Tristan and Isolde on the Horizon

Number One over at Cinerati requested my comments on the forthcoming Tristan and Isolde film and the legend. I promised them too him, then got too busy with the holidays to write about it.

As of this writing, there is very little official about the movie. One of my students got a free poster that she passed on to me, and there is a fan site, but the official site is very short on detail. Much, then, of what I have to say about the film here is going to be partly speculative, and should be taken with an appropriate-sized grain of salt.

After having viewed the trailer and other marketing stuff, I'm not too hopeful about the film. It appears as if it is going to strip all of the interesting adult material out of the tale and make it simply another dog-tired movie about true love overcoming disapproving authority. Perhaps if I were a sixteen-year-old girl I'd find that exciting and fresh, but as someone old and jaded I recognize it as cliche and childish.

[As an aside here, why can't we have filmmakers today who portray ADULT romantic relationships, like Hitchcock used to do? Watch Notorious and see if you can stomach seeing Meg Ryan or Leonardo DiCaprio on the screen again]

Of course, the versions of Tristran and Isolde vary (as do the spellings of their names, e.g. Tristram, Iseult, etc), so I am sure the filmmakers can make a case that their particular movie is a relatively accurate adaptation of one version or another. My favorite versions of the tale deal with issues of the difficulties of love between two people, rather than the difficulties of love in the face of external opposition.

The McGuffin at the center of the Tristran and Isolde myth is a love potion. Generally, the pair drink the potion while Tristan is escorting Isolde to meet her fiance King Mark, and naturally trouble ensues. What differs is what happens before and after. Most of the time, Tristan has been (apparently) mortally wounded when he meets Isolde, and she nurses him back to health. In some versions, they fall in love, but their love is severely tested with Isolde discovers that Tristan has killed one of her kin.

In my favorite versions of the story, though, Isolde and Tristan do not fall in love then, and Isolde is filled with hatred for Tristan when she discovers he has been the enemy of her family. Also, in some versions of the tale the love potion isn't permanent -- it only lasts for a particular period of time, such as seven years. The temporary love potion is also my favored McGuffin.

Why? Because if they are not in love before they drink the potion, and the effects of the potion are known to be temporary, we get a much more interesting and adult exploration of love. Image you are one of the lovers and you drink such a potion. Now you are really and truly in love with the other person, and are unwilling to help yourself. Intellectually, however, you know that the love is drug-induced, not natural -- but that doesn't stop it from feeling real. Yet you cannot simply shrug, say "oh well," and abandon yourself to the love of the person, because you know that in seven years the potion will stop working and presumably your love will die. Your love has an expiration date.

These versions of the tale intrigue me more because they deal with real adult issues. Who among us hasn't ourselves (or seen a close friend) loved someone whom they knew to be bad for them? Intellectually, you understand that the object of your love is someone you should hate -- and yet you do not. By the same token, how many of us have entered into a relationship with a lover that we knew could never last?

Sometimes the Tristan and Isolde myth is silly and trite, while other times it is powerful and adult. I fear the coming film may be the former.

Hooray! I'm Livier than the Dead!

I just realized today that my ranking on TTLB Academy is still at 16, but that Public Brewery has fallen below me.

Why should I care about being above Public Brewery? Because Brewer has been on hiatus since October 15th, and it is rather embarrassing to be ranked below a blog that hasn't been updated for over a month.

Of course, by linking to Public Brewery in this post, I'll probably knock it back up a notch above me.

Intention: What Did He Know, and When Did He Know It?

I'm a bit surprised by how interested in authorial intentionality people are; I posted "Intentionally Omitted" primarily to clarify what Drout, Hodges and I were dancing around for the One Ringers. The comments have been interesting, especially as a window into how minds work when they are grappling with intentionality.

I wanted to address the issues raised by Chris of Nihil Fit in one of his comments. Chris wrote:

Although it may be the case that it is difficult to determine the author's intent, it does not follow that such a project is impossible, nor does it follow that the author's intent is irrelevant (a strong claim probably not intended by Nokes). Can't we infer something about intent from examining the original context/audience?

First off, let's give Chris points for cleverness in questioning what I "intended" in my post -- he made me laugh harder than anyone else that day. I do think, however, that the intent of the author is almost irrelevant -- i.e., it can tell us a few things about meaning, but those things are not extraordinarily important (more about this in a bit).

I find that, in general, epistemological concerns often result in unwarranted skepticism and even worse, metaphysical conclusions. [...] Just because we can't have Cartesian certainty about a matter doesn't mean there is no truth about that matter. We should apporach each work on a case-by-sace basis, asking what we can discern about intent, rather than embracing a paradigm that dismisses such concerns altogether.

My first post primarily dealt with epistemology and intention (for those of you playing at home, epistemology is the theory or study of knowledge -- basically how we know things). Chris is right to protest that Cartesian uncertainty tells us little about whether or not a matter is true (plus, as a medievalist, I'm not particularly beholden to de Cartes anyway).

Let's grant, though, Cartesian certainty. Let's say that scientists at MIT have come up with an Intention-o-meter (patent pending) that is able to detect and measure authorial intention to an exactness of four decimal points. We have absolute Cartesian, epistemological certainty, right?

Well, not really, because our Intention-o-meter (patent still pending) only tells us what the author intended -- it does not follow that the author's intention determines meaning for a text. In other words, even if I know EXACTLY why the author of Gilgamesh decided to make him 2/3 god and 1/3 man instead of some other fraction, it probably doesn't affect the meaning of the text significantly. I take from it the idea that Gilgamesh was more god than man, regardless.

Let me give you another example. The other day one of my colleagues was telling the tale of a freshman essay he received, describing a child afflicted with "Attention Defecate Disorder" [sic].
Now, I can state with reasonable certainty that the author intended to write "Attention Deficit Disorder," and simply made an error. OK, so why did I laugh why my colleague told me? Why did you laugh when you read it?

Because we recognize that meaning is not held in the author's intentions. The meaning of the text is that the child has some sort of bizarre disorder, perhaps an inordinate interest in scatology. If we challenge the writer, she's probably argue, "Yes, but what I meant to say was...", conflating the idea of meaning with intention. If meaning were actually held in intention, though, the phrase "Attention Defecate Disorder" wouldn't be funny; it would just be a spelling error. We laugh because intention and meaning are radically disconnected.

Of course, intention is not always completely irrelevant. I assume my colleague wrote a wry comment next to the error and proceeded as if the paper had expressed the idea correctly. Manuscript study relies often on figuring out scribal intentions by using errors in the copying of texts to determine a manuscript's geneology. Still, when we edit a text we often correct it -- the very act of correction implying that the meaning of the text can be disconnected from the author's intention.

Rather than belabor the point any further, let me simply offer an example of two very similar texts: Frankenstein and Dracula (the books, not movies). Frankenstein works best when Shelley know exactly what she is doing; Dracula works best when Stoker loses control of what he is doing and lets his anxieties take over.

Daly, and Adjuncts as Professors

This is news? Though the academic blogosphere hasn't exactly been a-buzz about it, cable and radio news has made a fuss of late about John Daly's nasty e-mail to a student about her politics.

In case you missed the story, Professor John Daly of Warren Community College sent a nasty e-mail to freshman Rebecca Beach about her involvement with a lecture by some Iraq War veterans. Some of the dirtiest bits come at the end, in which he writes:

I will continue to expose your right-wing, anti-people politics until groups like your won't dare show their face on a college campus. Real freedom will come when soldiers in Iraq turn their guns on their superiors and fight for just causes and for people's needs [...]

If the "professors hate America" storyline weren't enough, Daly essentially calls for acts of treason and murder. It doesn't hurt either that Beach is very attractive and telegenic. Nevertheless, it seems to me that this story is far too trivial for the coverage it has received. The media is behaving as if Daly were the next Ward Churchhill. Hardly -- at best he's a Ward Molehill.

Daly is a professor, all right -- he's an adjunct professor. For those who aren't in academe, let me explain what this means: Daly is a part-time employee with an M.A. teaching a few freshman writing classes ... at a community college. In other words, he's very, very, very far down the academic totem pole. Making a news story about this e-mail is roughly the equivalent of calling hell-and-damnation down on all Do-It-Yourself projects because one Home Depot clerk made a snotty comment to you. Is it unprofessional? Yes, of course. Is it worth much concern? Not really; you can find hateful kooks on any streetcorner.

Now the above might sound like an awfully snobby dismissal of adjuncts (the majority of whom work their butts off) and community colleges (which too often get denigrated because of the word "community"), but my point is that this wasn't any angry e-mail from the president of an opinion-making school. This was from an adjunct at a local community college who had been working there for only about a year. Usually, adjuncts suffer a great deal because of their invisibility, and are treated like they are not "real" professors.

OK, fine. Let's say adjuncts aren't real professors. If they aren't real professors, though, can we stop treating Daly like a "real" professor?

OK, let's say they are real professors. In that case, shouldn't the story be about how a real professor is so poorly paid for his real work?

This story seems to want to have it both ways. Just this once, couldn't we let the adjuncts' invisibility work in their favor? Just let Warren Community College quietly decline to re-hire him next semester because of his unprofessional behavior.

By the way, the real scandal is that an English professor produced such a poorly-written e-mail. I mean, my e-mails (and blog posts) have their fair share of surface errors, but the e-mail is just rhetorically horrific.

Fahrenheit Moratorium

I plead with Hollywood (and the Sundance-types too):

Let us declare a voluntary moratorium on the use of the word "fahrenheit" or "celsius" in titles of films or descriptions of them. And, just in case you are considering trying to weasel around the moratorium, let's throw in "centigrade" as well, just in case.

While we're at it, let's declare a voluntary moratorium on more Rocky films. Please!

Don't Fear the Blogger

Since Blogrolling isn't working (again), for your surfing pleasure I send you to Poliblog where Dr. Taylor has revised a Blue Oyster Cult classic.

Don't try singing it aloud -- the meter is messed up -- so just enjoy the satire.

Kleinman on Philology and Tolkien

I just realized that my post of a few days ago linking to Scott Kleinman's comments about the "Wapentake" and philology thread somehow got lost in the wilds of the internet.

So here, again, is a link to Scott Kleinman's post entitled "Tolkien's Use of 'Weapontake'" from his blog Mern Þonke.

Sorry, Scott. I didn't mean to snub you.

Barriers and Academic Blogging

Slate has an interesting article on academic blogging entitled "Attack of the Career-Killing Blogs." The piece is largely pro-blog (at least the academic variety) arguing that "academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university's ideals."

One of the quotes that most interested me was from John Holbo, who argued that the problem with blogs is the lack of peer-review, stating, "It is utterly absurd to propose giving someone credit for activity with no barriers to entry."

I'll have to disagree with his claim that it is absurd; in fact, the absurdity lies in the idea that credit may only be given to things that have barriers to entry. He has (apparently unintentionally) hit upon one of the primary problems of academic publishing: that the barriers are more important than the ideas. Ideally, the quality of the arguments should be judged by, er, the quality of the arguments, not how hard it is to get published.

Take, for example, the PMLA (Publication of the Modern Language Association). Publication in PMLA is relatively prestigious, since the article will be widely distributed to all MLA members. Grad students would love to have their High Theory piece published in PMLA. As a result, the barriers to entry into PMLA are very, very high. You'd think, then, that articles in the PMLA would be some of the most influential in the field, wouldn't you?

But, no, they're not. Don't get me wrong -- PMLA publishes lots of very, very smart stuff. But no one cites a PMLA article in their papers. I've never cited one in any paper, whether orally delivered in a conference or published. I've done lots of editing (both medieval and modern), and have never seen the PMLA cited. Presumably someone, somewhere, has cited the PMLA. The stuff in the PMLA is often smart, but it doesn't have an influence on par with its distribution.

In fact, although tenure and promotion committees rely on peer reviewers to vet the arguments of individual articles (T&P committees have neither the time nor the field expertise to do so themselves reliably), barriers to publication tend to be as political as intellectual. When you reach a certain point in your career, scholarly barriers to publication fall away and are replaced by the limitations of time.

Take my own case. I have three book projects at the moment, in various levels of completion. One is sitting on my desk in camera-ready form ready to go to the printer, one is in the process of having the individual articles edited, and for one the deadline for articles hasn't yet arrived. In all three cases, I was approached by someone else asking me to do the project with them. The only barrier is that of time (a 4/4 load doth not lend itself well to editing three books). The only articles I am working on at the moment were all requested, either as a request for a conference presentation or a request for a submission. The barriers to entry are all on the level of reputation -- once someone knew my reputation, they asked me to do some work for/with them.

Let's say someone publishes in a blog (or perhaps just on his own website) an article he has written. Let's then go on to say that the article, which is not peer-reviewed and is entirely self-published, becomes very influential. Should the scholar receive no credit for that?

Ideally, we would get credit for the quality of our ideas rather than the percieved barriers for publication. Of course, in the world of the practical, Holbo is right. My blog has more readers every day than the sum of readers of my articles in widely-distributed publications like Anglo-Saxon England and The Old English Newsletter. Yet I have no plan to put my blog on any T&P application, even under service; I recognize that although Unlocked Wordhoard is a key component to what I see as my academy duty to be a public intellectual, the academic community as a whole sees it as irrelevant.

Holbo's statement is absurd, and the absurdity is that it is true.

h/t Poliblog

North Korea's Motives

I had always suspected, but it took the Onion to confirm it.

Intentionally Omitted

In a post about error in texts, Drout points out that I seem to be talking obliquely (if one can talk obliquely) about authorial intent. Of course, he is right ... the original version of the post had a paragraph about authorial intent, but I omitted it from the final version because I wasn't sure it was fair to bring it in to a discussion involving The One Ring folks (who aren't really trained to know what "authorial intent" means, nor why it is out of favor). Since Drout brings it up, though, I'll address it here.

One of the folks over at The One Ring has an interesting post differentiating between serious study and serious reading, which he ends with "Tolkien put it there for his reader." My only suggested revision of his main argument is to consider serious study and serious reading merely two different points along the same line, rather than two entirely different things, as I am trying to get at here (in a post that was primarily critiqued by the blogosphere as being homoerotic in its use of "fanboy" -- not my "intention").

The second and lesser point, though, is that Tolkien intended his work for non-philogists, a claim that I'll grant for the sake of argument. The next question should be, do we care? Does Tolkien have the final say over his text? We call this appeal to what the author intended "authorial intention," and if you visit your library you can find shelf after shelf on the subject. Let me smush the argument down into something bite-sized here.

Intention seems to make sense at first glance; when I entered undergraduate school as a geeky young English major, I was an intentionalist (though I didn't know what to call it). I liked to point out that if the author were unimportant, why did some authors have multiple great works? Are books foundlings? Are they not crafted by authors? And, as such, shouldn't the author have final say over the meaning of the work?

When you start to examine intention more closely, though, you can see that it isn't held together all that well. For one thing, we might not know who the author is. Or perhaps we have a name, but know little else -- for example, other than a few legends we know almost nothing about Homer. We know very little about Shakespeare, and certainly not enough to know what he intended in such-and-such a line. Even though we have no practical connection to the intention of the author, we don't throw up our hands and claim that we can't figure out what the text means.

What about an author about whom we know a great deal, though? Even in this case, the "intention" can change. Let's take C.S. Lewis, for example. Publishers have recently re-ordered the books so that The Magician's Nephew is the first in the series (a stupid decision, if you ask me). The argument between the two sides is laid out here. The decision to re-order the books was justified by the intention of the author, primarily growing out of this quote:

'I think I agree with your order for reading the books more than with your mother's. The series was not planned beforehand as she thinks. When I wrote The Lion I did not know I was going to write any more. Then I wrote P. Caspian as a sequel and still didn't think there would be any more, and when I had done The Voyage I felt quite sure it would be the last. But I found as I was wrong. So perhaps it does not matter very much in which order anyone read them. I'm not even sure that all the others were written in the same order in which they were published.

This quote, though, rather than supporting the change, actually undermines the idea of intention. Lewis writes that the serious "was not planned beforehand," that he "did not know" he would write more, that he thought Prince Caspian and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader each would be the last, etc. The sentence But I found as I was wrong shows us that the intention of the author can change over time. The author may not even know what was intended.

Lewis isn't an odd case -- he's the norm. Walt Whitman kept revising and re-publishing Leaves of Grass over and over. William Blake (who is one of the few authors who could make a claim that his works weren't sullied by editors, except possibly Mrs. Blake) would move poems back and forth between Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience. Tolkien (to take the author dearest to The One Ringers' hearts) didn't seem to know himself what "hobbit" was when he began The Hobbit, nor that Biblo's ring was really really really really eviiiiiil.

Of course, for the student of medieval literature, authorial intention isn't as much of a draw, because we often don't know who the author of a given work was -- which is the reason we refer to them as "the Beowulf poet" or "the Pearl poet." What do we know of Cynewulf beyond a name? Even when we know a great deal about an author, we are confronted with different ideas about authorship.

As I am fond of saying (my colleagues must be getting sick of hearing this), medieval scholars weren't as surprised to hear about the "death of the author," since we operate before the birth of the author.

Scholars and Fanboys

I've had a lot to write of late, but little time to do it. One of the books I'm editing has finally started moving again, so I've been able to turn attention to the individual articles. The last day for revisions of freshman composition papers was Friday, so I was buried under a stack of them. Finally, I wanted to use the three day weekend to make some repairs around the house. Progress on all fronts.

So, now I have time to blog again. In a post a little over a week ago, I made the following comment:

I can't think of another single modern author [other than Tolkien] for whom a deep understanding of medieval language or culture is a prerequisite to serious study.

Some folks over at The One Ring took exception to the idea that one has to be a philologist to study Tolkien. Drout weighed in; his comments can be reduced to "it takes all kinds to have a successful and living debate and discussion about the works of a dead author," though the larger argument is more nuanced than I've just made it out to be.

The original idea of the post was to defend modernists against the charge of snobbery against Tolkien; I felt that even though there is some justification to the charge of elitism, inexperience with philology was a more charitable interpretation.

The discussion over at The One Ring, then, seems to be less about the idea of philology, but more about the potential suggestion that those without training in philology should sit down, shut up, and listen to the Annointed Priests of Philology and Literature. Of course, that was not my intention -- though I can easily imagine some folks in academe taking that position.

What I meant by "serious study" could be teased out to mean "writing articles that will make a tenure and promotions committee happy" -- in other words, it was meant to underscore the distinction between literary scholarship and literary appreciation.

But is there a distinction? In the world of scholarly publication, such a distinction exists -- so if I say "such-and-such an author creates cool ways of looking at the world," I'm not going to get published, but if I say "such-and-such an author actualizes an ideology in conversation with the zeitgeist," I stand a better chance of publication, even though I'm saying essentially the same thing both times. Instead of "serious study," I probably should have written "serious professional study." Of course, now that medievalists have given sufficient cover to modernists, the modernists can publish on Tolkien without delving into philology at all.

But back to the original question: Is there truly a distinction between scholarship and appreciation, or is it simply a matter of being professionalized? When Drout writes,

we can differentiate between readings generated by the Philologist, the Fanboy/girl, the Modernist, the High-Culture Reader, the Movie-Obssessed Fan, the Film Critic, etc., etc. Each will bring something different to the table, and each will work within a different interpretive community and follow a different set of interpretive practices

... he seems to be talking about discursive communities. The model I prefer isn't a patchwork of communities, but a spectrum of appreciation, with the professional on the one pole and the amateur on the other.

When a Fanboy says, "I really liked that book because the hero seemed just like me," we recognize that as appreciation. When a professor says, "the text transgresses the generic norms to such a degree as to form a new genre," we recognize that as scholarship. Yet, in the end, both are saying the same thing: "The text works for such-and-such a reason." In fact, I think most scholarship boils down to this thought process:

-- Wow, that was cool.
-- Gee, I wonder what made it so cool?
-- Hmm, now that I think about it, I know what made it cool.
-- But how does that coolness work?
-- Ah, some guy has a theory for why things are cool. When I apply it here, you can REALLY see how cool it is.
-- Maybe I should write this down so other people can see how cool this is and enjoy it more.

Do that enough in an organized setting, and they'll give you a Ph.D. in literature -- but you are still a Fanboy at heart.

So, fear not, One Ringers ... we're all Fanboys here.

Pope and the Canon

No, not THAT Pope nor THAT canonization ... I mean Alexander Pope and the literary canon. As I'm re-working my lecture notes on Pope, I'm struck by how surprising it is that Academe still tolerates him. Pope always makes me laugh, but since the main thrust of his important works is to condemn things that happen to be the defining characteristics of Academe, I'm surprised more professors don't ignore him.

Take, for example, The Dunciad. At first glance, we might assume that Academe would applaud any poem puncturing dunces -- but the word "dunce" seems to have changed its meaning. When I think of a "dunce," I think of a stupid boy sitting in the corner of a one-room schoolhouse with a pointed cap on his head. A dunce in The Dunciad, though, seems to be more of a narrowly-educated pedant, unable to take a broader understanding of Knowledge. In other words, a dunce is ... a hyper-specialized professor, the very same type of person graduate schools tend to churn out intentionally. Regardless of whether Pope is right or not (and I think he is), why do we continue to teach someone who points out that we are dunces?

Or take Pope's comments on postmodernism. Well, ok, he wasn't really writing about postmodernity (unless he owned a time machine -- not an impossibility for Pope), but he may as well have. Take the opening of the fourth epistle of An Essay on Man:

Go, wiser thou! and, in thy scale of sense,
Weigh thy opinion against Providence;
Call imperfection what thou fanciest such,
Say, here He gives too little, there too much;
Destroy all creatures for thy sport or gust,
Yet cry, if man's unhappy, God's unjust;
If man alone engross not Heaven's high care,
Alone made perfect here, immortal there:
Snatch from His hand the balance and the rod,
Re-judge His justice, be the God of God.

Ouch! So Pope basically condemns the postmodern perception of truth -- a perception upon which not a few academic careers are (de) constucted. In a sense, this is not true relativism, since judgment is still possible, and opinions can be weighed against one another, but the stanza still ultimately condemns practical application of relativism.

So I like Pope, and plan to continue teaching him, but I wonder when Academe is going to realize that parts of it are condemned by Pope, mandating either a response or exile from the canon.

Mourier, Petrarch, and Me

In a post today over at Inside Higher Ed (which you folks in higher ed should be reading anyway), Scott McLemee comments in an introduction about the Mourier Hoax. He offers a slight revision, however, to my version of events:

But if you go to the archives of the departmental listserv in question, a slightly different picture emerges. Searching “Mourier,” you find no messages by unwary poseurs dropping Mourier’s name. One or two puzzled souls do confess that they’ve never heard of the author of Murmurs in the Cabaret: Finding Language through Noise (1951). Everybody else, however, is plainly goofing.

I stand by my account, but McLemee is right that some of the e-mails appear to be missing. I have paper copies of a few (bound into a humorous volume by a friend) that I can't find on the archives, and I clearly remember a few others (though they may be either phantoms of memory or simply direct e-mails). Perhaps the data is corrupt and lost, perhaps the thread heading changed ... who knows? McLemee was right about the point of the post, that it's "a cautionary tale about the danger of craving the au courant, even at the cost of making yourself ridiculous."

Just in case someone digs up some of the more embarrassing e-mails, though, let me offer a defense of the victims of the Mourier Hoax. I have been careful to excise names of people who were the worst offenders, having only mentioned the name of the guy who admitted he didn't know who Mourier was, since that frank admission demonstrates his intellectual virtue. I think it is important, however, to remember that the dupes were nearly all MA students, still finding their footing in theory. My guess is that many of them would not have made the same mistake if they were just a little more experienced.

So, in defense of them, let me offer up a story in which I play the fool -- the story of my first paper in graduate school.

That first semester, I took a class on Shakespeare from Arthur Marotti, a man who (as I was about to learn) doesn't suffer fools gladly, though he appears glad to make fools suffer. We had to write a short response paper on Shakespeare's sonnets. I worked very hard on the paper, wanting to make a good first impression in grad school. I don't remember much about the content of the paper, but I will take to my grave the memory of a single adjective buried in the paper: "Petrarchan."

In the first couple of classes, Marotti had referred to "Petrarchan imagery" and "Petrarch" several times, so I decided to throw in a reference to something being "Petrarchan" in the middle of the paper. It was not important to the paper, or even (really) to the sentence; it was just some filler that I thought sounded smart.

So, in the next class, Marotti went around the seminar table critiquing these papers. Some he praised, others he derided. When he got to mine, I swelled with pride, confident that he would recognize my genius, demand immediate publication of my paper in PLMA, and beg to be on my dissertation committee (hyperbole, but you get the idea of what a fool I was). Instead, he asked only one question: "Here on page two, you refer to this image as 'Petrarchan." What do you mean?"

The problem was that I had never read Petrarch. Not one word. Nothing. Nada.

So I decided to compound posturing with posturing. I tried to bluff my way out. Stupid move.

"Well, what I meant to say was that the image is reminiscent of Petrarch."
"How do you mean?"
"Er, well, if you look at the elements of Petrarch's poetry, and that of Shakespeare's poetry, you'll find they use similar imagery."
"What kind of imagery are you talking about here?"
"Um, well, I mean, see this image? It looks like something Petrarch would do!"

... and on and on. Soon, it became clear to everyone that I had no idea what I was talking about. Even the stupidest student in class that day could take comfort in knowing that he had made an honest mistake, and looked pretty good next to my transparent attempt at faking it. Finally, after about five full minutes of this, Marotti looked at my paper, looked at me, shook his head in disgust, and slammed it down on the table, moving on to the next student.

Two things came out of that incident. The first is that when I returned to the next class meeting, I knew a whole lot about Petrarch. The second is that I stopped trying to fake knowledge I didn't have. Of course, I made plenty more mistakes (and still do), but these are now honest mistakes. The lesson Arthur Marotti taught me was probably the single most important of my academic career, and I thank him for that.

So, if you go rooting through the listserv archives and find some less-than-brilliant emails by hoax victims, try to be charitable. Remember that they were still early in their education, and were just trying very hard to make a good impression. I know that I had a tendency to fake it early in my education, a tendency that I grew out of. I'm sure many of them did too.

[One more thing regarding McLemee's piece: I forgot to mention that "Henri Mensonge" was an occasional poster during the Mourier Hoax. And no, I was not Mensonge.]

Porn for English Profs

OK, I admit it. Someone accused me of posting the books I wanted banned with the hidden agenda of creating a booklist without seeming like I was jumping on the bandwagon.

Guilty.

Booklists are pornography for English professors. If you invite an English professor to your home and leave the room even momentarily, our voyeuristic eyes will immediately stray to any bookshelves in that room. We'll begin to peruse the books, drawing judgments about you and your character from what is there ... or what is missing. If you are gone long enough, we'll begin to open the books and try to ascertain more about your character:

Ah, he highlights books. I always suspected he was of shallow character.

Hmm, writing in the margins. Lots of notes about Providence and free will. A deep thinker about religious matters.

Dog-eared many, many pages in this book ... perhaps she's a slow reader ... no, wait, it is Milton -- all the dog-eared pages means she savors her poetry.

Tsk. All leather bound books, bindings unbroken. And, look! The pages uncut!

Most of these books have stamps from used bookstores ... probably a voracious reader who can't satisfy his appetite on his budget.

The only Shakespeare is a copy of "Coriolanus?" Perhaps far more interested in political philosophy than religion.

Malory and Chretien de Troyes mixed in with Marion Zimmer Bradley books? What a delightful combination of high and popular culture!

... and so on. So you see how delicious it was when Joe Carter over at Evangelical Outpost listed his "50 Favorite Works of Imaginative Literature (20th Century)." From there, he had a link to a similar list at the Thinklings. Ooooh, and the trackback to someone commenting and re-categorizing Carter's list! Yes, I have Googled the phrase "favorite books list" many times.

So, English majors, when I step out of my office and leave you there, I know perfectly well what you are doing alone in that room. I know what the guilty look on your face means. You too are a book voyeur. I know because I share your perversion. The moment I stepped out of the room you were at my shelves, leafing through the pages, seeking insight into my soul. I too have peeked through the keyhole to gaze at the intellect displayed on the bookshelves of my family, friends, and colleagues. The compulsion defies resistance.

Let us gaze upon one another's bookshelves with pleasure undisguised and unashamed.

Drezner Update

Unsurprisingly, Daniel Drezner already has a new job. I'd like to repeat my plea to the University of Chicago to please hire me and deny me tenure -- just so long as it turns out for me as it did for Drezner.

Absent the extremely unlikely scenario that U of C will hire me for the express purpose of denying me tenure, I guess I'll have to go on writing articles and books and such. It's a lot of work, but at least it keeps me off the streets.

More on Tolkien and Wapentake

My aside on Tolkien's use of wapentake has led to some really interesting and substantive posts at Gypsy Scholar and Wormtalk and Slugspeak. In an academic atmosphere that derides philology, we can easily forget its value. I wonder how much of that derision is a considered theoretical position, and how much of it is bravado obfuscating insecurity about philological ignorance?

That's why I'm thankful guys like Drout and Hodges are around -- it's nice to have company.

Reason on Eggheads

Reason magazine has an article entitled, "When Eggheads Gather" questioning whether the role of public intellectuals has diminished. Since I'm too tired to do a cogent analysis, let me just point out that in this paragraph ...

As intellectuals oscillate, they are just one cog in a complex series of media interactions influencing people's general attitudes: that between bloggers, between blogs and mainstream media outlets, between network stations, between network and cable stations, between tabloids and mainstream papers, and so on. The chafing is endless; the rivalries intense. Prospect's effort to focus on the top 100 intellectuals seems a tad anachronistic. Sometimes useful, sometimes irksome, the world's leading public intellectuals are not always that necessary.

... Michael Young seems to be folding public intellectuals into the general class of pundits. While that is not necessarily wrong, I think it reveals less than it intends, since in the above quote you replaced the word "intellectuals" with "bloggers," "blogs," "media outlets," "network stations," "cable stations," "tabloids," or "mainstream papers," the sentence still makes sense in exactly the same way. If we are going to be critiquing the role of public intellectuals at all, a more fruitful examination would treat them distinct from other forms of punditry. All he really ends up saying is that the influence of pundits waxes and wanes, and as a segment of the punditry so also does the influence of various public intellectuals.

Mmmm ... Kimchi is Parasit-o-licious!

An update on the Chinese ban on South Korean kimchi that Scribal Terror mentioned a couple of days ago:

It seems that about 3% of South Korean kimchi products contain parasite eggs. My two comments regarding this are,

1) Good. The less kimchi the Chinese eat, the more there is for me. My favorite kimchi is the more sour tasting from the South (Kyoung Nam Province area), so I'm considering starting a rumor that there are more parasites the further south one goes; and

2) Considering some of the things that Koreans (and for that matter, the Chinese who are doing the banning) eat on purpose, I hardly think parasite eggs are the most questionable. Live octopus, roasted larvae, sea squirts ... and we're worried about a parasite eggs?

I plan to be in Korea this December, and while I'm there, I plan to stuff my face with parasit-o-lious kimchi while downing large quanties of insects and questionable sea creatures -- Chinese ban or no. Take that, Beijing.

Defending the Tolkien Snobs

A couple of days ago I was discussing the semi-permeable membrane between "high" and "pop" culture with someone, and he brought up Tolkien. He restated the conventional wisdom that the reason it took so long for Tolkien to be taken seriously was because of snobbery about fantasy.

Very likely snobbery had something to do with it, but I think there might have been other, more influential reasons. The primary reason, I think, is simply that medieval scholars felt restricted from leaving their field.

Until the era of "medievalism," in which modern representations of the medieval came to be considered fair game for medieval scholars, Tolkien's fiction was not a proper subject for a medieval scholar to study -- not because he was producing fantasy, but because he clearly falls into the modern era. A quick perusal of the MLA areas will reveal that even today the study of literature is balkanized by period to some degree. A medieval scholar who wanted to get tenure or promotion needed to produce serious scholarship, not play dilettante in the modern era.

OK, you might say, fair enough ... but then why didn't the modern scholars do more work on Tolkien? Why didn't specialists in 20th century British literature canonize him?

The problem is that Tolkien's fiction taps into a deep well of philology that almost no modernist can dip into. How many modernists have a working knowledge of Old English? Old Norse? Any of the other medieval Germanic languages? How many know what the futhark is, and how it differs from the futhorc? How many understand what Tolkien means by the wapentake, and how Tolkien's use of the term indicates what he thinks it must have meant?

Of course, some modernists have these skills, but not many ... and why should they? In this regard, Tolkien is unique; I can't think of another single modern author for whom a deep understanding of medieval language or culture is a prerequisite to serious study. Most modernists would have difficulty understanding the rich foundation of learning upon which Tolkien's fiction rests, and those that do understand it aren't enough to make produce the critical mass necessary for canonizing an author.

Don't blame the modernists; blame us medievalists. We took a long time to decide that it was OK for a medievalist to study modern authors. Not everyone can be Tom Shippey.

What Is an Internet Community?

What does it mean to be a member of an internet community?

I caught myself wondering last night if I am a good neighbor in the blogosphere. Mostly out of the kindness of Dr. Taylor over at Poliblog, I'm a member of The Truth Laid Bear Academy Community. Presumably, being a member at TTLB's community implies that I am involved in some sort of conversation with the other members of that community.

Except that I've never really engaged any members of that community. Oh, I've posted a few links to Poliblog and Drezner and a couple of others, and have had a few links from those and Protein Wisdom and a couple of others, but I've never really engaged in a dialogue (unless you count discussions of Battlestar Galactica with Taylor).

Of course, I have engaged in lots of dialogues, but mostly with others outside of that community, such as Drout at Wormtalk and Slugspeak or Gosnell at A Knight's Blog and Pro's and Con's. Rarely, though, with those in my only "official" community. And when I look at the details of page referrals here, I have only one person who regularly visits this page from TTLB Academy.

I don't think the problem is the other members of The Academy, though. I think the problem might be me. I have a rather stubborn insistence that the Wordhoard will not become a political blog. The Academy seems to be primarily law and politics professors who, unsurprisingly, are interested in topics of law and politics. Those who specialize in other subjects nonetheless tend to blog about politics as well. When politics is a subject in the Wordhoard, it is generally only of secondary importance leading to a primary topic.

I think we can go too far with the idea of internet communities, though. If I'm not engaged in a conversation with others in the community, then the difference between "blogosphere community" and "blogroll" becomes nil. On the other hand, I recently had a discussion with some other bloggers about a particular group blog, the participants of which seem not to read any other blogs -- a true echo chamber. Neither idea of a community satisfies me.

So I've made a commitment to myself to try to comment more on the non-law&politics posts in TTLB Academy. It is mostly an experiment that I will abandon as soon as it becomes unfruitful (or boring), but I wanted to let the regular readers know why those changes are happening. I'm trying to be a better neighbor.

Halloween Rant

Enough of academics and literature -- here are two things that tick me off about Halloween:

1. "Kids" who are clearly in high school (or older!) treat-or-treating. If you are old enough that you drove yourself to my house, GET A JOB! If you are old enough that you shaved before donning your costume, BUY YOUR OWN CANDY! In my neighborhood, we always run out of candy. They are literally taking candy from babies when you come to the neighborhood and exhaust the candy supply. I always shame the kids and refuse to give to them. Even though they didn't get candy at my house, they must be getting it from somewhere or else they would give up. Next year, please, everyone join me in refusing and shaming them, so maybe eventually they'll quit.

2. Kids who show up without a costume, or even an attempt at a costume. No matter how little money we had when I was little (remember that I was trick-or-treating during the Carter years, so it was sometimes lean), I always had a costume. One year I took a milk jug, cut it and colored it, added a bent wire coathanger, and made myself an alien mask. At least make some effort to have a costume ... use markers to draw cat whiskers on your face or something. Dress in Mommy and Daddy's oversized clothes. Put a bag over your head and go as "Scary Bag-Over-the -Head Man!" All I'm asking is that you make some gesture toward dressing up. If you aren't in costume, you aren't trick-or-treating; you're just begging.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to raid the children's candy supply now that they're asleep.

Halloween and the Decameron

I did not plan to be teaching the Decameron over Halloween. It just worked out that way. Nonetheless, I'm struck with the similarities between the two events.

Children's Halloween and adult's Halloween are two different things. Adult Halloween is about trying on identities. When we are teens, we are able to cycle through identities pretty quickly; freshmen in my classes often end the semester with a different identity than that with which they began. Once we move into our middle 20's, though, we are expected to pick an identity and stick with it (even, I'm sorry to say, if it isn't a particularly good identity). Halloween gives us a time to play dress-up again, which probably explains why so many adult women's costumes are of the vixen variety -- it gives women the chance to dress dangerously without any real threat of social stigma. I've only seen our Chinese students dance at one ISCO dance ever: the Halloween party last week. When in costume and in the dark they lost their inhibitions. They could momentarily pretend to be someone or something else.

Children's Halloween is more like the Decameron; it is about managing our fears. When you are seven years old, you might intellectually understand that monsters aren't real, but deep down in your heart you know that they are not only real, but lurk in the shadowy corners of your house. Children can take control of these fears through Halloween. They can transform themselves into scary creatures, and be surrounded by scary creature all bound to the same quest for candy. Cookie Monster's desire to gobble cookies and the neighbor kid/ghost's desire to gobble candy turn children's fear's into something familiar, comfortable, and even a little fun.

The Decameron is like that. In the introduction, Boccaccio sets the frame story during an outbreak of the plague. He describes a city in which all social order has died: The dead are buried outside of their faith; servants rule over masters; family members are abandoned; the economy is in ruins. Surrounded by horror, the ten young people flee to the country and set up a new social order -- determining who will rule, having med to rule over the women, but fewer men than women to prevent overbearing patriarchy, etc. How do they cope with the death and disorder in the city? By telling stories, of course. Through telling stories about faith, love, and kinship, they can reclaim control of those areas that have been disordered by the plague. Their fears become managable.

Poe's "Masque of the Red Death" is what Halloween pretends to be about. Boccaccio's Decameron is what it is really about.

Mourier Hoax II

Because of its popularity, I'm continuing the saga of Pierre Mourier, literary theorist extraordinaire. For those who missed where I introduced the Mourier hoax, it can be found here. The e-mail to which I was directly responding can be found here.

Mike,
While it is about time someone finally applied Pierre Mourier to this issue, instead of simply trotting out his worn and tired acolytes Derrida and Foucault, I am surprised at your facile application of *The Rational Irrational*. As I'm sure everyone on this list knows, Mourier wrote the text at the zenith of his opium addiction, and he later recanted much of the work, returning to his earlier (and more important) ideas. For example, in his article "Language and Determined History: Some Thoughts on the Book of Job," Mourier writes:
"God's response to Job satisfies the soul but maddens the intellect. 'Can you pull in the leviation with a fishhook or tie down his tongue with a rope?' expresses the soul's yearning for confirmation that God is in control of thekosmos. Our minds rebel against this self-evident truth, that God lay the foundation of the earth in OBJECTIVE FACT [emphasis mine], leaving our fallen minds with nought but irrational interpretation of the rational world and, by extention, language." (James Dalma's translation)
You can't ignore his groudbreaking interpretation of the Tower of Babel (which a later, lesser acolyte ripped off and called "the panopticon"), nor of the creation accounts of Genesis and the Gospel of John, and act like you are actually representing Mourier! Sure, the article was controversial at the time(whenever an atheist speaks reverently of the Bible, it is bound to ruffle a few feathers), but no serious scholar puts the drug addled Mourier of *The Rational Irrational* above the prescient Mourier of "Language and Determined History!" Rationality is ALWAYS preferable to irrationality in Mourier's legitimate works, and if you think otherwise, you might want to consider re-reading for your Qualifying Exam.
Yours,
Scott Nokes

In case anyone is wondering, James Dalma and his translation of the fictional Mourier are also inventions of my own.

Correction: Buckyballs and Smart Paper

An anonymous poster offered a correction to my comments about buckypaper. He/She/It suggested that I had conflated the idea of buckypaper with smart paper.

Very likely the poster is right, since as I mentioned in the post I was recalling that application of buckyballs from years ago. I wanted to offer the correction up here, rather than letting it stay buried in the comments section.

So, if anyone else knows more about this topic, is the Gyricon Smart Paper what the poster is writing about? Was there speculation years ago about using buckyballs to make smart paper? And how long will it be until I can get my first smart book? My current books are all rather dumb.

By the way, in the comment, the poster called me a "humanitarian," presumably referring to someone working in the humanities. As my Civ IV post indicates, it is entirely inaccurate to refer to me as a humanitarian.

Civilization and my Savage Self

The release of the Civilization IV computer game snuck up on me. I received a breathless e-mail (er, figuratively breathless -- by their nature, all e-mails are without literal breath) from a friend reporting that its release was nigh.

Now I read from Timothy Burke that it is "great." Soon, I'll have another outlet for my megalomaniacal tendancies. Maybe I'll ask Santa to bring it to me.

Someone once wrote to me that I seemed quite sophisticated from my blog; ah, how deceiving appearances can be! Civilization brings out my most savage impulses. I have been known to nuke a single warrior out in the wilderness because his presence offended me. I will declare war at the slightest pretext. On my orders, stealth bombers have destroyed libraries, cathedrals, universities, and hospitals. I have been known to poison the water supplies of towns. On occasion, I have razed a city to the ground amid the wailing of its women. I have kept slaves, possessed huge pirate fleets, and encouraged enemies to destroy my "friends." Oh, yes, I have done all these things, and more.

Lord of the Flies suggests that the removal of boys from society sparks their most savage instincts. In my case, a keyboard and mouse are enough to enable atrocities dwarfing the maddest ambitions of Hitler, Mao, or Stalin.

Speaking of panning stuff...

Acephalous is panning Don Delillo. Normally, I wouldn't have any strong feelings about Delillo -- just kinda "eh," but after years of hearing the hype about him I finally read White Noise and found it mediocre and disappointing. Perhaps if it hadn't been hyped, I would have found it merely mediocre, but not so disappointing.

But, alas, it was so hyped, and I was so disappointed. I'm glad to see I'm not alone in thinking Delillo overrated.

The Paradise of Paradise Lost

The other day, a colleague asked me about my blog, "Do you like anything, or do you just pan s**t?"

I like lots of things, but too much praise can make one sound James Lipton-esque. And no one needs more James Lipton in his life.

Paradise Lost, for example. I love PL. I love about everything in it except for the astronomy lessons. I love the fact that Satan tempts Eve with the same sorts of weakness that caused his own Fall. I love that after eating of the Fruit, the first official post-Lapsarian sin is lust-inspired (rather than love-inspired) sex ... a sin that they have to commit together. I love that Adam and Eve try to blame one another for the Fall. I love the way that both Satan and Adam try to blame God for their troubles. I love that the thing that finally gets Adam and Eve confess their sins to God at the end of Book X is their near-breakup fight.

Perhaps most of all, I love the last two lines: "They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow,/ Through Eden took their solitary way." Solitary, but hand in hand -- the human condition.

Remediation

An interesting piece on college remediation at Cold Spring Shops. Strangely, I had a dream last night about remediation; there must be something in the air.

Mourier Introduced

For those who don't understand the context of this post, you can read more about the Mourier hoax here.

Below is the first e-mail in which a colleague referenced the fictional Mourier. He was responding to a post by "Joe," who was in on the joke. The "JD" here is Jacques Derrida. The "GW" stands for "George W. Bush," since the whole exchange started as a reading of picture of Bush with a target on him in the English office. As I continue to post these in the coming days (or until I get sick of them), see if you can guess who is in on the joke, and who is simply faking knowledge they don't have.

Sorry to say, Joe has lost his way. His post quite clearly shows this with his last line: "perhaps it would be fruitful to read it relationally."Earlier he cites a more rational age, the pre-J.D. era, so that he can lead us to the promised land of clear thinking. As most know, however, those earlier eras were not as critically simple as we latter-day romantics tend to think. In fact, the great J.D.'s own teacher, Pierre Mourier, became famous for his early rejection of this wishful thinking in his book *The Rational Irrational* (1913). "Rationality is a stray path, a forgotten toy, a stale loaf. While once it may have held glory, it now only leads to dissolution" (243). We can go back further to the very romantics who, on the surface, would seem to lead us to the text as such (Keats' urn) and see that true reading is found only in spiritual epiphany (Coleridge's Khan; Wordsworth's Tintern). Irrationality is the only avenue in which to encounter the text. It's apparent then that Joe has lost his way in regards to the whole GW issue (and, perhaps, his own dissertation): reading only elicits meaning if we can follow the spirals of the text to their own fruitless and irrational ends.
mike

Pierre Mourier: (S)call(ion)s of (D)is(se)nt

Long ago I promised a forthcoming post on theorist Pierre Mourier. Here it (finally) is. Don't worry, this is fun stuff, not boring theory talk.

When I was in graduate school, we had a listserv for the graduate students. The intention of the list was, so far as I could tell, to make general announcements for all grad students -- such as "I need someone to share a hotel room at the MLA" or "the committee meeting regarding the freshman comp classes has decided such-and-such." Pretty pedestrian stuff.

About once per semester, however, the list would turn into a theory shouting-match. The participants were mostly working on their MAs, and I think they were under the misunderstanding that they could get attention from the professors if they showed their theoretical acumen on the list (a false assumption since the only professor on the list was the graduate director, who may not have actually read the comments). This happened fairly regularly, and was annoying in the way that it clogged up our e-mailboxes with posturing crap.

One day I was sitting around the office with my friend (and fellow PhD candidate) Mike, and we were grousing about the theory flamewar currently going on. What we found especially annoying was that it was clear to anyone who had actually studied the theorists that the participants did not know what they were talking about, and were simply throwing around the names of the Theorists of the Week Club as buzzwords. That's when we came up with the idea for a prank.

We invented a fake theorist by the name of Pierre Mourier, and started a flamewar between the two of us regarding his work. We would make up fake texts and long quotes that he supposedly said, and argue aggressively about them. We thought that after a week or so, some enterprising MA student would try to look up Mourier and discover the joke.

But, no ... instead, they started arguing with us! People who were not in on the joke would write things like: "Well, my reading of Mourier is..." implying that they had read these non-existent texts. When the other PhD students saw what we were up to, they began to create (and quote extensively from) their own fake theorists, such as Gillaume de Slopard, Simone Mourier (his wife), and Jorge Jesus Castillo. The works by and about these theorists included "The Rational Irrational," "Language and Determined History: Some Thoughts on the Book of Job," "Baudelaire's Blue Lobster: The Genesis of the Psychocultural Image and the Return to Hermeticism," "The Syphlitic Eye," "Murmurs in the Cabaret: Finding Language through Noise," and "The Suffering of Memory" (which, in a brilliant post, one of my colleagues argued should be better translated as "The Ache of Memory").

This went on and on. We tried to become more and more absurd to see if anyone would call us on it, but no one ever caught on. Finally, after weeks of this fake flamewar, one of the MA students wrote in the first intellectually honest post of the thread in which he confessed total ignorance of Mourier, said plainly that he had never heard of him, and asked if we could refer him to any particular works of significance.

This had gone on for some time, so we were uncertain how to proceed. Finally, I called the fellow on the phone and let him in on the joke. He thought it was hilarious and asked to join in. So, I sent him (via the list) a very, very nasty reply about his ignorance of Mourier, and he replied (via the list) that all the books by Mourier were always checked out of the library, and that the local bookstores could not even keep his books in stock. The fun continued.

Eventually, the hoax was revealed by one of our professors who outed us in a class filled with MAs. We stopped the flamewar, and one of my colleagues put together as many of the e-mails as she could cull out of the database into a samizdat volume entitled, "(S)call(ion)s of (D)is(se)nt: (S)Talking Rational(ity)." I still have it on my shelf, and pull it off for a laugh every so often.

People will occasionally ask me why I don't talk about "High Theory" in specifics here much. The reason, I suppose, is that often when I get into discussions of particular theorists, I can tell that the other person doesn't really know what they are talking about and are instead tossing about fetishized names ("Well, Kristeva completely explodes that argument, you know..."). All I hear are people arguing that their readings of Pierre Mourier are superior to mine.

If there is enough interest, I might occasionally some of the e-mails from the flamewar for your amusement. I'd have to re-type them from scratch, though, so I won't bother if no one asks.

Untagging Myself

You may be wondering why I haven't posted for a couple of days (or, you may not have noticed). The reason is that Scott Gosnell over at A Knight's Blog has tagged me for an ACLU meme, or more accurately, for an anti-ACLU meme. I've been trying to figure out how to respond. Perhaps I wouldn't normally have taken so long, but it's the first time I've been tagged for a meme, so I wanted to do it right.

I've decided not to play along. That decision is not implicit praise nor denunciation of the ACLU, nor is it about Gosnell. It's about the nature of this blog.

Unlocked Wordhoard isn't a political blog; it's about the life of the nuos. I don't shy away from political subjects when they are the secondary focus of the posting; for example, I have spent some time debating with Gosnell about whether we wanted another lawyer on the SCotUS -- but that debate began long before even the Roberts nomination. I haven't bothered to state a position on Miers since this blog isn't about those policy decisions. If Miers does something interesting from a textual, medieval, or academic viewpoint, then I'll blog on her. Or, if she does something funny, I might also blog on her.

So.... sorry, but I must decline. The blogosphere has plenty of other political blogs for those who want cogent political debate and analysis. It doesn't, however, have as many blogs about thinking and reading. I don't want to let Unlocked Wordhoard's identity be obscured.

By the way, if I reserve the right to change my mind and start blogging on political topics in the future.

Textual Polyamory

I've been working on three book projects at the same time. One of them, Conflict in Southern Writing, is almost ready to go to the printer. My part in what remains is simply to do one last read-through.

Now that I've had a weekend of freedom from that book, I realize that trying to do three books at once on a 4/4 schedule was madness. It can't be done ... well, OK, I guess it can be done since I just did it, but it shouldn't be done.

It isn't like I was spending every waking hour working on these three books; rather, all three of them were flitting about the back of my mind in a blur. I find that in order to write (I mean write good stuff, not off-the-cuff stuff like blog entries) I need more than two hours. The first hour I need to piddle about with mindless tasks while I think about the writing, and the second hour I need to ease out of the writing to move on to the next task at hand. Thus, if I have two hours and ten minutes uninterrupted, I'll have about 10 minutes of really great writing time. When I can't get more than two hours blocked off without interruption, I can't write much meaningful. On the other hand, if I can get, say, eight straight hours, that's six solid hours of good writing, even taking a break every 45 minutes.

To give you one real-life example of this, after doing all the research it was taking me forever to finish my dissertation. Finally, I gathered all my materials, some canned food, a sleeping bag, and a laptop, and rented a cabin out in the woods. Four days later I walked out having written the last two chapters -- the two chapters that needed (by far) the least revision. My dissertation director wrote me and said that I had finally found my voice.

Given that I need large blocks of time to concentrate, the more projects I have at once, the less I can get done on them. Now that I finished my part on one of the books, I moved to editing an article for one of the other books. I had previously looked at the article before, of course, but I was surprised at how much more clearly I understood it. Having that extra book to edit didn't take up that much actual writing time, but it took up that much extra thinking time.

So, here's my resolution -- I resolve to never again work on more than two book-length projects at a time. [Did you like reading that split infinitive in the resolution as much as I liked writing it?] Total monogamous commitment to one book at a time might be more than I can realistically restrict myself to, but one book spouse with a book mistress on the side seems reasonable, even for a textual philanderer like me.

Buckypaper and the End of Print Literature

Scribal Terror has a link to this article in Science Daily about buckypaper. I first heard about buckypaper a few years ago, but in a much different (and more significant) context.

Though it is not mentioned in the article, one of the potential uses for buckypaper that I heard discussed in those days was to make buckybooks (sorry, I have no link -- I heard this long ago). The idea, as I remember it, was to have paper made entirely of buckyballs that were dark on one side and light on the other. The "off" setting for the balls would be for the light side to be facing out. When current was run through the buckyballs, they would flip over so that the dark side was showing. By selectively turning some on and turning some off, you could create writing on the page (much as a marquee sign does by turning lights on and off).

The article talks about a lot of less important uses, like body armor, shielding airplanes from lightning strikes, etc. While all those things are nice, none of them will change the world. Buckypaper has the potential to change the world as significantly as Gutenberg's printing press.

Until now, electronic books have not really taken off. We are willing to access short texts on the internet, but longer texts we like in book form. The book has dominated literacy since it superceded the scroll, and survived through both manuscript culture and print culture. The computer screen does not have the potential to supercede the book because it is too difficult to carry around and is uncomfortable on the eyes and hands.

Buckypaper could be what the e-book has been waiting for. Imagine you hold in your hands a book. It looks like a normal book, except perhaps there is a thin battery and USB port in the binding. When you open the book, you see that the pages are blank. Just page after page of nothing.

Now, imagine you go online and download a novel onto a jump drive. You insert the drive into the USB port, upload the novel -- and suddenly the words appear on the page. Now you have a novel in a comfortable, portable form.

But wait -- you are finished with that novel ... what do you do? Instead of putting it on the shelf, you would simple store the file on your personal computer and upload a different novel into your buckybook. In other words, you could store your entire personal library on your keychain, and have just one or two tabula rasa books on your shelf. The cost of printing becomes nil. Books with short runs are no longer more expensive than mass market paperbacks (indeed, pricing would probably be inverted). Bibles and other censored texts could be stored in files and wiped from the buckybook before any censoring officials saw them. It would also be possible for your book -- that sheaf of papers you have in your hand -- to become truly interactive, with links like a web page.

Of course, buckybooks would be expensive at first, but I would think that a cost comparable to a laptop computer, say a few thousand dollars, would be marketable. Universities could require all students to use them and practically eliminate print books. If your local public library didn't have a book -- why not download it from the Library of Congress? Even rare print books could be scanned and turned into cheap facsimile editions, allowing for early training in manuscript paleography to take place without excessive cost or the risk of damage to manuscripts.

Sure, body armor and airplane covering is fine, but I prefer applications that change the world.

The Next Time I'm Arrested ...

... I hope my mugshot looks like Tom Delay's. Say what you want about his politics -- if you're going to be arrested, this is the classiest conceivable way to do it. Heck, my driver's license photo looks more like this.

If Delay is convicted, at least his family will have one really nice photo of him for the mantle. Do you think the Harris County Sheriff's Office does school photos, too?

Medieval Blaxploitation

Medieval Blaxploitation can be found here.

A problem with online polls...

...is that they are so frequently hacked. Unlike Bainbridge, who apparently has never seen the brain-corrupting influence of Time magazine on freshman composition papers, I suspect Time readers ARE dumb ... though whether many dumb people subscribe to Time, or Time dumb-ifies smart people who read it, I cannot say.

Regardless, as of this posting, the ranking system gives The Watchmen as #1, Snow Crash as #3, and The Catcher in the Rye as #14. Um, The Watchmen isn't even a novel (no, changing the phrase "comic book" to "graphic novel" doesn't make it a sub-genre of the novel; it's a sub-genre of the comic book); Snow Crash is a book I read when I mis-remembered the title of White Noise, and found it disappointing enough that it doesn't even belong in the "Top Rated Science Fiction Stories in Paperback for under $10 that Prof. Nokes Has Read on Accident" category; and The Catcher in the Rye is high on my list of books that should be banned because they encourage self-indulgence among already-obnoxious teens ("Society just doesn't understand me, man.")

Surely not even Time readers are this dumb. People readers, maybe. It must be a couple of guys sitting in cubicles hitting the "vote" button over and over.

Coining Words: Blognoramus

The Gypsy Scholar has a post about coining a new word -- but he gets it wrong! Now, I've previously posted regarding the right of English professors to coin new words, but you can't hide your light under a bushel; after coining the word, you actually have to use it, or it doesn't count. So, Gypsy Scholar, you are halfway there ... you just have to use the word in public, and define it.

Here, let me demonstrate by coining a new word here:

blognoramus (blog.no.ra.mus) n. An ignorant blogger; someone who frequently blogs stupid things: Dr. Nokes might occasionally blog something interesting, but in general he is a blognoramus.

All done. New word neatly coined. See how easy it is?

[Editor's note: I had included a nice dictionary etymology at the end of the entry, but Blogger keeps mistaking all the odd marks for bad html coding. The limits of the medium, I guess.]

It's Carnival Time!

Scribbling Woman is hosting the Teaching Carnival II, which is more about teaching in higher ed than anything else. Warning: I never read SW because her font is so tiny it gives me a headache. Use the biggest monitor you've got!

h/t Inside Higher Ed

National Review's Non-Fiction 100

Apparently, 'tis the season for book lists. National Review came up with their list of the top 100 non-fiction books of the 20th century.

Much of what is there, particularly at the top, is politically selected; for example, Hayek comes up twice in the top 10, as does Orwell (though Orwell may well deserve it). But Anne Frank as number 20? The comments attempting to justify her inclusion suggest that the compilers know full well it doesn't belong. Tom Wolfe, in my opinion, belongs on neither the fiction nor non-fiction lists.

Then there is God & Man at Yale ... it helps to have founded the magazine doing the rating. The Elements of Style would not have even come up on my radar screen, since I tend to ignore reference books, but it seems a good choice. What the heck is Silent Spring doing there ... one would think even The Nation would laugh that one off. And the Starr Report at number 100? That one just seems like an ironic joke.

Much better is the Random House list that inspired NR's, which makes NR's list even more inexplicable. After reading the Random House list, how could they have left off Henry Adams? Or T.S. Eliot? Or Lewis Thomas?

Ah, well, that is the fun of these lists -- grousing about what is missing.

Germans on Korean Lit

Sign and Sight has this review of contemporary Korean literature.

Academic Stars vs. Superstars

"Well, I went to grad school with Robert Scholarson, and Bobby says..."

One of the on-going jokes here in my department has to do with academic superstars we have known. All of the junior faculty have met or worked with some academic superstars, and many of the senior faculty have as well, though by now that starlight has in some cases waned. A strange thing about academic superstars is that they tend to be total jackasses. Many of them are quite smart (though not all them), but their habits of self-promotion, posturing, and cruelty earn loathing from scholars outside of the elitist clique (i.e. those that control a few organizations and publications, such the the Chronicle and the MLA).

One of my colleagues went to school with one of the more obnoxious superstars -- we'll call him Robert Scholarson (no, that isn't his name in some kind of code). One of the bonding moments I had with this colleague was when I mentioned a particularly loathesome essay by Robert Scholarson -- how I found it both stupid and offensive, a cheap exploitation of personal tragedy -- and my colleague mentioned that he had been to school with Scholarson. He then regaled me with tales of how obnoxious Scholarson is in person -- worse than I had thought.

Perhaps more galling is that, so far as we could tell, Scholarson (who has published a great deal), seems to have published very little actual scholarship. I asked my colleague how Scholarson became an academic superstar with such an anemic scholarly record. According to my colleague, Scholarson entered graduate school annointed, and from that point forward was groomed for great things. Scholarson has, reasonably, turned that grooming into a very successful career. I doubt anyone would begrudge him it if he didn't behave as if good things in life resulted from moral superiority, rather than politicking and networking.

Daniel Boorstin once said that "The celebrity is a person who is well-known for his well-knownness." Since that quote lacks a certain poetry, we generally revise it to "famous for being famous." Robert Scholarson is an academic superstar because he is an academic superstar.

Now, this is the peculiar thing. I'm using Scholarson as an example because he is so thin in terms of scholarship -- he is not the scholar himself, but at best the scholar's son living off the father's inheritance (or in this case, dissertation committee's political pull). The run-of-the-mill academic stars, on the other hand, tend to be much nicer people than the academic superstars. Why would that be? Aren't stars superstars-in-waiting?

Probably not. When I look at the superstars, I find that they tend to have one really smart book in their career. After this first book, they are prolific, pronouncing on things about which they know little, but finding publication primarily because of that smart book. Superstars seem insecure in their position, likely fearing that they don't have another smart book in them.

The stars, on the other hand, tend not to have one really smart book. They tend to have a half dozen solidly smart books that, while they never caught fire, advanced their discipline. The stars, then, earned their positions, and maintain them by producing more work of the type that brought them stardom. As a result, stars tend to be more understanding of the shortcomings of others, because they themselves have struggled with writer's block, with ideas that stopped working in the middle of an article, with detailed and meticulous research. I've seen superstars brutally tear apart novice graduate students at conferences, but stars tend to be more supportive, offering suggestions for improvements.

I've tried to take a lesson from this. I'm neither star nor superstar, but in my own limited way I try to emulate the stars. Rushing after the latest, hippest thing might advance my career ... but is that why I got into academe in the first place? Fame doesn't interest me. Riches would be nice, but I'm less interested in them than in leaving a small-but-enduring legacy for scholars who come after me. I'd rather work slowly and produce work I can be proud of.

Whenever we want to say something pretentious, the joke around here is to say, "Well, I went to grad school with Robert Scholarson, and Bobby says..." I hope no one ever says that about me.

Rosa Parks & Reading

I received this e-mail from the chair of Troy University's English Department at the Montgomery Campus, Kirk Curnutt:

As you know, the fiftieth anniversary of Rosa Parks' arrest is only weeks away. To that end, we would like to make you aware of an exciting event on the Montgomery campus that is taking place on Wednesday, October 19, 2005 in the Rosa Parks Library and Museum Auditorium. Troy-Montgomery's A&S divison is hosting a reading and book signing by Donnie Williams and Wayne Greenhaw, authors of "The Thunder of Angels: The Montgomery Bus Boycott and the People Who Broke the Back of Jim Crow." The event begins at 7 p.m.

I won't be able to make it, but if you are going to be in Montgomery and would like to go to a reading, this one sounds good. If you've never been to a book reading before and would like to attend this one, it is usually not necessary to buy the book in advance; they typically sell them right where the authors are signing them.

By the way, I also recommend Curnutt's book, Baby Let's Make a Baby, though it has nothing to do with Rosa Parks.

August Wilson, RIP

Though I noted it in the news about two weeks ago, I missed mentioning here the passing of August Wilson. At a time when the political pressures on black playwrights writing about black characters were to produce very narrow art that, at best, is only accessible to a certain type of person at a certain period of time, or, at worst, uses blackness as a gimmick to pass off inferior works -- at that time, Wilson produced some work that was remarkable in both its particularness and its transcendance. Wilson understood the importance of the WORD, and refused to allow either posturing or pandering to overwhelm his art.

As a result, I suspect that in 2105, somewhere in the world August Wilson will still be playing (probably Fences), and deservedly so.

Lacking Style -- or at least some of its Elements

Althouse has an interesting post (and thread of comments) about the new Elements of Style and this article regarding it.

I'm with them ... and leaving the reviser's name off the title suggests that the editors are intentionally trying to pull a fast one. Perhaps next they'll silently revise other books by dead authors, such as...

Hamlet (now with 25% more ghosts!)
Tale of Two Cities (removing all that ambiguity in the opening)
Paradise Lost (with a new ending, in which Adam and Eve go after Satan with AK-47s)
Pride and Prejudice (car chase thrown in for dramatic effect)
Moby Dick (the whale is revised from boring white to black with red racing stripes)
The Scarlet Letter (in which the "A" is quietly changed to a Harry Potter lighting scar)
The Bible (all that stuff about Moses and Jesus removed -- they didn't test well with the focus groups)
Wheelock's Latin (all gendered inflections omitted)
Robinson Crusoe (given a "Survivor" twist, in which Friday gets voted off the island)
Lord of the Ring (Hobbits replaced by Bratz dolls, with hip new illustrations)
Everyman (the sexist title changed to "Everyindividualregardlessofgenderincludingthetransgendered")
The Book of the City of Ladies (abridged to "The Pamphlet of the City of Ladies")

In Favor of Banning Books

The blogosphere has been full of book banning memes all month, designed, so far as I can tell, as opportunities for bloggers to posture, to praise their favorite books, or (if lucky), both. Much of this has been driven by the American Library Association which, truth be told, is not among my favorite organizations, but my distaste for them lacks enough intensity for me to complain overmuch.

I would like to come out in favor of banning books. Most book-banners want to censor material because it is morally or politically objectionable; I, on the other hand, wish to ban certain materials because they are aesthetically displeasing, yet have somehow become so over-rated that they cannot seem to fall out of print. Clearly, the only way to save humanity from these foul ditches of crappy prose, junior-high poetry, contrived plotlines, vacuous posturing, and ridiculous characters is to burn these books in the public square and strike any record of them from all bibliographies, card catalogues, and databases ... finally salting the earth of any location contaminated by them.

A few of these aesthetically objectionable books, in no particular order:

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (which, I'm delighted to note, is already in the top 100 most challenged)
The Handmaid's Tale
The Collected Works of John Grisham (not really lit, but I hate him so much I had to include him)
Walden
Stranger in a Strange Land
The Awakening
The Collected Works of Tom Wolfe
All H.G. Wells except The Time Machine, War of the Worlds and The Invisible Man
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
A Separate Peace (OK, I don't remember this one well, but since my memory of reading it in high school has been repressed, it couldn't have been pretty)
Jude the Obscure (not obscure enough)
Lady Chatterly's Lover
The Collected Works of Ayn Rand
The Crucible
The Pilgrim's Progress
Billy Budd (and I love Melville so much, too. Why does this piece of garbage always get anthologized? Possibly his worst work)
A Doll's House
The Collected Works of Pablo Neruda (Don't get me started...)
Things Fall Apart
The Collected Works of Toni Morrison except Song of Solomon (which is so good, it redeems all her other stuff ... Toni, come back to us!)
Germinal
The Showings of Julian of Norwich (See? Something medieval!)
The Razor's Edge
Ragged Dick (and by extension everything else by Alger)
Looking Backward

... etc. There should be something on that list to displease everyone. By the way, if you plan to comment, I'd prefer you didn't defend one of the books on the list (an impossibility, since all are indefensible) -- instead, add your own books for us to ban.

h/t Poliblog and Public Brewery

OK, one more short before grading papers...

This pair of articles on the front page of The Nation online puts the magazine in the strange position of tacitly advocating violence among left-wing college students, while explicitly denouncing right-wing college students for not being violent enough.

Me? I am against student violence, but in favor of faculty violence. In fact, I'm going to commit a metaphorically violent act against a freshman composition paper right now.

Gender Politics in Academe

For my non-academic readers who mistake faithful descriptions of academic life as hyperbolic satire: This is not a joke.

By the way, if the participants had any medieval training, they would have used the OE hit, a gender-neutral pronoun. Do you suppose Cousin It from the Addams Family got his name from one of these sessions?

Tolkien Webliography

I just got an e-mail about Tolkien: A Webliography, a collection of online Tolkien resources in English and Italian. It appears to be in progress, but it should become more exhaustive over time.

Suspense and the English Professor

One of the professional hazards of being an English professor is the problem of suspense. It is very, very hard for me to be surprised in a story. When you deal with narrative enough, the details almost don't matter; the pattern is clear.

My wife and daughter hate to watch Monk with me, because I always know whodunit before the second commercial break, and often even before the first. They find it especially frustrating because I know even before there are any clues presented, primarily because the "clues" I notice are narrative clues. Even though I don't tell them whodunit, I will either stop paying attention or simply leave the room, which really frustrates them. It is equally frustrating to me, though, since mysteries hold little excitement for me.

When I went to see The Sixth Sense with a friend, I remember seeing Bruce Willis gutshot, then sitting on a park bench. I leaned over to my friend, already a little angry that the film was falling into place for me, and muttered, "If it turns out that he's dead through this whole thing, I'm gonna be peeved" [OK, I didn't say "peeved," but you get the point]. You can guess how I felt at the end of it.

Stargate: SG1 will always dwell in a good place in my heart because of one particular episode. A major character has apparently been killed, but this is an obvious red herring for a less drastic change to the plotline. The narrative clues all lined up to suggest that we were to think Character A had died, when in fact it was Character B who died. I almost turned it off, and probably only watch the episode through to the end because the remote control was out of reach. Then, LO! In fact, the entire Character A and Character B plotline had turned out to be a red herring atop a red herring (a whole school of herring), and Character C was dead! Hooray! Someone managed to fool me!

But this Stargate episode is a real rarity. I always know, as do most other English professors. So, when I received a reply on an old post about Battlestar Galactica, I found myself unable to respond. The commenter asked:

And replacement or homemade, why is a junior lieutenant a cylon under your argument?

The truth is that I can't explain it, except to say that it fits the narrative mold. Narratives move in predictable ways because, if they don't, they stink (archetypal critics have an explanation for this). I'm not arguing that all the clues point in that direction; I'm arguing, I suppose, that it would be a better narrative if he were. Since the writers have so far avoided bad science fiction writing, I expect them to produce good narrative before tricky or efficient narrative. D'Anna Biers, for example, did not simply have the possibility of being a cylon -- either she (or her cameraman) had to be a cylon for the narrative to work.

So here's the deal: I can't argue for it without putting you through years of study as an English major. But even if I could do so, I wouldn't ruin it for you. As a saavy consumer of culture, you already know how predictable (and dull) romantic comedies can be (Guess what? They get together at the end!) or action adventure films (Oooh, the hero survived! What a surprise!) or horror films (The monster wasn't really destroyed, and could now return for a sequel? Shocking!). Really understanding how narrative works is like already knowing all the spoilers for every story you will ever encounter. You should enjoy the experience, instead.

Wayne Booth, RIP

Wayne Booth died on October 10th. The only thing of interest I have to add is that when I was a freshman, I had a professor who mentioned Booth so often in class that I thought Wayne Booth was a professor at my school.

... and coming out smelling like roses.

Yes, falling into a big pile of poo and coming out smelling like roses appears to be what is happening to Dan Drezner. After being denied tenure, his high profile has resulted in a storm in the blogosphere (by last count 232 comments on his website alone), along with a story in the New York Sun and a link to that article in Arts & Letters Daily.

Now, in all fairness to the U of C, no one outside of their institution has any idea why he was denied tenure; I know I certainly don't. Frankly, people outside of academe might be surprised -- or shocked and appalled -- to find out some of the legitimate and trivial reasons people are denied tenure. For all we know, Drezner was sleeping with all his colleagues' wives (or husbands), or was impossible to get along with, or denigrated the work of his colleagues in the classroom, or had been discovered as a plagiarist, or was embezzling sums of money, or was failing/passing students at an unacceptable rate, or had chronic halitosis ... well, you get the idea. Or, of course, it could have been all about the blog. If U of C is like any of the other schools I've worked at, we'll never know the reason, and neither will he.

Regardless of the reason, being denied tenure, sometimes the end of an academic career, seems to have pushed him into the limelight. Drezner has managed to do the impossible in academe: he has attained nearly Ward Churchillian notoriety without being a monumental jackass.

So, a request to the University of Chicago: My CV is available here. Please hire me, then feel free to deny me tenure. If it goes anything like it has for Drezner, I won't mind even a little bit.