on the Wordhoard, would I? Oh, and by the way, if you don't think the Six Million Dollar Man fighting Bigfoot is cool, then you are a bad person.

Girl Medieval Nerds

Medieval Living has a couple of recent posts revisiting the discussion of girl medieval nerds, one recommending girls read the works of Steven Till.

My own daughter fled from medieval geekdom* a few years ago, primarily because I would have liked it -- and there's nothing less cool than something your dad likes. All things medieval got jettisoned with all things literary.

I'm started to see the veneer cracking, though, as her own natural curiousity is getting the better of her. It started with history (with a brief enthusiasm for the Egyptians), then moved into Latin. Now, after hearing that a non-academic adult male friend was finding Pride and Prejudice "freakin' hilarious,"** she nonchalantly expressed an interest in that. We recently watched the movie Labyrinth, and she really enjoyed that -- the first open interest in anything vaguely medievalist.

So, for the female Wordhoarders out there, what medievalist bait would you suggest for a high school girl who's desperately trying not to show an interest in anything medieval? It has to be subtle, or she'll suspect the trap and I'll lose my quarry.


*I prefer the word "geek" to "nerd." For a brief overview of the difference, see here. Dork, of course, rarely applies to medieval enthusiasts.
** If you don't find Pride and Prejudice funny from the very first line, you're not reading it right.

Sypeck's Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier Available

Jeff Sypeck's The Tale of Charlemagne and Ralph the Collier is now available in all sorts of different forms, from paper to PDF.

I wonder how much for a copy inscribed on vellum?

1999 Beowulf Still Bad

The 1999 futuristic film version of Beowulf starring Christopher Lambert was on TV the other day, so I decided to record it to see if maybe it had become fun in an ironic sort of way now that some time has passed. I wanted to write something about how medievalism is adapted to science fiction in the film.

I regret to report that it remains unwatchable. It took me three tries to get 20 minutes into it, and I can go no further. It still holds a 0% rating at Rotten Tomatoes which is, in a perverse way, impressive.

Medieval Style Brick Oven

While searching for something completely unrelated, I ran into these instructions for building a medieval-style brick oven. It's clearly not meant to be super authentic, since it has materials such as a cheap plastic tarp.

What I found fascinating was the claim that "Our oven is based on one from the 12th century found in an excavation at York, England (i.e., Norman period), although it is similar to earlier Viking Age ones. The original was made out of wickerwork and completely covered inside and out with daub."

A wickerwork oven? I never would have thought of that, but protected by daub, properly dried and fired, there's no reason that wouldn't have worked.

Here's someone else who underestimated the power of wicker for baking.

Demands that I Leave the Field

Over at History News Network, Jonathan Jarrett (perhaps better-known for his excellent blog, A Corner of Tenth-Century Europe) expresses annoyance with me for my piece on the Medieval Warm Period. If I take his argument correctly, he suggests that it is irrelevant whether the MWP occurred because MWP denial allows policies to be made today that he and other "thinking people" support.

Obviously I disagree, and have no immediate plans to seek non-medievalist employment, but his piece is worth a read.