On entering the double digits

Despite his parents' desperate attempts to arrest his development (and perhaps thereby forestall their own obsolescence), Kid #1 turned ten years old over the weekend. He celebrated with a sleepover party that featured a trip to a Mongolian barbecue, an intense game of dodge ball, a showing of Shrek 2, and a night of staying awake in the basement telling jokes about farts and butts.

Ten is a tough age: still kid-like enough to want to feel close to mom and dad, to want to have big and obvious signs of parental affection ... but proto-adolescent enough to become sullen when offered a children's menu or kid's cup at a restaurant, and to attempt through the strategic shutting of doors and wearing of headphones to create private space and independence. And the moodswings: I don't envy the boy for the little hurricanes of havoc his small surges of hormones are causing, and I'm sure that it is an odd experience to see that your body is elongating so quickly that almost every day you are reminded of how distant you now are from the small child you once were ... but damn, if this is a taste of what true adolescence is like, then Sergeant Stern's School for Young Men is looking like a pretty good option (you mail them your child just as he enters his difficult phase; they send him back in a few years as a well disciplined and obedient soldier) (downside: he will also be a killing machine).

All joking aside, I realize how fortunate I am to have had a decade with this amazing child proto-adolescent. I even look forward to the next decade, with all it will bring. He tells me he is going to live well into the triple digits, so I'm expecting we'll have a long time together.

More on the Chaucer blog ...

Stephanie Trigg has posted her thoughts on the recent post here at ITM by the "Chaucer author function" (see Chaucer speaks).

Seems many readers were simultaneously impressed and disappointed by the post. To answer many emails at once: yes, I do know the originator; yes, I do swear the post was crafted by the entity behind the Chaucer blog; no, it is not David Wallace after all; no, David Wallace did not force me to type that; no, David Wallace is not standing behind me with a firearm; no, you won't get another word from me about the Chaucer blog author, not even the smallest crumb of a hint, not even for a large bribe (though please do email if you are interested in offering a VERY large bribe).

Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds

The day will come when I will be ruled ineligible for that endowed chair I have my eye on because my blog posts about office chairs with bungee cords reveal a disagreeable levity. Oh well. All end of the semester giddiness aside, however, here is the draft of one of my Kalamazoo papers, to be delivered in a session on "Wild Spaces in Medieval Romance." Suggestions very welcome. Sections of it have appeared on this blog previously; sections will also be published as part of a collection of essays I am working on.

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Infinite Realms and Alternate Worlds:
Barrows, Portals and Possibility

An alium orbem somniat infinita regna habentem?
[Is he dreaming of another world containing kingdoms without number?]
-- William of Newburgh, History of English Affairs, 1.Prologue

Medieval Welsh and Irish texts offer stories of worlds that exist in strange contiguity to everyday life. The Welsh otherworld of Annwn finds its gateway at a mound where adventurers sit to seek wonders. In the Irish story of Cú Chulainn's love for Fand, queen of the sídhe, the hero enters a parallel universe through a nondescript mound of earth. The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn describes the strange beings who inhabit this subterranean world as other than human, differing in their customs, ancient history, potency in magic. Cú Chulainn is "cured" of his self-destructive love for this Fairy Queen only through the intervention of an oblivion spell: he must forget the riches of her world in order to reinhabit his own. Like many Irish and Welsh narratives involving mounds as portals to fay or demonic realms, The Wasting Sickness of Cú Chulainn seems to carry with it an untold story about the belatedness of a people to the land they possess, figuring the territory's earlier inhabitants as an inhuman race whose traces are dwindling, whose presence lingers as if at a dimming twilight.

My paper today begins at a similar mound, now transported into Yorkshire. The twelfth-century historian William of Newburgh described how as a drunken reveler stumbled home one night, he heard song resound from within a tumulus:

A countryman from this hamlet had gone to meet a friend staying in the next village. He was returning late at night a little drunk, when suddenly from a hillock close by ... he heard voices singing, as though people were feasting in celebration (History of English Affairs 1.28)

William assures us that this hill is quite near his own birthplace, and that he has seen it numerous times. On this particular night a door into the mound has opened [in latere tumuli januam patentem] to reveal a celebration in progress:

He approached and looked inside. Before his eyes was a large, well-lit dwelling crowded with men and women reclining at table as at a formal feast. One of the servants noticed him standing at the door, and offered him a cup.

Not the most polite guest, the man pours the drink from its cup and flees on horseback to his village. The revelers pursue him, eager to regain the stolen goblet, but his horse proves too swift for their feet. The cup is described as mysterious all around: "of unknown material, unusual color, and strange shape" [vasculum materiae incognitae, coloris insoliti, et formae inusitate]. In time the splendid cup is given to King Henry, Anglorum regi, as a gift. The object passes from the king of England to his brother-in-law David of Scotland, thence back to England's Henry II. Though the goblet circulates from the mysterious mound to an ordinary Englishman to a succession of regents (Anglo-Norman to Anglo-Scottish to Anglo-Angevin), its path is determined not by some weighty history behind the object, but via the object's agentless status as mere curiosity. The cup of unknown material and inscrutable origin is thereby transformed from the key to another world to a deracinated souvenir of some vaguely exotic elsewhere. The feast once refused recedes from memory, taking with it the history of that community glimpsed within the still mysterious mound.

What would happen, though, if the Yorkshire drunkard had joined the celebration inside the tumulus rather than stolen its tableware and fled? What would have come to pass had he entered into conversation with the subterranean congregants, if one of these revelers had spoken the tale of who they were and what they honored at their table? Whose history would this mound-dweller narrate?

My guess is that this other story, barely glimpsed by a passing English man and narrated as a wondrous fragment by William of Newburgh, would be very different from the history that William otherwise composes, a history that can discern in this fairy mound only a lost tale rather than a living one. Were the celebrants of the underground feast invited to speak, the narrative they would tell would likely reveal the difference between English literature and British literature.

As the twelfth century came to a close, Wales and Ireland no longer posed so fierce a challenge to English dominion. No prospect of renewed internal strife was evident. Edged by barbarian peoples whose land awaited the impress of civilization, England considered itself not only Britain's cultural center, but Britannia itself. Henry of Huntingdon declared blandly that "this most celebrated of islands" might once have been called Albion, might later have been labeled Britain, but was now simply named England. King Arthur begins the century as a mythic Briton, probably embraced in an attempt to inspire Welsh pride, but by its end has been converted into a superbly English monarch.

Yet the "victory of Englishness" over the diversity of the archipelago to which it belonged came at a price. Claiming that Britain was now, simply and straightforwardly, England ensured that the more recent term would always be haunted by its predecessor. The island was, after all, still inhabited by peoples who did not share with the English an identity, history, or political mythology. England, in other words, could never fully Anglicize itself, let alone the island it shared with Wales and Scotland -- or the history it shared with Romans, Britons, Picts, Danes, the Irish. There would always be an archipelago dwelling within England.

For the most part England responded to this living history in the way that most domineering powers respond in the face of ethical complexities, by ignoring them. Yet histories anxiously relegated to silence frequently prove themselves to be like the undead who haunt the halls and barrows of Icelandic sagas: eerily returning in strange forms, relentlessly demanding that the unfinished business they incarnate be acknowledged. Just as in the sagas, moreover, such revenants entered the present moment with disturbing stories about trauma, memory, and the limits of community.

William of Newburgh was a twelfth century writer who composed in the shadow of a formidable tradition of English history writing. Today William's narrative is cited most frequently for his angry condemnation of Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain. Geoffrey was essentially the inventor of king Arthur, and thereby an origin of medieval romance. Geoffrey taught the Middle Ages how to dream of fully realized Otherworlds, and though he composed a history, he helped to engender a new genre.

William of Newburgh, however, had little patience for romance or for proto-romantic history. He wrote that "clearly all that Geoffrey has published in his writing about Arthur and Merlin has been invented by liars to feed the curiosity of the ignorant," 1.Prologue). William's assertion that Geoffrey of Monmouth had been "dreaming some other world containing kingdoms without number" (1.Prologue) is, I would argue, intimately connected to William's narration of the alien feast beneath the English mound. Placed at an epistemic edge, the revelers figure a troubling fact that haunts William's unfolding English history: the lingering presence of aboriginal peoples in a Britain over which England has asserted complete dominion. On the one hand the island had by the end of the twelfth century been so long under a process of forced anglicization that English writers no longer bothered to distinguish between Britain and England; on the other the untimely intrusion of pre-English indigenous presence suggests that, even if the Normans became English, not every difference is so tractable. At once fragments of a fading past and a spectacular embodiment of a living people consigned to mere antiquity, the revelers in the tumulus undermine William's usually confident narration of the English nation.

Like most English writers of his day, William was no lover of the Scots, Irish, or Welsh. They are at best barbarians, at worst a feral people who amount to a national threat. The Scots are described as "thirsting for blood against the English people, through savage barbarity" (1.24; cf. 2.32, 2.34). The natives of Ireland are "uncivilized, and barbarous in their manners, almost totally ignorant of laws and order" (2.26). The Welsh are "a restless and barbarous people" (2.5). These last people, William explains, are

the remnant of the Britons, the first inhabitants of this island, now called England, but originally Britain ... when the Britons were being exterminated by the invading nations of the Angles, such as were able to escape fled into Wales ... and there this nation continues to the present day (2.5)

This passage makes it clear why Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain irritated William of Newburgh so much. William knows that the Welsh are the aborigines of the island; he knows that they once held the whole of Britain, and that they would argue strenuously against his declaration that "Britain" had been superseded by "England." William's rhetorical question ("Is he dreaming another world containing kingdoms without number?" 1.Prologue) is supposed to expose the patent ridiculousness of Geoffrey's narration. Yet it also reveals an anxiety that William implicitly voices through his prolonged condemnation of that author: what if Geoffrey is right? What if British history has not been subsumed into and assimilated by English history? What if Arthur resists conversion into an English king? Could it be that the island of Britain, despite the insistence of William and his contemporaries that it has been renamed and thoroughly Anglicized, what if that island remains so capacious that in fact its territories are rife with other worlds, with kingdoms lacking number?

Romance Spaces
English literature, and specifically romance written in English, betrays some cognizance of this possibility. Romance is replete with what by convention are called, resonantly enough, "Other Worlds." These spaces seem at once impossibly distant and unbearably close, intrusions into the quotidian of alternate realities. Through the portal of this wonderful realm beckons a place where the dreary rules that structure mundane existence are exchanged for eruptions of magic, strange transformations, fabulous wealth, landscapes fashioned of desire and dread. Jeff Rider describes romance other worlds as "dream worlds, wish worlds" ("The Other Worlds of Romance" 122), and we can see immediately what such expanses have in common with Geoffrey of Monmouth's kingdoms without number, with his infinite realms.

The action of the Breton lai "Sir Orfeo" is set into motion by such a dreamer of another world, of a realm without boundary that glimpsed in its fearsome allure. Heurodis falls asleep in a grassy orchard beneath an "ympe-tre" ["grafted tree," a living hybrid] and is snatched away by a radiant host. She beholds a "king o fairy" (283) who wears a crown "nas of silver, no of gold red / Ac it was of a precious ston"(15051) – no doubt William of Newburgh would have described the headpiece as of "unknown material, unusual color, and strange shape." This knightly incarnation of an Other world shows her sights of tremendous beauty, then announces that she must join him forever – not just in spirit, but in body, or that body will torn to fragments.

Though time prevents my analyzing this text at any length, let me offer a few observations. The fairy realm to which Heurodis is abducted is accessed by passing through a rock ("In at a roche the levidis rideth" 347), making it similar to the subterranean worlds envisioned by William of Newburgh, Gerald of Wales (Elidur's kingdom of tiny men), Marie de France (Yonec), as well as those Irish and Welsh mound-portals I mentioned at the beginning of my paper. There seems something quite British (that is, Welsh) about this Otherworld, since it seems to exist in strange contiguity to the England from which Heurodis is abducted. Anglocentric writers like William of Newburgh likewise imagined Wales to be, like all backwards countries as beheld through imperial eyes, locked in an unchanging time. Here bodies injured in war continue to bleed; those who have died are locked perpetually in the agony of their perishing; everyday life yields neither goal nor progress (e.g. when the Fairy King and his retinue go to hunt, they do not seem to pursue any animal, but simply make their mysterious way through the woods). "Sir Orfeo," it should be stressed, is – for all of its 605 lines of fast moving verse – one of the most ambitious colonial projects every launched in English literature, transforming the realm of classical myth into an English world (Orpheus is thus "king / In Inglond" [39-40]; his father and mother are Pluto and Juno; Winchester is shockingly declared the English name for Thrace). Yet perhaps the greatest violence that "Sir Orfeo" does to Britain is to vanish it entirely: like all examples from this quite English genre of writing, this lai claims origin not on the island but in Briatin's near homonym, Brittany (Breteyne), making it seem (as Marie de France does) that the story comes from a direct line of communication between England and an exotic elsewhere across the channel – dooming proximate Wales and a potentially multicultural Britain to oblivious silence.

Chaucer performs a similar set of maneuvers, though perhaps with more subtlety than the author of "Sir Orfeo." Internationally minded and far from jingoistic, Chaucer's works range geographically from Africa to Italy to the Mongol Empire, from heaven (Troilus and Criseyde) all the way to hell ('Friar's Tale'). Yet nearby Wales, Scotland and Ireland are almost entirely absent.

As an adolescent Chaucer was attached to the household of Prince Lionel, second in line for the English crown. As Count of Ulster, Lionel had inherited about half of Ireland through marriage. During his stay on the island in 1366, Lionel presided over a parliament in Kilkenny that issued a statute forbidding English settlers from adopting Irish language, customs, or dress (that is, forbade English assimilation). Even if he never set foot in Ireland, Chaucer was certainly aware throughout his life of the ongoing project of subjugating its population, partly through the promulgation of the very language in which he was composing poetry. Chaucer would also have been well aware of the colonial history of England in Wales, the site of sporadic but intense resistance long after its official conquest had ended in the previous century. He would have been frequently reminded of the fluctuating enmity and alliances that English nobles forged with Scotland, especially because his patron John of Gaunt became so embroiled in Scottish politics.

Chaucer's only avowedly "Celtic" narrative, the Breton lai told by the Franklin, completely ignores the non-English inhabitants with whom the writer shares the island by unfolding in Brittany rather than in nearby Wales. The setting seems especially perverse given that the names of the protagonists (Aurelius, Arveragus, and perhaps Dorigen) are taken from Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, a profoundly influential text that provided the island a rich, pre-English history – and a text that was central to contemporary Welsh nationalism. Like all the Canterbury tales set abroad, moreover, the "speech and customs are thoroughly anglicized," as if the Bretons were Londoners and all the world were England (John Bowers). When the knight Arveragus travels abroad to hone his chivalry, he goes to 'Engelond, that cleped was eek Briteyne' (810), silently granting as ancient fact an equivalence for which only England would argue.

Chaucer's single Arthurian narrative, the 'Wife of Bath's Tale,' implies that this genre so intimately tied to Welsh nationalism is quaint and outdated, as insubstantial as the disappearing elves and fairies that populate its prologue:

In th'olde dayes of the Kyng Arthour,
Of which that Britons speken greet honour,
Al was this land fulfild of fayerye.
The elf-queene, with hir joly compaignye,
Daunced ful ofte in many a grene mede. (857-61)

The Britons (i.e. the Welsh) are aligned with the 'olde dayes' of the island (863). The "grene mede" is Chaucer's flattened version of the fairy mound we saw earlier in Ireland and Wales. It is the same mound inside which William of Newburgh's English observer witnessed a feast being celebrated and declined to participate, stealing from its riches but failing to comprehend the history and community behind the artifact.

Likewise, sadly, for Chaucer. "I speke of manye hundred yeres ago," the Wife of Bath declares as she gives her Arthurian romance its temporal setting. "But now kan no man se none elves mo" (863-64): Nowdays no one sees elves any more.

Dear Prof. Cohen,

Do you really seat your delicate derrière on a chair made of bungee cords?


Why yes, Dear Reader. I was not lying. You can even purchase your own at CB2.

What I like best about the chair is that if you grip the arms tightly, you can bounce a good two or three feet skyward and land without significant injury. When I assembled the chaise, the Office Manager wheeled me around the department corridor for a Grand Procession. We are thinking of renting out the chair (and its attendant Office Manager) as a university vehicle for use on special occasions. The fees collected will of course replenish our faculty sherry fund.

Dignity? Gravitas? Not in my office, thank you.

Herr Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake at Kalamazoo

Memories of the film Winged Migration: If the onset of spring in this hemisphere has awakened in your blood some primal urge to migrate to western Michigan, you must be a medievalist.

If so, then you -- like me -- are frantically working on a paper right now for Kalamazoo. This paper was probably born of some impulsive promise way back in the happy go lucky days of last summer, when May 2007 seemed so impossibly remote that you could declare, yes, I certainly can compose The Complete Book of All Medieval Studies and have a coherent twenty minute version ready for a panel come spring.

Well, far be it from me to provide you with ways to procrastinate ... but I do highly recommend that you peruse Herr Prof. Dr. Boethius P. von Korncrake's journal of his adventures at Kalamazoo, so far in seven parts. The professor is, in his own words, "the current occupant the Klaus Meine Chair of Medieval Semiotics at the Institut für Europäische Spielwissenschaft und Freizeitforschung in Bitterfeld, Germany. Prof. Dr. von Korncrake holds a doctorate in Semiotics and Marxist Philosophy from Patrice Lumumba Peoples’ Friendship University in Moscow, and an undergraduate degree in Sports Psychology from University of Halle. Additionally, he has done post-graduate work at California State University, Chico."

All fifteen of his books are, according to his website, currently out of print.

plus ça change

I read this piece on Queen Elizabeth's visit to Jamestown and I think: Times have changed.

As the 81-year old monarch stepped to the microphone to address a commemorative session of state legislators at the newly renovated Capitol, she was somber and reflective in celebrating the 400th anniversary of Jamestown, the first permanent English colony in the New World.

“Over the course of my reign and certainly since I first visited Jamestown in 1957, my country has become a much more diverse society, just as the commonwealth of Virginia and the whole United States of America have also undergone a major social change,” the queen said. “The ‘melting pot’ metaphor captures one of the great strengths of your country and is an inspiration to others around the world as we face the continuing social challenges ahead.”

In February, Virginia became the first state to pass a resolution expressing official regret for slavery. In recent weeks, some scholars and minorities had asked whether the queen would consider making a formal apology for Britain’s role in slavery and the way early English settlers mistreated the Indians.

Though she offered no such apology, she observed that human progress rarely came without a cost.

Gov. Tim Kaine echoed the importance of how much had changed since her visit in 1957.

“We didn’t tell everybody’s story; we didn’t include everyone; we didn’t honor all the accomplishments,” Mr. Kaine said at a news conference. “We didn’t acknowledge that the progress came at a cost and there was huge pain along the way. This time, we have a chance to really get it right.”

I read this piece on Barack Obama and I think: Not as much as they should.

Democratic Sen. Barack Obama was placed under Secret Service protection, the earliest ever for a presidential candidate, the agency said Thursday ... Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., told reporters Thursday night that several weeks ago he received information -- some of it with a racial bent -- that made him concerned for Obama's safety. The number of people Obama was attracting at campaign events also worried him, Durbin said.

Durbin said he approached Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., six to eight weeks ago and that Reid and Republican leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., went to the Secret Service last week.

''I expressed concern because of my affection for Barack and his family. I've traveled with Obama. I've witnessed enormous crowds,'' Durbin said. ''This is a relief.''

According to a senior law enforcement official, the security detail was prompted by general concerns about the safety of a prominent black candidate. Although there was no direct threat to Obama, several factors raised concerns, including some racist chatter on white supremacist Web sites.

From the desk of JJC

The following is excerpted from an official email that I sent yesterday. In all fairness to myself, I was replying to the minutes of a meeting of our graduate committee that did state that "all references to Prof. X's underwear have been omitted" from the transcript, and that the eventual ambition of the graduate committee was to take over the English department. [Prof X., I should add, is a member of the graduate committee; I suspect that he is the one who instigated the, um, Boxer Rebellion conversation -- and probably made the topic incredibly relevant to Shakespeare, somehow].

Dear Graduate Committee,

I read your meeting notes with interest. I would have read them with more interest had references to [Professor X's] undergarments not been deleted, since for a long time faculty members have been speculating on this intriguing issue.

I don't think anything you outline requires the bylaws to be changed (unless of course you are actually serious about your colonization ambitions; then the bylaws will need to be burned and [the Deputy Chair] and I will have to be hanged from the 7th floor windows) ...

Thanks for keeping me in the loop. I have a new office chair made of bungee cords that is fun to bounce upon, if you do take over the department in its entirety and grow bored of taunting the Office Manager.

Jeffrey

Ah, end of the term giddiness. I think we are all tackling too much work on too little sleep.

An End of the Semester Little Self-Aggrandizement Corner

I just dismissed my last Barnard course, let them fill out evaluations, and had the penultimate sit here in my Barnard office. And I just discovered that one of my students had kept a record called "Quotable Karl (& Less Quotable Karl)," which she deposited in my mailbox. Here are the quotes:

On Switzerland: "You can see it in Goldfinger"*

On college-level spelling courses: "Oh, you mean without beer."

On the discursive construct of cannibalism** in Heart of Darkness: "Like you're on a ship that's being piloted by a burrito."

On pedagogy: "I'm just saying words."

On student discussion: "Gold stars for everyone!"

On his sentence: "No, that's stupid."

On contributing to society: "It's probably better -- for the world -- if I don't talk more."

On himself: "I'm full of deepness."

On domestic violence and Hurston: "I believe the word is 'blow,' not 'girly slap.'"***

--
Notes by the object of study:
* Frankenstein discussion.
** I love it when my students--my Freshmen!--start talking like this.
*** In correcting a student's misapprehension of Janie's violence in hitting Tea Cake in Their Eyes Were Watching God

==
I should also say that my students have parodied me to my face. They're especially fond of my use of the word "fantastic" as an all-purpose modifier for books I like. This happen to anyone else?

Burne-Jones, Chaucer, and the Slippage of Everything

Okay, since spending some time recently watching a lot of episodes of South Park with my first-year writing students and reading Mandeville's Travels with my M.A. students [see previous post here], we can now call this an obsession of mine--by which I mean: noticing all the ways in which various anti-semitic discourses and even meta-anti-semitic discourses [whether in the form of apocryphal stories, reductively stereotypical tropes, satire, etc.] are made to kind of "disappear" in or move into the background of our "readings" of various texts: whether travelogues, television shows, or even paintings. My interest is not in delineating the contours of the anti-semitic discourses themselves [which are obvious], but in trying to take note of how we subvert a certain way of "taking note" of them [if that makes any sense].

I recently attended a show at the Saint Louis Museum of Art, "Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Deleware Art Museum," in which I was able to view a painting of which I had formerly been completely unaware, Edward Burne-Jones's The Prioress's Tale (1898), based on Chaucer's tale of the same name. It was his last "produced" painting (he died that same year), and he had apparently been working on it for over thirty years. Burne-Jones had also worked with William Morris on his 1896 Kelmscott edition of the Canterbury Tales, and earlier in his career had also illustrated a wooden cabinet with scenes from this particular story. "The Prioress's Tale," of course, has generated much critical scholarship, especially as regards its virulent anti-semitism, with some critics feeling discomfited by what appears to be Chaucer's comfort with telling a supposedly uncritical story about a Christian child being savagely murdered by Jews and thrown into a communal privy, and others maintaining that since it is the Prioress's story, Chaucer is obviously doing something more subversive--i.e., this brutal and hate-filled tale, coming from the mouth of the nun who wears a necklace that declares "amor vincit omnia" and who is so "pitous" she would weep over a small mouse caught in a trap and whose table manners make her "ful semely" [but in a contrived manner--she "apes" politeness], cannot possibly be read "straight," and part of its shock value comes from who is telling it. I tend to agree with this latter view, and I actually believe Chaucer made some of the details in the tale as crude as possible in order to make this cliched martyr narrative both "cute" ["litel"] and sublimely horrible at once. With Chaucer, it's all about the layering. The layers, my friends, the layers.

By "referencing" this story of Chaucer's in a painting, there is already somewhat of an undermining of Chaucer's framing, because it is no longer the Prioress's story, per se, but is Burne-Jones's "lifting" and re-framing [literally] of two particular moments in that story: the murder of the boy--seen in the right-hand middle-third of the canvas, one woman can clearly be seen holding the boy down against his will, a dagger in her hand pressed against his back, with which we know she is going to slit his throat, while another women looks on, apparently an accomplice--and the moment at which the Virgin Mary places the grain on his tongue so that he can continue singing even though his throat has been cut. To a certain extent, Burne-Jones quite purposefully minimized the violence of both of these scenes. In the central image of the painting--where the Virgin Mary is bending over the boy who can be seen to be standing in a kind of grave in a garden of poppies and lilies, hands clasped in a prayerful pose--the boy is completely unmolested, his body whole and complete and beautifully boy-like. His actual murder is relegated to the background at the moment just before it actually happens. There is nothing in the painting to suggest that the boy is in the Jewish ghetto of the original tale. You have to look hard to notice the dagger.

I assume the original audience of this painting would have been more familiar than the museum-goers in Saint Louis with the original story and may have filled in the missing details, as well as looked for the murder weapon, and the imminent moment of the boy's murder. For the contemporary audience, the accompanying wall plaque and the iPod audio tour provide the necessary glosses on the painting, and to my surprise, while both mention that the painting is based on a story by Chaucer, the only narrative details provided are that the story is about a boy who is murdered while singing a hymn to the Virgin Mary, and that she is placing a grain in his mouth so that he can continue singing even though he has been murdered. All of the provided detail--brief as it is--focuses on the foreground of the painting, and no mention is made of what is happening in the background. I was looking for the murder scene, but I doubt other museum-goers were, and the detail will be lost to many without some kind of narrative guidance. Simply put, much of the content [and context] of Chaucer's original story is drained in this painting [by Burne-Jones], and the museum curators and exhibition authors have not seen fit to fill in much of what is missing, thereby flattening the painting's possible effects upon its viewers, as well as covering over the story's richly multi-layered history. For now, it's just another pretty picture in the room.

There are other interesting details in this painting which I am sure were intended by Burne-Jones as narrative "cues," but I did not have sufficient time to study them all, so if others have further thoughts about the painting, I would love to hear them. I wonder why Burne-Jones labored over this particular painting for so long? Does anyone know? I would love to know more about that, too. To a certain extent, the story obviously had some kind of hold on him, as it still does on us today.

Mary Beard on Hadrian's Wall

In the latest entry of her blog, A Don's Life, Mary Beard examines the idée reçue that Hadrian's Wall was an attempt to insulate a Roman zone from a barbarian one. She points out that the structure is ineptly designed if it was originally intended to serve only defensively. She then describes the Roman notion of a frontier zone, a place not so much of fearful Us Versus Them as a geography of vivacious intermixture:

Despite the impression given by Hadrian’s Wall (and by a few other places largely in Germany) that they saw a linear divide between the empire and the barbarian world, the Roman image of the frontier was usually much more subtly nuanced. The empire shaded into “foreign” territory across many kilometres that were melting pot of cultural difference and often a hot-spot of trading and commercial activity. It was a question of frontier zones, rather than frontiers – governed partly by Rome, partly by a whole variety of non-Roman powers. Hadrian’s Wall, whatever its function, was an exception.

President Bush and our other wall-crazy political leaders might learn from that.

She's referring to the Bush administration's idea of a security wall demarcating the US from Mexico. Who says late antiquity studies have nothing to say to contemporary immigration policy?

Chaucer speaks

You will just have to take my word for it: the following is from the evil genius who originated the Chaucer blog. Enjoy! And thank you, "Geoffrey Chaucer," for this post.

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IF YOU REALLY want to hear about it, the first thing you’ll probably want to know is how it started and how I got the idea. Because this is the first time I’ve gone and written about it in my own words – broke character and all.

The thing is, it didn’t start out as anything special. I was messing around with that old friendster site and people were having a time making fake accounts for people like Dorothy Parker or Babe Ruth. So I made one for Chaucer. Then what the friendster people did, they started giving blogs to everybody on friendster, because of that crumby myspace having more features and all. So I thought what the hell and just started typing up stuff in Chaucer’s blog, I guess around May 2005 every once-in-a-while. Then I did that "internet abbreviations" job and people started commenting on it. Boy, I was glad just to get a couple of comments. And when you get readers, the thing is then you can make it a back and forth. So Chaucer did an advice column and somebody wrote in and asked about if the Gawain poet ever met Chaucer and I guess you could say I had a big old idea. I had Chaucer write about necking with the Gawain poet in France and I based it around that movie – Brokeback Mountain – that everybody was seeing back then. That’s when people started linking to it. I started seeing that danged post around the web. Somebody on livejournal even made a danged icon about it. I guess people thought it was sort of funny because it mixed things together in a way that didn’t really make sense but also sort of did. I was practically jumping up and down because there were these people out there who like hearing old Chaucer talk about crazy things in Middle English. I know it sounds corny but I felt kind of better about people because of that and so I thought it would be a helluva thing to have Chaucer’s blog get read by even more people.

Then I moved it to blogspot which was not necessarily a thing I knew about, but I knew it was better looking than that lousy friendster blog. That was March 26, 2006. The next part I don’t remember so hot. I guess it just sort of took off because of a lot of real decent people liked it. Like these two editors, Patrick and Theresa Nielsen-Hayden, they have this blog called Making Light that was one of the first big blogs to link to it. Boy, I bet about a thousand people must read that thing every day and they all saw the link to Chaucer. Also around the same time, it seemed to me all these medieval scholars were setting up websites. In the Middle started up around January 2006, I guess, right? And the medieval types that already had blogs, well they started talking to the new ones and everybody just kind of started talking to each other. For the first time at kalamazoo all the medieval bloggers met up. I guess you could call it a medieval blogging renaissance except medievalists get real teed off when you use that word. Anyway, all I did was I got on that bus and I rode it. A rising tide floats all blogs, yessir. All these people kept linking to old Chaucer, all kinds of people and too many to all say thank you to, though a couple stick out: In the Middle has for like a million years been saying things about the blog that sound real smart, like that thing that the blog “crosses historical lines so gleefully that the whole project can be called temporally impure,” which pretty much read my mind about what I wanted to do; and I’m real grateful to good old Doc Virago and Stephanie Trigg, and that crazy singer guy Momus who isn’t even a medievalist. And then they say a professor referred to the danged blog in a speech for a big meeting about Chaucer in July 2006. I wasn’t there on account of my flight not getting in yet and all so I didn’t hear him say it, but that really killed me to see that the blog was getting some “press.”

And that’s pretty much how it happened that I get all these terrifically intelligent people coming to the blog, even though I haven’t posted anything for like a hundred years and I feel lousy about it. The whole thing has just about knocked me out and I feel real thankful to everybody who’s liked the blog and linked to it and commented on it. It sure is a nice thing to write some jokes and have people like them.

And to tell you the truth I don’t mind making a buck here and there when I can either, so I started making some funny t-shirts for the blog and doing them through this site called zazzle, where you just make up the shirt and they sell it and you get little bit of the money. I can tell you I have made over a thousand u. s. dollars on those little tiny percentages and that is one heck of a thing, yes it is. The t-shirts that sell the best are the ones that aren’t too specific, like you might guess. Number one is “CHAUCER: Because Shakespeare was Too Easy,” number two is “I study medieval literature; because that’s where the money is” and third place is “Swynke, Drynke, Swyve, and Aftir Make Retraccioun.” I don’t understand why people are all crazy about that last one. Maybe somebody bought it for all of their family or something. Now that would be an unusual christmas. Anyway, it sure is something to think about me just walking down the street somewhere and seeing somebody wearing a t-shirt I put the words on. That would just crack me up.

Let’s see what else I can tell you. I get all kinds of crazy people writing in and I always just answer the emails as Chaucer in Middle English and all. The people who confuse me the most are the ones who make a big deal about things being accurate. Like this one person sent me an email saying “When exactly is this supposed to be happening. I’m guessing you’re setting it in 1385, but if so, why do you have?...” The reason I’m not specific is because I don’t want people to know whether it’s the past or the present, because that’s where the funny stuff happens. Like Chaucer playing video games or Lowys listening to rap or whatever. Boy, also sometimes somebody will write in and go around correcting my language, which I guess you could say I appreciate some of the time. But you see, I make stuff easier on purpose so that people can read it. Like I use “must” instead of “moot” and all that kind of stuff. That’s part of the mission, which is to be able to walk people into Chaucer who maybe only read his stuff like in one class and to also be funny to these brainy types who have like all of Jacob’s Well memorized. So when people correct me about the little kind of “mistakes,” boy I really get fired up. But I don’t want to sound like I’m perfect and all. I’m not exactly always putting my final e’s in the right places and remembering my subjunctives and all that. It’s a funny thing how you can read a language but not be able to write in it proper. And I appreciate the corrections but some people sure sound really angry about the subjunctive and I think, well I wouldn’t want to have a cocktail with them.

But there’s also a bunch of swell people who write in, too. Some of them help me. And some of those helpers, I don’t even know their names. This person who writes Katherine Swynford, I have no idea who it is. What we did, we just “met” through our characters. I saw her blog and when my family went on holiday – back when I was trying to do a post every week, what a time! – I had Chaucer email his “deere suster-in-lawe” and ask if she would like to guest blog. And she did it, old Katherine, she really did write some madman entries. Katherine Swynford, if you’re out there, give old Chaucer an e-mail. He’d sure love to have you back.

Also, Chaucer keeps trying to interview people who other people might have heard about. My idea was I’d have him ask people crazy questions. But not too many folks have been excited about it. Chaucer emailed old Harold Bloom and you know what Professor Bloom did? He actually responded, which is more than I can say for some people, and he was a real gentleman about it and said “Dear Chaucer: I am worn down this summer and can not be interviewed. With good wishes, Harold Bloom.” I swear to God. And there were some other people who were real nice but then got really really busy (I am looking at you Ray Smuckles). I do have one interview on file with this swell guy named Lord Whimsy who’s this kind of a modern-day dandy – he even wrote this terrific book about dressing up and all that’s a real hoot -- but I need to type that out and put it up. I’m pretty lazy, to tell you the truth. I could be about the laziest person in the world. Anyway, also people sometimes write in to interview Chaucer and once or twice they even wrote in to ask about putting something from the blog into a magazine. It never worked out with the magazines because they want my real name. And Chaucer always has to say something like “Ich am yclept Chaucer and ich haue the parish records to proue it!” and then Wired doesn’t get back to me because I don’t want my name in the byline. Because I’ve got this real thing about staying anonymous. I know it sounds crazy, but I think it’s real important.

You know, it’s like when you have someone in your family gets all dressed up as Santa Claus. And everybody, they know it’s not really Santa Claus. They probably know it’s Uncle Robin or whatever because they can see his wart on his nose. But if Santa Claus doesn’t go breaking his character, you’ve still got the make believe and everybody can have a good time. Or maybe it’s like how somebody puts this stuff on boozy old Poe’s grave every year on his birthday. Now that is just one helluva thing. But what would it be like if everybody knew that that somebody was Mrs. Carla Durbanville of Clichy-sous-Bois, France, who flew over every year? I don’t want to know that this person who puts flowers and booze on Poe’s grave is Mrs. Durbanville, or even that it’s a French lady. And even though the Chaucer blog isn’t exactly some big mystery like that, I don’t ever want people to know who I am or even what type of person (though I wish they could see my hat, I’ve got this red hunting hat that’s pretty terrific). I think it should be a “blog written by Chaucer” not a “blog written by a Canadian gender-studies expert recently tenured in a large Midwestern research university in the voice of Chaucer.” If you like the blog, write to Chaucer. But don’t go trying to figure out who it is. Unless you really hate the blog, I guess, and you want to ruin it for everybody and for me too. But in that case I hope you have better things to do like maybe make your own blog about your problems with anger.

That’s about all I’m going to tell you about. I guess I can probably say I got some plans for the future. My big plan is, I’m just going to keep writing the danged thing until it jumps the danged shark, and then I’ll write it until it jumps the shark again because I don’t give a damn and sharks can be fun to jump. Heck, it’d be swell if I could push that interview thing, get a bunch of people who you look at them you wouldn’t think they like Chaucer but on the blog they talk about it. Maybe I’ll try old Will Wheaton. He really cracks me up. I’d like to have some professors talk about why they read Chaucer and all. I see that sometimes profs or teachers use the blog in assignments, so I’d like to make some parts of the blog that are about pegag- pedag- pedoogo- about teaching stuff, like maybe some fun stuff about Chaucer and his times and all, or about showing how the Middle English on the blog isn’t really like what you see exactly in Chaucer’s writings. Anything goes, as long as it’s not boring. I sure hate being boring and I try to avoid it all the time, which is why I’m not too sure about this long old paper I’m writing for you now, I tell you. If you want to know the truth, the whole blog is a viral marketing campaign for this pretty smart guy. His name is Chaucer. So I guess you could say I have an obligation to come up with some good plans all right, and to try and keep it funny, ywis, ye koude saye swich a thing.

Tiny Shriner Review: Rainy Day Edition

The Tiny Shriner gazes down from his active water feature on JJC's window ledge, piercing the electrons of the internet with his diminutive Eye of Sauron.

He couldn't write worse prose if he tried to inscribe miserabler prose. Sadly, he composes this wretched prose without really trying.

But enough that is prosaic. Let's get back to the rainy day, as storm systems move across DC, dropping buckets of water and reverberating with rumbles of thunder that sound vaguely like "Alberto" "scandal" "subpoena" "resignation" and "Paul Dundes Wolfowitz."

What could be wetter than a mermaid? Actually, what happens when a mermaid sprouts legs and walks away from her aqueous existence? Check out Coffee and Critique for a slightly acidic but fair trade cup of analysis: Getting to the Bottom of the Little Mermaid. You will also be enlightened into the mysteries of the dinglehopper.

End of the year grading got you down? Well, the whole process will come speedily alive if one of your students threatens to sue! Delaying on finding entertaining ways to procrastinate instead of grading papers? (Sometimes our repetitious prose is so redundant we chuckle even as we type it.) Check out the Google referral links to this or any other blog. Machina Memorialis did, and discovered the Tiny Shriner's second favorite type of chat room (Tiny's most favorite focuses upon the sexual proclivities of gnomes.) If you prefer your erotic musings to be more medieval in their leanings, read the dapper Dr. Richard Nokes on Charlemagne's tawdry tangle with Shirley MacLaine. Or his link to a codpiece video.

Did you know that in the Middle Ages what we know was told to us by the church? And that nowadays what we know is told to us by aggregates of public opinion? Well, you will know these facts if you read Larry Sanger's essay at The Edge (Sanger is a co-founder of Wikipedia, an online resource that suffers the serious lacuna of having no entry for "Tiny Shriner"). Ironically, though, Sanger's piece is a traditional single author essay that tells you what you know and how you will know it while arguing that wikis and aggregates tell you what you know and how you know it.

Speaking of making things up, Dr. Virago is claiming she ran the Boston Marathon. Yeah, yeah Rosie Ruiz, we know you did. Just like JJC just got back from helping Stephen Hawking on his space flight. Medievalists exert themselves by lugging around Latin dictionaries. In cases of extreme emergency, they get up enough forward momentum to shamble. They do not run.

Finally, the Tiny Shriner wishes Stephanie Trigg a safe trip home. Her post from London captured well a familiar yearning that seems to haunt the last days of a trip abroad.

[For previous editions of the Tiny Shriner review, look here, here and here]

Jonathan Turley on Liviu Librescu

via the USA Today opinion blog

Paging Dr Holsinger

From the front page of today's NY Post:

In honor (again and again and, indeed, again) of the impending arrival of a book I'm very much wanting to read, Bruce Holsinger's Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror. Description from here:

President Bush was roundly criticized for likening America’s antiterrorism measures to a “crusade” in 2001. Far from just a gaffe, however, such medievalism has become a dominant paradigm for comprehending the identity and motivations of America’s perceived enemy in the war on terror. Yet as Bruce Holsinger argues here, this cloying post-9/11 rhetoric has served to obscure the more intricate ideological machinations of neomedievalism, the global idiom of the non-state actor: non-governmental organizations, transnational corporate militias, and terrorist organizations such as al Qaeda.

Neomedievalism, Neoconservatism, and the War on Terror addresses the role of neomedievalism in contemporary politics. While international-relations theorists promote neomedievalism as a model for understanding emergent modes of global sovereignty, neoconservatives exploit its conceptual slipperiness for their own tactical ends. Holsinger concludes with a careful parsing of the Bush administration’s torture memos, which enlist neomedievalism’s model of feudal sovereignty on behalf of the abrogation of human rights

You may also peak at Amanda Marcotte on the opportunistic feminism of the right, where she observes,

I would also add that for those who hoped cultural relativism would be the cure for imperialism, I can see why you’d think that. However, you’re quickly being proven wrong by the Christian right, who has learned to mimick the language of cultural relativism just as surely as imperialists like Bush have learned to mimick the language of humanism. I cannot tell you how many times I’ve written a post protesting the imperialist, genocidal bent of Christian wingnuts only to have them show up in my comments and accuse me of intolerance of their religion/culture.

Canterbury, ho! Chaucer is about to arrive

Look for the promised and much anticipated post at week's end.