An All Purpose Magical Tent, or, A New Old English Poet's Blog

[picture: Old English...or was it French...in New York. The Cloisters in Late Summer]

I miss blogging. Since the beginning of this school year, I've been learning on a number of levels -- learning how to be a "doctoral candidate"; learning how to write a dissertation; learning how to be a better teacher; learning how to be an organizer in the department; learning how to balance an Old English single-author blog with a medieval group blog (a task I'm always grateful for); learning how to find ways of exercising mind, heart and body that fit in ways that complement, rather than detract from, one another.

And it's April. Finally. The winter here in NYC appears to be abating, and by this time tomorrow I'll have written something that will vaguely resemble the first chapter of my dissertation. I've finally identified my Growing Pains again, and realized that that's the hard part about experiencing them: you never know when they're going to come back, and each time you experience them, it's something completely new and overwhelming.

But today I had an Epic Realization, and remembered that they too are like growing pains. Each time you experience them, it's just like the first time you realized. And my Epic Realization was this: what makes this work worthwhile are the people I've met doing it. My colleagues here at ITM -- co-bloggers and comment-ers alike! -- are a big part of that: the conversation that unfolds here is teaching me how to be a better, more humane academic, and teaching me how I want to see the field unfold as I begin to enter into it in a real way.

However, I'm also blessed with a number of talented colleagues here at Columbia, and it's my great pleasure to introduce one of them who has just (and finally!) started a blog of his own. Of course, an introduction isn't really necessary: you all know him already. LJS, of Monster Theory fame, has not only published his new chapbook but has also built an All Purpose Magical Tent. I'm psyched that LJS is joining the blogosphere, and am looking forward to seeing the ways he will bring together his poetry and his prose, and through the magic of the internet, bring them to us.

Welcome to the blogosphere, LJS!

cross posted at OEinNYC

Kofi Campbell blogging David Wallace this weekend

In the meantime, you might be interested in this piece that Kofi presented at a symposium at GW a few years ago. Part of a series of talks called "Futures of the Field: Medieval Studies," Kofi's presentation examines place, race, the medieval and the Caribbean.

The New Retractionism?

From Elizabeth Scala's review of A. C. Spearing, Textual Subjectivity: The Encoding of Subjectivity in Medieval Narratives and Lyrics (TMR 08.04.07):

There's something of a theoretical retrospective going on in literary
studies these days. Hard-core social constructionists are trumpeting
essential differences (Eve Sedgwick), and dyed-in-the-wool Marxists
are urging more close reading and attention to aesthetics (Terry
Eagleton). The boomer generation of literary critics is seeing new
horizons in refuting its once signature moves, generously returning us
to a simpler way of reading. Medievalists, for their part, are not
immune to this trend. Since the principal subject of this review is A.
C. Spearing's Textual Subjectivity and its principal focus is
Chaucer, we could call this trend in medievalist scholarship "the New
Retraction." Its global form may be no easier to take than the local
one I will describe here, and neither is it any less suspect than
Chaucer's own repudiation of much of his writing at the end of the
Canterbury Tales.

The whole review deserves careful reading, exploring as it does what is at stake in acts of critical self-repudiation (in many senses of that phrase: Spearing's project is directed against the "I" of medieval literature). Liz also has a Molotov cocktail of an essay [I mean that as a compliment] on the gender of historicism that, when published, is going to start some important conversations. Her work is becoming truly provocative.

Gowther's Interrupted Utopia Idyll

I met with an independent study student today about Sir Gowther. Without much luck, we tried to track Gowther's developing relations with dogs after the Pope demands he "eyt no meyt bot that thu revus of howndus mothe" (296). At an Emperor's palace, he "droghe" a bone from a spaniel, "and gredely on hit he gnofe" (355-6), and, when the Emperor's daughter places a loaf of bread in one dog's mouth and flesh in another's, Gowther "raft bothe owt with eyggur mode" (449). Subsequent encounters with dogs (512-16, 610-11, and 649) are vaguer about how Gowther eats.

To resist masochistic readings of Gowther and to lessen the humiliation of his penance: these were my desires, and they came to nothing. There's just something irredeemably wretched and, well, bestial about the Pope's alimentary injunction and Gowther's obedient food-snatching. And there's no development at all: Gowther and the dogs just don't get along. But this, however, is the case only at the Emperor's place. My student and I noticed that Gowther's first encounter with dogs violates the Pope's strictures: when he is outdoors, resting on a hill, Gowther receives his food as a gift.

He went owt of that ceté
Into anodur far cuntré,
Tho testamentys thus thei sey;
He seyt hym down undur a hyll,
A greyhownde broght hym meyt untyll
Or evon yche a dey.

Thre neythtys ther he ley:
Tho grwhownd ylke a dey
A whyte lofe he hym broghht;
On tho fort day come hym non,
Up he start and forthe con gon,
And lovyd God in his thoght. (Sir Gowther 307-18)

Far from a humiliation, this encounter is a moment of tenderness, an astonishing tenderness, really, for a narrative that otherwise swings wildly between sadism and piety, and more often that not, combines the two. In today's conversation, I identified this encounter as a utopic moment. For a time, Gowther is trying to do nothing; he is out of doors, out of all civilized organization of space; and for three days, he suffers--or, better, enjoys--a dog's charity. Only when he finally gets up and goes does he secure this charity to a proper, divine source. But before he substitutes a divine for a demonic telos, before he stands up, before he begins to make his way to a court where he meets dogs who, there, function only in a grotesque mimesis of animality, before all this, in that time on the hill, Gowther has found, with this dog, another way of being.

It's a pity Gowther didn't end at line 318, or even a few lines earlier.

(picture from here. I might have referenced the lovely Pippi too)

Some suggested reading

A rainy Sunday here in DC, and I'm looking through my stack of books (recently finished or in progress) to recommend the following:

• Jane Shore, A Yes-Or-No Answer. Bias alert: Jane is my colleague (and friend) at GW. These poems, though, are some of her best -- and she is a writer of considerable talent. Autobiographical, funny, pained and beautiful. Last night I listed to Jane read from the book at my favorite DC bookstore. Quite an event: I keep hearing the words of the poems running through my mind, in her inflection.
  
• Kathleen Biddick, The Typological Imaginary. I'm finally sitting with the book to work through it thoroughly. Tough going in parts, polemical, but quite a provocative argument about the relation between Christianity, seriality and temporality. I'm sure I'll be mentioning it here in the future.
  
• James R. Simpson, Troubling Arthurian Histories. Eventually I'll compose my promised blog post on this one. A close look at a single romance by Chrétien de Troyes, but with ramifications for medieval studies far beyond that single work. Energetic, at times hilarious. Simpson is a brilliant writer.
• Garth Nix, The Abhorsen Trilogy. Recommended to me by my son. Books 1 and 3 in this trilogy are so much fun, some of the best [adolescent-pitched] fantasy I've read. Dark and death-obsessed as well.
• Ashley Crownover, Wealtheow. Crownover sent me a prepublication copy of her debut novel and asked if I'd mention it on the blog. It's Beowulf from Wealtheow's POV. Although it's not typically the kind of book I enjoy, and although it's not without its problems (Grendel's mother is particularly unconvincing), this was a book that I read in a sitting. Crownover is quite a story teller.
• David Wallace, Premodern Places. I just reread this book cover to cover in anticipation of Kofi guest blogging about it. It's my favorite of David Wallace's works, and takes some artistic risks that pay off well.

What are you reading that's good?

NYT: Blogging may cause sleep disorders, bloating, death

Two weeks ago in North Lauderdale, Fla., funeral services were held for Russell Shaw, a prolific blogger on technology subjects who died at 60 of a heart attack. In December, another tech blogger, Marc Orchant, died at 50 of a massive coronary. A third, Om Malik, 41, survived a heart attack in December!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Other bloggers complain of weight loss or gain, sleep disorders, exhaustion and other maladies born of the nonstop strain of producing for a news and information cycle that is as always-on as the Internet!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To be sure, there is no official diagnosis of death by blogging, and the premature demise of two people obviously does not qualify as an epidemic. There is also no certainty that the stress of the work contributed to their deaths. But friends and family of the deceased, and fellow information workers, say those deaths have them thinking about the dangers of their work style!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Some punctuation and emphasis added. Full story here.

Festive Friday: Our Next Logo?

Today the peace symbol turns fifty. Happy birthday, peace symbol!

Attentive reader that you are, you will have noticed that this very symbol forms an important part of our In the Middle logo: the visual pax vobiscum is superimposed over a cloudless earth, where it suggests an askew medieval T-O map (conveniently placed to the right for readers who prefer bludgeoning over suggestiveness with their symbols).

Today's festive Friday question, to which we encourage all readers to respond: if we were to redesign our somewhat dated logo (I believe that I cobbled it together -- in Microsoft Word!! -- more than a year ago), what words and/or image would you suggest to capture the spirit of this blog? Please post your comments below ... and if you'd like to try your hand at a new logo for us, feel free to email an image file to me [jeffreyjeromecohen@gmail] and I'll place it up for you. No LOL Cats, please (though LOL wombats are possibly acceptable).

About Time

So Eileen conned, forced, compelled, tricked (etc) me into participating in the K'zoo BABEL session on "What is the Place of the Present in Medieval Studies?"

I've been firing every synapse of my brain trying to come up with something novel and pithy on the topic .... and -- some scribblings and vagrant thoughts aside -- have so far a big fat zero to show. First, my scribblings. Then, the diagnosis of the underlying problem.

These sparse jottings have accumulated in the notebook I carry with me at all times:

Start w/ the commensensical. Bynum wrote long ago that the present determines the questions we address to the past. But more. Doesn't that form a circuit? Can't be one way communication. The past might give unexpected answers answers to those present-minded questions ... Past may very well interrupt even change present thereby (the reality of possibility -- its materiality, even when it does not strictly speaking exist). Cf. Bruno Latour: time is what we add to the equation last of all, to account for changes that "time" per se didn't bring about (causal agent that in fact hides causality). What about Aramis? Can the possibility itself speak, interrupt time's flow, bring the present and past to confused newness?

Well, the use of confused is right. What I'm trying to get at is that time already doesn't easily parcel itself into past-present-future, that the question as phrased in the session's title cannot be answered (other than to say, honestly, 'It is and always has been inextricable. The same goes for the future.') We like to think of time's movement as an arrow, but that linearity is more for convenience and easy order than it is a recognition of phenomenological, physical, cosmological, or experiential reality.

And here's where I get hung up: I've said some version of this before. Many times, in fact. In "Midcolonial," my introduction to The Postcolonial Middle Ages:

a progressive or teleological history in which time is conceived as mere seriality and flat chronology is inadequate to the task of thinking the meanings and trauma of the past, its embededness in the present and future. Once homogeneity and progressive or hierarchizing "developmental" models are denied history - once simple, linear sequences of cause and effect are abandoned for more complicated narratives of heterogeneity, overlap, sedimentation, and multiplicity -- time itself becomes a problem for postcolonial studies, and the medieval "meridian" or "middle" becomes an instrument useful for rethinking what postcolonial might signify ... for accuracy's sake it would make more sense to speak of the "midcolonial": the time of "always-already," an intermediacy that no narrative can pin to a single moment of history in its origin or end ... Much work has been done on the atemporality of postcolonial theory's non-periodizing "post-," and this inquiry could be extended when paired with a rethinking of the Middle Ages' temporally vexed "middleness" ... Janus-faced, biformis, the postcolonial Middle Ages performs a double work, so that the alliance of postcolonial theory and medieval studies might open up the present to multiplicity, newness, difficult similarity conjoined to complex difference.

Or these passages from the first chapter of Medieval Identity Machines:

my intention is to survey recent critical work on temporality to discover how time might be thought beyond some of its conventional parameters, outside of reduction into a monologic history (especially when "history" is understood as either simple context or a chain of flat, serial causality); outside of enchainment into progress narratives, with their "ever upwards" movement of evolutionary betterment and abandonment of the past for a predestined, superior futures; and outside of linearization, the weary process through which a past is not encountered for its own possibilities, but either distanced as mere antecedent or explored only to understand better the present and to render predictable the future. In fidelity to the themes of this book, I am most interested in engagements with time that stress the open-ended movements of becoming over the immobililities of being, that stress mutating interconnections over the stabilities of form ... One of the most important texts on medieval chronology, Bede's Little Book Concerning the Fleeting and Wave-tossed Course of Time (known in English succinctly but unpoetically as The Reckoning of Time) concludes, naturally enough, with a discussion of "the eternal stability and stable eternity" of paradise. Time's machines offer no such "blessed repose," but operate in ceaseless motion, in strange middle spaces unperturbed by questions of delineative beginnings or definitive ends.

Or this passage, also from the "Time's Machines" chapter of Medieval Identity Machines:

Creation of a nonspatialized, shared, coeval time allows the possibility of what the anthropologist Johannes Fabian calls "the radical contemporaneity of mankind," the opening up of a world without temporalized violence against that which is different and distant. In arguing that temporalities separated by centuries may also in a sense be coeval, I am taking Fabian's argument further than he intended, since for him coevalness applies to cultures contemporary to each other but geographically removed. Once progressivist narratives of chronology have been abandoned, can movement in time ever be "back," with all the negative connotations which anterior temporality (as undeveloped, as primitive) carries? The possibility of coevalness across time, it must be noted, does not imply a radical moral relativism, but simply carries an insistence that "advanced" civilizations cannot claim an innate ethical superiority over those at their temporal or geographical margins. Coevalness requires as well an acknowledgement that the achievement of a tolerant or non-persecuting society is at best a fragile and temporary gain rather than the irreversible attainment of some higher stage of societal evolution, some permanent state of enlightenment. A constant vigilance is by implication absolutely necessary to maintain these moments as tenuous as they are rare.

Why am I quoting all this now? Because in trying to think about time -- and in trying specifically to think about the place of the present in considering the medieval -- I am not certain that I have anything more to say on the subject than I did a few years back. I want to be trenchant, I want to be original, I want to be new ... but in rereading what I've already published, I can see that what was at the time provisional has hardened for me into belief. That frightens me: I am not in general a believer, and am always looking to push myself towards the places where I am most ignorant. Deleuze said it best, in an interview with Claire Parnet: it is only interesting, it is only creative, to write from the edge of your ignorance, not to compose from the settled position of knowing in advance the contours of what you will say. I am no longer sure I have anything interesting to say about time. Belief, the worst replacement for ignorance, has placed itself in the way.

Dick Cheney to blog at In the Middle

Invoking a little known clause of the Patriot Act allowing "at will seizure of medieval or medieval-themed blogging," Vice President Dick Cheney will become our fifth permanent blogger. Look for his pieces Monday through Sunday every day every year, except on leap years when the other bloggers may post (but just on February 29, and just for ten minutes).



Happy April 1.

Coming Soon: Kofi Campbell on David Wallace

Two great medievalists who go great together: Kofi Omoniyi Sylvanus Campbell, author of Literature and Culture in the Black Atlantic: From Pre- to Postcolonial, will guest blog on David Wallace's book Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn.

Details to follow.

All's quiet on the blog ...

... and I will use this uncharacteristically monastic pause in our verbosity to thank publicly the many friends who made the Cohen family trip to NYC so enjoyable: Karl, Alison, JKW, MKH, and Liza. Many sights were enjoyed. Much food was consumed. Embarrassing photos were snapped (a certain medievalist sitting in the Bug Carousel of the Bronx Zoo -- in a seat shaped like a brown ball, pushed along by an enormous dung beetle; Karl in a large turtle shell; an odd fellow with the ugly head of a doll belonging to his daughter peering out of a coat pocket, making him look like a demented marsupial). None of these images will -- alas! -- appear here at ITM, but if you use your imagination you can almost picture them yourself. Almost.

A family moment that will stay with us for a long time: clichéd as it was, we took a night ride through Central Park on horse-drawn carriage. Snuggled beneath a velvety blanket, watching shadows move through trees and listening to the clop of the horse, coming across those tableaux that seem made for maudlin films but are the inventions of a moment: a raccoon engaged in treetop ballet; two lovers sharing a single iPod headphone, dancing awkwardly to music heard only by them; a skating rink with solitary figure gliding; the yellow lights of distant windows. The carriage's driver, a taciturn young man from Poland, was so touched by the almost-four-year-old Cohen that he let her feed too many carrots to his horse. As we said our good-nights to him, the driver leaned down and gave Katherine a small kiss on her cheek. The dreariness of carting tourists along the same circuit through the same park all day and into the night had lifted, and for a moment all was right in the world.

Thinking About: Translation

I'm still working on that post entitled "Growing Pains" -- all about the last two months of my academic life, and the weird transition into dissertating that has been by turns difficult and exhilarating, but mostly just plain scary. I'm hoping that eventually I'll have a bit more mental space to sort out all of the fragmented "notes" that are populating the "Blogging" section of my Spring 2008 OneNote Notebook (yes, I have sold my soul to Bill Gates -- but OneNote is really fantastic) -- more specifically, I'm hoping that after this weekend, I'll have a little more mental space to think through all of that.


However, part of my brain power has been caught up in a conference I've been helping to organize, and so I'm excited to mention that, this weekend, there's a New York Happening you won't want to miss: Columbia's Center for Literary Translation is putting on the third biannual National Graduate Student Translation Conference! The Keynote is a discussion, featuring our own Michael Scammell with Poet Laureate Charles Simic! Among the many roundtables during the two days, frequent commenter and fellow Anglo-Saxonist LJS will be moderating a roundtable discussion on Multilingualism and Translation, and I will be moderating a session on Translation and the Academy. The other -- and equally important and fun -- part of the conference is a series of workshops: graduate students from around the country are participating in workshops on translations from various languages (everything from Persian to French to Greek to Korean), and I'm going to be workshopping my translations of the Old English Advent Lyrics, and the Old English Wanderer, in one of them! It's a bit overwhelming: it's the first time I've let my translations be viewed by peers who weren't in a translation workshop with me at Columbia, but I'm also very excited to be taking part.

Anyone who has been at an event where the future of Old English studies has come up and I have been in the room will know that one of my major questions about the future of the field is what role new translations and editions will have to play in it. Of course, all you really have to do is read a bit of what I've written on ITM and OENY to notice that. One of the major ambivalences I've had about Old English and translation is the disservice it seems to do to the language, or more aptly, the disservice I do to the language when I try to translate it. And yet translations -- myriad translations -- are necessary in literature. And in life.

However, what is difficult to realize until you set yourself down to do it is that translation is a creative endeavor. As I've been writing about the Old English Orosius this week, I've realized how apparent the lack of concern for translation as creation in and of itself can be. For much of the history of scholarship on the Orosius, the concern has been for the "original" parts, the parts that weren't found in the Latin Historiarum Adversum Paganos: the voyages of Ohthere and Wulfstan, which interrupt the geographical preface and bring the work of historical inquiry to the court of Alfred the Great, have been subject to intense scrutiny. When the Old English translator embellishes on the story of Babylon, composing an impromptu poem not unlike the Ruin, critics rush to praise the innovation of the translator.

I think that this betrays a fundamental misconception about translation, one that can be phrased two ways. First, it assumes that the real difficulty is innovation: if you can translate from Latin into Old English, what is interesting is composition that is only present in the vernacular. These moments in the text can be BOTH creative AND intellectually apt -- after all, modification to the original must still fit in with the text as a whole. This conception of translation marks it as inherently derivative, and privileges the original text's superior position not in terms of authority, but in terms of originality.

What this conception of translation misses is the difficulty of true translation: the difficulty in being able to pose someone else's words in words that are not their own, but somehow mean in the same way. The difficulty of inhabiting another person's point of view, of sharing a part of their understanding of the world -- and of doing so imperfectly, but respectfully.

Disjointed musings that all go to say firstly that my silence in the blogosphere is reaching an end point (I sincerely hope), and that I will undoubtedly have more to say about translation after my panel on translation in the academy. You may expect a full report. In the mean time, I leave you with an excerpt from the translation of the Wanderer I've submitted for workshop this weekend. It's the part where the voyager falls asleep, and imagines that the birds are his old friends -- only to wake up alone:

He who knows exile will lack lordly learning
and the wisdom of warriors. His sleep will be wretched,
shackeled by dreams. He imagines his lord
embracing him—and lays hands and head
in the lap of his king, as once long ago
he took comfort from joy in the mead-hall.

He awakens alone. Sea-birds bathe, and ruffle their feathers,
skim light over the dark waves in snow and sleet.
Seeing shapes and shades of friends of old,
comrades of the past—he greets them with joy,
hails them aloud, fleeting spirits!
They swim away. Sorrow returns.
Old words are useless to him, who
must send his tired mind far over the waters.

I do not know why my mind is not saddened,
when deep in earth’s darkness, I ponder how brief
are the lives of men, how quickly they leave
the mead hall, so bold and so young.

Happy weekend to all, especially to JJC and family, whom I will see in NYC soon!

cross posted to OENYC.

NYC

The Cohens board the 10AM Vamoose bus and arrive in NYC later this afternoon ... for what looks like a wet, windy and cold weekend. We're happy all the same that we'll be seeing so many friends. For their birthdays we even let each child pick a show: Little Mermaid for the soon to be four year old (why do I keep thinking that the only way to make that one interesting is to do it as transvestite theatre?), Blue Man Group for the cusp-of-eleven boy.

We may return with pneumonia, but we'll also be fatter and less rested. That can't be bad.

Another reason to admire Stephanie Trigg

She has crime fighting super powers.

Nothing here, move along

The copyediting and collation of this little baby has kept me preoccupied over the past week, as had a terrific trip to UPenn. The Cohen family leaves for NYC tomorrow, and I am looking forward to seeing the many ITM co-bloggers and readers and commentators and friends who will be rendezvousing with us.