An interesting conversation about publishing ...

... was fueled in small part by a recent toss-away Speech Act of mine, and can be read at Quod She. Thanks for starting it, Dr. V.

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EDIT 3/16
Here's what I wrote over there, corrected ever so slightly:

It's a great set of questions, Dr V, and I'm glad that my frivolous comment masquerading as a Speech Act helped spur something deeper.

Anything peer reviewed typically counts highly to both a college/university tenure committee and to an outside reviewer of a tenure case. Period. It doesn't usually matter at all whether it is a journal or a collection of essays so long as it has been declared kosher via this secretive process which only allows truth to emerge. [Though I have served on a university T&P Committee in which different disciplines sometimes attempted to impose their own ratings -- i.e., an analytical philosopher who decreed that refereed journal articles were the gold standard; he declared this for no good reason that I could discern other than that this is what people in his field say to each other, and so it seemed to him a universal verity]

Personally, I think this reliance upon the magic phrase "peer reviewed" is an excuse for evaluators NOT to use their own brains, to read something and judge it for themselves. Anyone who thinks about peer review for more than a few seconds will immediately realize what a fallible system it is, susceptible to abuse and to favoritism at every turn.

As to the Medievalist Trifecta [of JMEMS, Exemplaria, and Speculum]: what Karl doesn't know is that when you complete it as I've outlined, a secret committee of medievalists who watches over such things sends you a small bouquet of flowers, a medal, and a certificate suitable for framing.

AND...

One more thing: it was JMEMS's obsession with special topics that allowed me to place an essay there (in an issue on medieval race, just as I was working on the topic). Exemplaria worked because I proposed and assembled a cluster myself (on medieval noise) ... and Speculum accepted my piece because at the time I submitted there was a sympathetic editor there whom I suspected would send my essay to readers who would take it seriously, and not to some dessicated crank who would inveigh against use of theory, style, or whatever else was causing scholarly dyspepsia on that day. Thus, I believe, did the first mention of Deleuze and Guattari make its way into Speculum. Writing for that journal was really an exercise in adapting my methods to its love of Latin and its copious footnoting of obscure works in multiple languages. It was actually a lot of fun to do that essay, a little piece called "The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich."

On a related note, that same Speculum editor is the one who plucked my edited collection The Postcolonial Middle Ages out of the "Also Received" dustbin (where the books go that will not be reviewed in the journal; it's that list of doomed orphans at the back of each issue). He reviewed the volume himself, sympathetically. Peer review gone right? No, a further example of the fallible chain of human actors who have a profound influence upon work they may or may not take with appropriate seriousness. I could go on and on about the license to be crazy or mean or police-like that the anonymity of peer review can grant ... but I want to stress that my "Trifecta" essays saw light of day not because peer review declared them to be True, but because of strategy, opportunity, and realization of the network of human actors behind publishing. [Also in there, I would like to think they had something valuable and original as well. I don't want to make it seem that I'm saying you can write anything and publish it so long as you pitch it correctly ... two of the three of the essays I'm speaking of benefited immensely from the serious, helpful, and probing comments of the readers.]

And I add, now: for these reasons medieval studies owes a great debt to scholars like Bonnie Wheeler and Al Shoaf who have nurtured challenging and unconventional projects and who have gently guided to print writing that could easily sink should peer review go wrong.

In March, July, October, May / The Ides fall on the fifteenth day

ITM wishes all of its readers a propitious Ides of March. Avoid the Forum ... and celebrate in the traditional way: with a Caesar salad washed down by an Orange Julius.

Festive Fridays: Get Your Fossil On

This just in: according to Entertainment Weekly's most recent Shaw Report [by Jessica Shaw], fossils are "in," skeletons are "five minutes ago," and hieroglyphics are "out." And here is Jeffrey Cohen, on his way to UPenn on Tuesday to talk fossils, neoliths, and the "weight of the past." We know he's "got his fossil on," but what about you?

The Frenchness of Medieval Jews in England

Cultural Diversity in the British Middle Ages: Archipelago, Island, England has been copyedited; the contributors and I are deep in the process of accepting, rejecting, and tinkering. I'm fiddling with the talk and attendant PowerPoint barrage I'll be presenting at U Penn next Tuesday (and at the University of Maryland at the end of April). My packet of proposed hires for next year is due along with the thousand administrative odds and ends that, once put to rest, will allow me not to step foot in my office during the entirety of spring break. That's a long of saying: Nothing new here today, folks.

BUT, connected to a post I recently wrote that loosely tied medieval French to Hebrew, here's something more historical that makes this union more explicit. The following is an early version of what eventually appeared in Hybridity, Identity and Monstrosity in Medieval Britain: On Difficult Middles (go there for the bibliography and footnotes, which I am not reproducing). It's about the lingering Frenchness of the Jews in England, and how this tinge of the Franci may have absorbed some indigenous animus initially directed towards the Normans.

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The Jews of Norwich
[Besides the native English and conquering Normans,] a third community precariously inhabited this city of uncertainties, a group both alien and alienated. Within the powerful Norman minority was a more tenuous francophone community, the Ashkenazic Jews who had begun to make permanent settlements in England in the days of Conqueror. Having followed the international trade routes which linked Norwich to their communities in Normandy and the lower Rhineland, these Jewish immigrants had been resident in the city for no more than a decade when the events narrated by Thomas [of Monmouth, in his Life of St William of Norwich] occurred. Although the Norwich Jews lived among the Christians rather than in a separate Jewry, according to V. D. Lipman's extensive research their habitations were for the most part located in what Domesday had called the city's novus burgus, the French borough of Mancroft, founded in the shadow of the castle:

To the south and south-east of the market place lived most, though not all, the Jews of medieval Norwich. They lived between the castle and market … Thus they were in the midst of the most populous part of the city; and near to the centres of royal and civic authority … It is noticeable that these groups of houses are all near the new market place in the new 'French' settlement and that they are also within easy reach of the castle, which was the headquarters of the representative of royal authority specially charged with the oversight and protection of the Jews, and which also served as a refuge for them in times of disturbance.

The Jewish community was at once marginal and central: small in number, nonparticipants in the rituals that bound Christians to each other, but as moneylenders the lifeblood of Norwich's commercial prosperity. They were geographical and economic intimates with the Franci de Norwic [Normans], a people with whom they shared a language and in many cases an origin , since most English Jews prior to 1154 arrived from Normandy.

Although they must have known some English and a modicum of Latin to conduct effective business, French was the vernacular of the Jews, a domestic and conversational tongue spoken among themselves and with Christians of the upper classes. Because it was the language they employed at home, English Jews tended to bear francophone appellations, often translations of their Hebrew names. Contemporary Jewish literacy consisted of facility in Hebrew, sometimes in Latin, and invariably in French. Norwich's cathedral, castle, and new borough might be inhabited by people of Norman heritage who conducted many of their interactions en français, but these residents of the city likely thought of themselves as English. Anglicization did not penetrate England's Jewish communities as it did the households of former Normans. The Jews remained a French-speaking people who continued to cultivate ties with their relations on the continent, especially Rouen. At a time when the kingdom of England was literally becoming more insular (Normandy was temporarily lost during Stephen's reign), the Jews maintained strong connections to the continent, making them an international group resident within a dwindled national community.

Even to francophone Christians, the Jews seemed a people set forever apart. Whereas for most citizens of Norwich the centers of community were the local church and the city's cathedral, the Jews attended their synagogue and did not live according to the ritual calendar that gave the Christian year its structure. The long solemnity of Lent and Easter, the festivity of Christmas, the multiplicity of holy days that called the city to communal prayer, celebration, or repentance meant nothing to a people who still awaited their messiah and who could not believe in the sacred magic of the saints. Few as they were, the Jews formed a national community more than a local one -- evidenced, for example, by the fact that they sent their dead to London to be buried in a Jewish cemetery. They enjoyed royal protections not available to local citizens; they continued to speak French in an environment that was becoming increasingly dominated by English; even their households were different, Jewish women more fully participating in domestic governance and public business than Christian women did. The Jews seemed ultimately to be alieni of a different order, disturbingly uninterested in or incapable of the assimilation [into a singular English community] that their neighbors in the new borough of Norwich were undergoing.

Linguistic, religious, and cultural otherness rendered the Jews easy targets for animus and anxiety that endured in the wake of the city's profound social, structural, architectural transformation. As the first Jewish settlers arrived in Norwich, the wooden fortifications of the Norman castle had just been replaced with a stone keep. The cathedral church, monastic buildings, and bishop's palace were likewise nearing completion or had just been finished. Jurnet, Norwich's wealthiest moneylender, had a stone house built for his family in the 1170s and employed the same masons who had previously toiled on some of the cathedral buildings. Emily Rose speculates that this house was meant to replace the wooden domicile in which [the boy 'martyr'] William had supposedly been crucified, allowing Jurnet to raze the now notorious building. In the decade following William's death this house was perhaps on its way to becoming an unofficial pilgrimage site where observers hoped to spot the boy's blood on the timbers, just as Thomas of Monmouth had done. Jewish homes in the new borough's marketplace provided a constant visual reminder of the shift in the city's economic and social gravity. This transferal of power would have accelerated after the Jews arrived in the 1130s, catalyzing further mercantile and monetary activity. Norwich's Jewish population appeared, in other words, just in time to embody every Norman transformation wrought upon the fabric of English Norwich. Perhaps that is why when the supposed messenger arrives to offer the boy William a position in the archdeacon's kitchen, his mother cannot tell whether the man who leads away her son is a Christian or a Jew (1.4). In her English eyes and to her English ears, all the francophone residents of the new borough -- whether attached to the cathedral or practicing an alien faith -- are foreigners. As much as their difference in creed, it must have been the Jews' lingering Frenchness that triggered historical resentments having much to do with the lingering memory of the effects of the conquest.

Wondering about the Wonders: CELCE's "Crossing Borders"

If writing -- and, shall I add, blog writing -- is a practice, I've clearly fallen down on the job lately. I like to think of it as "dissertation block." It's like writer's block, only it happens more slowly: first, you start noticing that every time you sit down to write those 20 pages of dissertation material for your adviser, your chest gets tight and you feel the compulsive need to do yoga until you have to go to an appointment (which conveniently eliminates the chest tightness as the dissertation time you'd planned). Eventually, you find it extending to every time you sit down at a computer -- whether it's to write an email, comment on a student draft, or even write a blog post. I'm actually in a the midst of a short post on this very topic -- titled, in honor of this new stage of my grad school career, "Growing Pains." However, for today, I thought I'd post about another New York City Medieval Happening (and if you missed a very fruitful Happening LAST Friday -- read Eileen's latest below!)

Tomorrow, I will take part in the the CELCE conference at NYU: "Crossing Borders". In fact, in mere minutes, I will be traveling south on the 1 train to Christopher Street, and trekking over to the conference location in order to hear Carolyn Dinshaw's keynote address.

Tomorrow, however, I will be debuting a version of a paper I wrote two years ago (and will repeat in altered format at Kalamazoo). It's called "The Space Between: Mapping Monsters in the Old English Wonders of the East." In it, I will argue that the location of the Mambres and Jamnes section of the Wonders, in the largely "scientific" focus of the MS Cotton Tiberius, actually makes an argument for how monsters ought to be encountered (textually or otherwise): as a strict warning that some knowledge isn't meant to be known. Mambres and Jamnes are, of course, the magicians who go up against Moses and Aaron, and the text of the Mambres section of the Tiberius tells of how the damned soul of Jamnes warns his brother that by learning "the deep secrets of his idolatry" (literally, the word is deoflegildes -- devil-wages!) he too shall be banished to a hell-pit, which is 2 x 4 cubits (ah, the level of detail!).

This paper has plagued me for a long time. Originally, and ultimately (if I ever revise it into an article), I was making a much larger argument about contingency, monstrous bodies, and dangerous knowing. It used a lot of Agamben, and so engaged my major difficulty with theoretical texts: I am utterly incapable of writing about them. I think that that indeterminate status of a contingency is still present in the part of the paper I will post here: however, I should note that you're not missing anything about Agamben, as I have completely cut him from the argument for lack of space and eloquence. Here follows (in beautiful, Word 2007 formatting!) a portion of my conclusion. I've been told it's too poetic, and hence too unclear. I'll probably clean it up a bit come time for the conference tomorrow. But for now -- poetics and all -- I offer the conclusion to my go on the monsters.


Of course what I really want to know: Anybody catch the Dave Matthew's Band reference in the title?

The message implied by the Mambres section is that the creatures of the Wonders are so guarded [by dangers, threats and distance] because they are not meant to be known. The text is not attempting to illuminate their existence so much as their meaning. Like the trees of the Letter of Alexander, the knowledge apportioned to each man is limited: Ac ne frign ðu unc nohtes ma ne axa, for þon wit habbað oferheloðred þæt gemære uncres leohtes (But ask no more of the two of us, for we have spoken beyond the limits of our light).[1] Just such a limit may also be intimated by the Wonders, by the descriptions that approach but never fully see the far off creatures the text treats. Creatures that do not fit into regulatory categories may be monsters, and it seems better to take from them the lesson they may teach than to know what they are in themselves. Their message is acceptance, a lack of querying, and the injunction of the trees: ne frign. These creatures are different, and some are dangerous, and traveling to find them is itself marked by obstacles that may be set in place for a reason. If one does ask – if one opens the books, and learns by this opening the secrets of the deep mysteries, the risk is of one’s own dissolution. The marvel takes the unwary explorer in – into a hell-pit of 2 by 4 cubits, or more chillingly, inside itself via ingestion.[2] The specifics of their existence are not the point: rather, their warning against inquiry and the dangers of knowing monsters allows the reader to escape entrapment by his own arcane knowledge.

Monsters and marvels are dangerous because they defy categorization, they hybridize, and they hijack human language to use for their own monstrous purpose. The unsettling suggestion of Wonders is that these creatures might not be simply “bodies” that signify only God’s power over the physical, his ability to raise the physical, human body from the dead written in His creation of bodies fantastic.[3] Rather, more than just the inhabitants of Ciconia may be “thought to be men” – a potential best left unexplored, and its consequences left unsuffered. Thus the final injunction of the Mambres and Jamnes segment of the text leaves us where the text began -- in the midst of an unresolved possibility of beings, fragmented beyond perfect comprehension of a reason, with only the stern warning that it isn’t ours to know, or even to ask about. We end with two magicians, deep secrets of idolatry, knowledge written in books, and the warning that some things are not supposed to be known.

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[1] Orchard, Pride and Prodigies, 253.

[2] Jeffrey Cohen’s visualization of the Donestre (as literally incorporating was key in connecting these concepts. Cf. Of Giants p. 3-5, most specifically: "in the last scene of the narrative, the traveler has been completely transformed. The severed head is an empty point of fascination that directs the viewer’s gaze back to the alienating form in which the traveler is now contained, at the monster he has now become."

[3] Cf. Austin for a cogent description of Augustine’s theory. Austin, Greta. “Marvelous Peoples or Marvelous Races ? Race and the Anglo-Saxon
Wonders of the East” in Marvels, Monsters and Miracle: Studies in the Medieval and Early Modern Imaginations. Ed. Timothy S. Jones and David A Sprunger. Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications, 2002.

cross posted at Old English in New York.

Here Now Is One Who Will Increase Our Loves: On the Virtues (and Loves) of Beautiful Singularities

Figure 1. Terminal at JFK Airport

I have written letters that are failures, but I have written few, I think, that are lies. Trying to reach a person means asking the same question over and over again: Is this the truth, or not? I begin this letter to you, then, in the western tradition. If I understand it, the western tradition is: put your cards on the table.—Amy Hempel, “Tumble Home”

We are neither present in the world nor absent from it.—Leo Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject”

I am recently back from New York City and the Medieval Club of New York’s panel, “Subjects of Friendship, Medieval and Medievalist,” and the experience—of the talks and commentary at the panel itself but also of hanging out in NYC with assorted [and lovely] persons I have known or am getting to know—has left me with more questions than I know how to answer as regards friendship, ethics, eros [broadly defined, for me, as a life-force, of which sexuality is only one powerful symptom], love, humanism, and the practices of our profession [the humanities, most broadly], all subjects that have been obsessing me of late, especially in relation to their inter- or disconnectedness with each other [and the cognitive dissonances that often result when they don’t “hook up,” and that we have to navigate every day in our traffic within the university, and elsewhere]. I have spent a long-ish amount of time reading the philosophy and theory of ethics, love, friendship, and sexuality [of course, my bibliography could never be complete], and I am feeling, finally, somewhat dissatisfied with the ideas, expressed variously by different thinkers, that my relationship to the Other [whether as someone for whom I am responsible or as someone I want to approach in love or friendship or desire] can only be accomplished through various acts of world- and self-cancellation and through leave-takings of the forms of embodiment with which I am most familiar [and for which my longing longs]. In some way [I have no idea how, really, so help me, please] I want to contest Leo Bersani’s notion that intersubjecvtivity, “as we have come to prize it in western culture . . . is a reining in, a sequestering, of our energies” [Homos, p. 124]. Or, as he also puts it, “Our complex views of intersubjectivity, nourished by an intricate consciousness of desire, have the effect of channeling our imagination of human relations into the narrow domain of the private” [p. 123]. And what is proposed, as an antidote to all this [and also to avoid a definition of “all relations as property relations”], is that

we move irresponsibly among other bodies, somewhat indifferent to them, demanding nothing more than that they be as available to contact as we are, and that, no longer owned by others, they also renounce self-ownership and agree to the loss of boundaries which will allow them to be, with us, shifting points of rest in a universal and mobile communication of being. [p, 128]

It is as if a certain de-familiarization is seen as prerequisite to truly seeing or experiencing the Other, friendship, love, sexuality, freedom, etc., and the will to de-familiarize could even be said to constitute the most insubordinate and revelatory act, one that allows everything, even history (especially history), to “come undone” and to also “come unstuck” from the “difference” that we write [often violently] upon all the forms that cross our field of vision, as forms, or figures. And the truest “community” could only be one “in which the other, no longer respected or violated as a person, would merely be cruised as another opportunity, at once insignificant and precious” [Homos, p. 129].

Yes, yes, yes, I know that everything—especially identities—as Bersani has written, “spill over” and that we “exist, in both time and space, in a vast network of near-sameness” [Homos, p. 146], and therefore, we should work very hard on new relational modes that would be, in a sense, beyond identity [with Bersani and other theorists’ “cruising” or Howie’s “think what it means to reach out in the dark” standing in as the best modes of “contact”—yet since I came of age, as it were, in the decadent gay bars and Act Up protests of Capitol Hill in the mid-1980s, I sometimes want more than the queer politics or queer ethics that always draws, for its metaphors, or inspiration, upon the material circumstances of the death-haunted and often mindless and drug-enhanced escapades of my youth—and yes, I said “mindless,” intentionally, because now, now I want the mind involved and saying that the best sexuality somehow has to involve the divestiture of the self is also like saying, how can I leave my mind behind? And why is it, whether we’re talking Plato or queer theory or theology, that escaping or shedding the self, which is also the mind which is also the body, is always seen as the best thing, the higher thing?]. And yet, I don’t want to let go of some kind of notion of identity that would be, hopefully, non-oppressive and open to its relational “allness” [as Bersani and Dutoit might say, pace Forms of Being], but which would also mark, in both time and space, the instance [or moment] of an always beautifully different singularity [or shining “oneness”—is this Bersani’s “point of rest”? I truly don’t know yet, but it could be and thereby I’d suture myself, again and again, to his thought].

And this is why, as Karl “outed” me in a recent comment to his post on “The Phoenix and the Turtle,” I do not believe that anyone or anything is “homo” [the same], and I hate the term homosexual [although, ostensibly, I am one]—could any term, similar to heterosexual, be so stupid and limiting as regards desire? To be truly “homo,” I would have to be in love [or in desire] with my clone, and let’s face it—that’s one step beyond incest; it would be the ultimate creepy encounter with the uncanny [yes, yes, I know I’m being too literal, but sometimes you have to be—let me do it sometimes, just sometimes]. The engine of desire is built on difference, or to put it another way, in the words of Elizabeth Grosz, “The ongoing production of individual differences is the internal motor, the ‘vitalist impetus’ of all of life” [The Nick of Time, p. 40]. Variation, my friends, variation, variation, variation, and this is why, as I stated at Kalamazoo last May, “we have never been homo, but we have always been hetero-queer.” [Now I suppose we could make the argument, though, that to limit one’s “mating” within a species group is a homo-ness of a type, but let’s save that discussion for another day.]

So, by way of a digression, after departing, mid-day, from Karl and Alison’s apartment in Brooklyn just this past Saturday, I ended up getting stranded at JFK airport overnight [due to the severe winter storms that had hit Ohio and Kentucky and other parts northeast]. In all of my traveling—and I have done a lot of that since I took my first overseas trip at 15 months—I have never had to stay overnight in a terminal. Of course, after seeing that my flight was cancelled [which did not become apparent until well into the evening after delays and more delays], my first instinct was to run to the nearest hotel, but since there was an outside chance I could get on a 6:00 am flight on Sunday morning, leaving the airport was not the best idea. I won’t lie: I ran through that gamut of clichéd and self-absorbed emotions that say, in one form or another: can my life get any worse than this? I want to kill myself. Why me? Why now? How will I ever survive these torments? Etc. Etc. That was for about ten minutes, maybe fifteen. Nothing is more absurd than this type of hyperbolic and misplaced self-pity. In short, it is not attractive. Then I called my friend Betsy and she reminded me that airport terminals are the perfect liminal spaces, and I should really indulge that, so I did. I proceeded to pick a vantage point from which I could watch everyone and also order martinis [the hangover the next day, my friends, the hangover], and basically . . . watch, and wonder. Yes, I like to watch, and to imagine. I imagined everyone’s private lives, the circumstances that might have brought them to this airport, and where they might be going, where they’ve been, what they’ve lost or gained, whether this is the day in which they, also stranded, reflect upon their recent losses and disappointments or upon their happinesses and pleasures, or maybe don’t think at all, like blank yet somehow humming pages, and how, ultimately, I could mean anything to any of these persons, or what they could mean to me. What if I knew them, knew them better? What are the possibilities?

And all of this immediately reminded me of how Franco Masciandaro had concluded his beautiful talk Friday evening, “Notes on Dante’s Poetics of Friendship,” with the invocation of the line, from Dante’s Paradiso: ecco chi crescerà li nostri amori [“Here now is one who will increase our loves”], which is addressed to Dante, “the anonymous pilgrim, by the equally anonymous souls concealed in light, who, appearing in the Sphere of Mercury, ‘were far more than a thousand splendors’” [F. Masciandaro]. Franco asked us to note the “plural” of their loves which “increase the moment anyone appears.” This is a moment that shares in both the infinity of a divine and “higher” [and perhaps, abstract] love but that also shows love as going out to the singular person in his uniqueness [even if anonymous, at first] at the exact moment of his arrival, which is always anticipated, and always welcome [and therefore, the divine perfection of paradise is not enough: we must have other persons, other arrivants, as it were, and they are never just anyone—how could they be? Or, am I saying that, for me, they must always be someone, someone in particular whose particularity I could relish?]. The singular person is always beautiful [and desirable] in her moment of arrival, walking, it cannot be stressed enough, in her [and only her] body. You do not know her but you will come to know her—this is the hope of love, of desire, and yet, already, even as someone anonymous, she approaches as a someone. And I can’t, or don’t want to, submit this beautiful image from Dante to Bersani’s idea, again in Homos, that the “psychology of desire” is an “essentially doomed and generally anguished interrogation of the other’s desires,” and therefore, all potentially revolutionary acts of love and desire “return over and over again, to relations of ownership and dominance” [pp. 123, 128].

To return to my original feelings of dissatisfaction, and by way of further explanation, I’ll just offer here some bits and pieces from the papers and comments delivered Friday evening [including my own], and also from some recent reading of my own, all of which have led me to start questioning, more and more, the abstractions [for lack of a better word], and also the modes of messianic delay and distancing and self-undoing and dis-attachment, even death, upon which so many of our discourses on ethics, friendship, love, and eros seems to be built, and from which I suddenly want to tear myself. There is no order in any of this; think of it as just a random, free-associative catalog even. So . . . .

In Derrida, we have the idea that it “is thanks to death that friendship can be declared. Never before, never otherwise. And never if not in recalling (while thanks to death, the friend recalls that there are no friends). And when friendships is declared during the lifetime of friends, it avows, fundamentally, the same thing: it avows the death thanks to which the chance to declare itself comes at last, never failing to come” [The Politics of Friendship, p. 302]. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, we have Nietzsche’s idea that amity or friendship is a “continuation of love in which possessive craving of two people for each other gives way to a new desire and lust for . . . a shared higher thirst for an ideal above them,” and we are also exhorted, not to love of the neighbor, but rather to “flight from your neighbor and to love of the most distant.” For Maurice Blanchot, friendship is an “incommensurable relation of one to the other” in which “the other is the outside drawing near in its separateness and inaccessibility” [The Writing of Disaster, p. 50]. In Giorgio Agamben’s conception, friendship is a “de-subjectivization at the very heart of the most intimate perception of self” [“Friendship,” Contretemps 5 (2004): p. 6]. In Levinas’s conception of the face, “the face of the other is verticality and uprightness; it spells a relation or rectitude. The face is not in front of me but above me. . . . The ethical rapport with the face is asymmetrical in that it subordinates my existence to the other” [Dialogues with Contemporary Continental Thinkers, pp. 59-60]. From Aquinas, we hear that in “the love of concupiscence, we draw to us what is extraneous for us, for we love other things . . . in so far as they are useful or delectable to us. But in the love of friendship . . . similitude is the cause of love, for we do not love someone in this way unless we are one with him, and similitude is a kind of unity.” With Deleuze and Guattari, we should praise molecular flows over molar unities as well as “interbeing”: a “transversal movement that sweeps one and the other away, a stream without beginning or end that undermines its own banks and picks up speed in the middle” [A Thousand Plateaus, p. 25], leading Foucault to wonder if what we need now is to “de-individualize by means of multiplication and displacement” [“Preface,” Deleueze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, p. xiv]. Count on as many fingers as you like [Freud, Lacan, Laplanche, etc.] all the psychoanalytic thinkers who view love and desire as lack or even as an aggressively destructive narcissism, or further, a death-drive. And following that, with Edelman, we could embrace that death-drive and insist that “the fate of the queer is to figure the fate that cuts the thread of futurity” and to define ourselves by that “mortality” which is “the negation of everything that would define itself, moralistically, as pro-life” [No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, pp. 30, 31]. And from Bersani and Ulysse Dutoit, in a striking passage from Forms of Being, we are asked to consider how we might emit a kind of light,

a light hidden behind psychic darkness, blocked by our expressive being. To lose our fascinating and crippling expressiveness might be the precondition for our moving within nature, moving as appearances registering, and responding to the call of, other appearances. No longer darkened by the demand for love, we might be ready to receive something like the splendor, the ‘dazzling radiance,’ that Homer’s ‘blazing-eyed Athena’ casts on the humans she protects. [p. 70]

Perhaps, in the end, I do somehow align with Bersani, when he writes that the “human subject does of course exist and act discretely, separately; but its being exceeds its bounded subjectivity” [“Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006): p. 170], although I do not think our being can exceed our bounded bodies [without which our selves lack certain, I think, important vehicles of expressivity and feeling], regardless of Deleuze and Guttari’s [and others’ wild hopes to the contrary]. And this brings me back to the first philosopher who may be partly to blame [at least, in the western tradition] for insisting we view love [and even ideation] as something beyond or exterior to the body, beyond ourselves: Plato, who, in the Symposium, traces a route of a “higher” love from a love of bodies to a love of souls to a love of laws and then on to a love of wisdom. Further, in Socrates’ words, the “beautiful will not appear . . . in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body. It will not appear . . . as one idea or one kind of knowledge. It is not anywhere in another thing, as in an animal, or in earth, or in heaven, or in anything else, but itself by itself with itself” [Plato, Symposium]. This idea of somehow “breaking through” the self and even the world to a more divine or “higher” perspective [and perhaps, in Bersani, to a more enworlded “allness”], continues to haunt all of our critical discourses—on ethics, on friendship, on love, and even on sexuality—and asks us, I really believe, to become angels, or other sorts of floating disembodiments, and not human beings.

According to Jonathan Lear, in his beautiful essay “Eros and Unknowing,” the really critical moment of the Symposium is the sudden and drunken disruption of Alcibiades, who expresses frustration over Socrates’ refusal to sleep with him and who is also locked in what he thinks is a struggle with Socrates over the sexual possession of Agathon. For Lear, the privileging of a conception of the divine, or “higher,” love signifies what he believes is the tragedy of the Symposium, where to follow Socrates’ account of love is to “become disdainful of one's own mortal nature, treating it as not part of one’s true self,” and this is what also “accounts for Socrates’ indifference” to Alcibiades “erotic suffering”:

Socrates has made the journey, he has become as divine as humanly possible, and though he remains in the human realm, he is no longer part of it. He looks on the humanity of the human world with the indifference of the gods. Alcibiades is, of course, as human as they come. He is trapped in the human erotic . . . . insofar as Alcibiades is trapped in the human-erotic, he can, from Socrates’ perspective, go fuck himself. It does not matter to Socrates what the consequences are. From the vantage of Athenian culture, this encounter between Alcibiades and Socrates must be judged a failure of inestimable cost. Nothing less is at stake than the future of one of [the] world's great civilizations. And yet, from a divine point of view, human politics is by and large a distraction. It just does not matter which particular form the distraction takes. [Open-Minded: Working Out the Logic of the Soul, p. 164]

But it matters a great deal, actually, to Lear, and also to myself, “which particular form the distraction takes,” and our aim should be “not to leave the human realm behind, but to get deeper into it—its smells, feels, textures, and the imaginary meanings we give to them,” for “it is this particular [embodied] subjectivity with which we are pregnant: and it is from this that we give birth to beauty” [p. 166].

Lear’s thinking here, heavily indebted to Freud's idea that the individual “cannot be understood other than as a response to certain forces that permeate the social world,” accords well with the insight of cognitive science that, in the words of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, reason “is not disembodied, as the [Western] tradition has largely held, but arises from the nature of our brains, bodies, and bodily experience,” and further, “reason is not, in any way, a transcendent feature of the universe or of disembodied mind. Instead, it is shaped crucially by the peculiarities of our human bodies, by the remarkable details of the neural structure of our brains, and by the specifics of our everyday functioning in the world” [Philosophy in the Flesh, p. 4]. The peculiarity of the human body is exactly what Alcibiades cannot get around in his struggle with Socrates by whom he feels “completely possessed,” and while Alcibiades is clearly locked in a repetitive and neurotic “acting out” against Socrates, which does not allow him to grow or expand as a person, Socrates’ indifference to him further impedes his ability to individuate. In Freudian terms, Socrates essentially refuses to confront Alcibiades’ transference, which, in Lear’s words, is “in essence a form of political engagement” [p. 152].

As is well known, what I would call Alcibiades’ bad education had disastrous consequences: he vandalized the statues of the temple of Hermes by breaking off their genitals, profaned the Eleusinian mysteries, and ultimately decamped to Sparta where he betrayed Athens’ military secrets. The undoing of Alcibiades through Socrates’ indifference becomes the undoing of Athens itself, and the fault is not in Alcibiades’ inability to ascend to a higher plane of awareness—to get beyond the particular body of Socrates to an idea of a higher virtue, for that, after all, is only human—but in Socrates’ unwillingness to descend to Alcibiades, in other words, to love him, not necessarily sexually, but as person in need of a certain affectionate regard, a regard, moreover, grounded in an attachment to the human world and its well-being. And maybe this is why I was so swept away recently by Cary Howie’s book Claustrophilia, in which he writes in two sentences everything I am trying to say here: “to say I am enclosed in your mouth and I am enclosed in your hand is to inscribe a difference at the heart of you” and “being inside you is always simultaneously being beside you, irreducibly.” For me, the beautiful only really appears “in the guise of a face or hands or anything else that belongs to the body”—and this is where I am placing my bets, and pinning my hopes. If I have any sort of radical politics, it is only to say that I will never stop waiting for those who might still arrive and increase my loves, here, and now, while we can still experience and reckon all the accounts of our affections. Perhaps what I really want is a neo-Epicureanism.

Oliver Sacks' Love of Fossils

From yesterday's NYT, a short piece on the prehistoric and lapidary devotions of the neurologist/essayist:

Dr. Sacks can be even more primeval, turning the clock back as far as it will go. To demonstrate, he has a slice of fossilized stromatolite, among earth’s earliest life forms. They date from the Archean era, more than three billion years ago. Stromatolites, once thought to have been long extinct until a large living colony was discovered in Shark Bay in Western Australia in the mid-1950s, are made up of large colonies of bacteria, often blue-green algae, and sedimentary deposits, which grow naturally in a style that Dr. Sacks likened to a layer cake.

Maybe not the most appetizing cake, but he pointed out that stromatolites are held to be responsible for converting the abundance of carbon dioxide in the earth’s Archean-era atmosphere into oxygen. “Over the years, they made enough oxygen to make life possible for the rest of us,” he said.

This should endear them to even the most squeamish. It is their longevity, however, that enchants Dr. Sacks, a man who still writes on a typewriter. “They’re survivors,” he said. “I like the idea of ancient things which have adapted.”

“I am horrified by poor quality and transience,” he added. “If you’re religious, you can believe in the eternal. For me, the next best thing is the enduring.”

As this suggests, his feeling for stromatolites and other long-lived natural-history curiosities is no casual attitude. While he came to the natural sciences as a refuge from a chaotic boyhood, he cherishes them more now that, as he often sees, their integrity is under attack by religious fundamentalists.

“My religion is nature,” he said. “That’s what arouses those feelings of wonder and mysticism and gratitude in me.”

A final return for the Phoenix and Turtle

Ages ago I asked for bibliography for an article on Shakespeare's "The Phoenix and the Turtle." Thanks for your help back then, and, if you have time, or the energy, or the interest, or the desire to procrastinate, thank you again for your current help. I've finished a draft of the article, which I present here less to be read than to spur me to get it into a better shape before Tuesday, when I present it to my Brooklyn colleagues, and before Saturday, when it's due for the initial stages of assimilation into the anthology. Comments now will be very gratefully received.

I make no claims to advance queer theory. There's no coinage here. When I'm most tired, I'm convinced that this article is, at best, simply the q.t. article that "The Phoenix and the Turtle" invites and so one that must be written (the text of this short poem: here). At worst, I think I'm flattening out and misrepresenting arguments, tending towards the banal, and wasting everyone's time, including mine. We'll see.

Mine is not one of the poem's many good historical readings. If you're interested in such things, the Times Literary Supplement has been thick with them this century. The tendency now seems to be to read it as a crypto-Catholic lament: if it's read as personal allegory, Elizabeth and Essex, traditional designees for the Phoenix and Turtledove, have been swapped out in favor of obscure (to me, anyway) martyrs. For a superior example of such a reading, see John Finnis and Patrick Martin in the April 18, 2003 TLS (e.g., on the middle stanzas, "But first they are mathematical, and echo Euclid: 'in twain, / Had the essence but in one, / Two distincts, division none: / Number there in love was slain.' The cumulation invites us to ask: What has 'distance and no space,' length and no breadth (Euclid i.1, def 2; translated Billingsley, 1571), no area? A line-by extension, Ann and Roger Line.") But of course!

My argument's below, but, if you haven't done so already, have a look at Jeffrey's most recent posts, especially this lovely meditation on Hebrew, Marie de France, and Mayan bracelets

(EDIT: The comments below are a lovely testament to what academic blogdom can achieve once we put down our swords and try, instead, to help one another. I realize that all this talk of love can make it sound as if we don't have irreconcilable differences. Some of us do; but we need not be jerks about it. And a warning to anyone who wants to quote the draft below: while the version that's going off to Madhavi Menon tomorrow has the same argument, it's different in structure, emphasis, and in its evidence [i.e., I've corrected some misreadings]. I plead with you, quoting people, if such people exist, not to quote this, unless, of course, you're doing a paper on academic blogging or, better yet, revision.

Thanks to all.):

IT'S A DRAFT FOLKS: read above!
Shakespeare's short elegy “The Phoenix and the Turtle” opens by demanding that an unnamed “bird of loudest lay” (1) herald a procession of those birds possessing “chaste wings” (4). Despite the peculiarity of the image, the message is clear enough: eros is unfit for this ceremony, as are death and other tyrannical powers, for the herald also forbids the “shrieking harbinger” (5) and “every fowl of tyrant wing” (6). The prohibitions suggest that the poem will go on to chart a Boethian stoical technique for altogether spurning the powers of death and life and love. It comes as a surprise, then, that it instead aims, first, to celebrate the ecstatic contact of the Phoenix and Turtledove, and then to mourn their deaths. Have unchastity, the shrieking harbinger, and grim death been allowed in?

By no means; but neither have they been forbidden entirely from the procession. Not all tyrants have been proscribed; only all “save the eagle, feather'd king” (11). Granted space to “keep the obsequy so strict” (12), the eagle is participant and enforcer of the ritual’s gravitas. Into this solemn space enters the “death-divining” (15) swan-priest, whose expertise in funereal music is at once professional and highly personal, since the swan’s song heralds its own death. By joining its dying voice with the grandeur of this funeral march, the swan’s service to the procession also dignifies its own end. The swan thus suggests that the poem may be understood as both a memento mori and memento vivare, as instruction on how a decorous life and proper death each serve the other. The crow follows. As a figure clothed in “sable” (18), it is the chief mourner in a ritual that accepts and promotes death “as that which gives 'meaning' to life, or is the precondition for the 'true' life of man" (Marcuse, "Ideology of Death" 64). For in calling the crow “treble-dated” (17) Shakespeare indicates the crow’s long life and also that however long its life, death is its limit: “treble” may be considerable, but it is not infinite. Simultaneously, as John Klause argued, Shakespeare echoes the “hoc, nunc, and usque in saeculum” (henceforth, now, and unto eternity) of the Dies irae (“The Phoenix and Turtle in its Time,” in In the Company of Shakespeare: Essays on English Renaissance Literature in Honor of G. Blakemore Evans, 2002, 217), a poem that fantasizes about the last judgment and the reduction of the world to cinders. The suitability of the allusion to this poem needs no explanation. Combining its temporal reach with its “breath,” by which it “givest and takest” life (19), the crow shackles together eternity, death, and life. In this complex, life is always a tending towards an inevitable end, at whose conclusion it will be exchanged for and rewarded by ceremony of death. Death becomes no merely technical, biological problem, but rather the last, inevitable, most proper terminus (Marcuse 69). When death comes, as it must come, it should come not as the shrieking, undignified end, not as the terrible loneliness of one's own private death; in a proper death, overseen by the forces these three birds embody, life and death are each communal. And the community’s most suitable response is not noisy grief, resentment at death’s terrible injustice, or a refusal of the sacrifice, but rather only the bloodless tribute of a sighed prayer (67).

An anthem follows to mark the passing of the Phoenix and Turtledove, and also simply to wonder at a love whose intensity bursts forth in otherwise unthinkable modes of relation. Presented with this refusal to fall into line, Property is “appalled” (37) and Reason “confounded” (41). Theirs, after all, is the power by which things are sorted into distinct entities. In its confusion, Reason recapitulates and deepens the avian procession’s first effort, the initial anthem that proclaimed the death of Love and Constancy (22) before it fell into enthusiasm for the two birds’ love. Like the anthem, but with a more sustained dignity, Reason’s threnos mourns what the world has lost with the passing of the Phoenix and Turtle: Truth, Beauty, Rarity, and Grace. Because it seeks to confine the birds to a monument formed of what it demands be recognized as their own separate, and indisputably defunct selves, Reason's song is more a summons than a commemoration. It seeks to fix them into abstractions, which, precisely because they are incorporeal, are perfectly dependent on rationality; in exchange for their own existence, Reason gives them an existence only in itself. By substituting abstractions for the Phoenix and the Turtledove, and by declaring the abstractions now passed from the world, Reason shuts off their existence from all others and hollows out a melancholy in anyone suitably moved by the poem. Reason demands that devotees of the Phoenix and Turtledove recognize that there is a truth, but that it is a truth lost to the world. Joining in the threnos under the terms Reason sets means coming to recognize that there is something to long for, that this something is the greatest of things, and that it can never be had, that it can be experienced only as an absence, that it can only be longed for. When all are made to desire the Phoenix and Turtledove while being made to comprehend themselves in the impossibility of fulfilling their desire, grief becomes a necessary condition of being.

In its threnos, Reason nevertheless allowed the Phoenix and Turtledove a kind of physical presence; if they are present at all, they are present by being “here enclosed” in “cinders.” Yet despite Reason's designation of the cinders as a grave, they should be thought neither the container for the birds, nor as the remnants of their life and love, but rather as witness to a failed effort at enclosure. For in being a form of the Phoenix, the cinders are not “merely an infertile, dead substance, but on the contrary a breeding-ground of new life” (Christine Gilham, “'Single Natures Double Name': Some Comments on the P and the T” 127). The cinders are therefore anything but a mark of finality. They might be thought instead what has been left behind, as the remnants of the legibility of both birds to Reason once they have passed into illegibility; the cinders have been rationalized, while the birds, as the anthem declared, have “fled / in a mutual flame from hence” (23-24); and by slipping away with its flaming lover, the Turtledove has picked up at least one of the Phoenix’s tricks. Understood this way, the cinders signify that something may be occurring elsewhere, and also that Reason gets it wrong. Mourning here is a ceremony by which something too difficult to observe, too troubling to experience, something too titillating, too present, is deliberately misplaced—or, more pointedly, shut up.

Its threnos, then, furthers Reason’s initial appraisal of the two birds’ ecstasy, the moment of its first confusion. It first described the birds’ love as one in which division “gr[e]w together” (42) so that two “simples” (44), the most basic of elements, become “well compounded” (44), joined together into one homogeneous compound. With their two loves collapsed into perfect concord, this is a desire that is no desire at all, but only the self-satisfaction of a single being containing its all in itself. When paradox has been cooled into harmony, and the becomings of ecstatic contact into one being, the poem offers itself up as mystical allegory, as it does in the New Cambridge Shakespeare (both 1992 and 2006 editions). There, the two birds, by modeling Platonic bisexuality, vanish into one body, Shakespeare’s, whose different aspects they represent. Comprehended this way, if the birds have any kind of existence, it is an existence as allegory, disembodied properties of reason sequestered from all the impurities of lived existence. Trying something else, Reason then suggests that the birds are a “true..twain” (45), devoted to one another but also truly double. Split asunder from each other, they are confined to their individual subjectivities. This desire is like that of the mourners at the poem’s end, a desire driven by some lack, tantalized by some promise held out by the other. Here, the only paradox, if it could be called that, would be the “tragic scene” (52), as Reason terms this ceremony, of the insatiability of desire that could not be abandoned.

Reason’s two appraisals at this first contact misconstrue the Phoenix and Turtledove as badly as does its Threnos. The avian procession describes the ecstasy of the Phoenix and Turtledove as one in which there were “two distincts, division none” (27), “hearts remote, yet not asunder” (29), in which “either was the other's mine” (36) and at whose contact “number…in love was slain” (28). In this ecstasy, no one model of contact or desire predominates. When there is no space between “the turtle and his queen,” they are in a relationship in which there are separate but perfectly contiguous; for even in this intimacy, they still remain two birds. This is the touching or being besides described in Cary Howie's Claustrophilia, where he calls for an awareness of “a relationship of contiguity or juxtaposition that would not be reducible to either an antagonism, on the one hand, or simple collapse, on the other” (149). In this touching, the Phoenix and Turtledove are not absorbed into one another; they are embraced, not disappeared; they not assimilated, but with-in. This might also be thought the mutual touching of Sara Ahmed's queer phenomenology (“Toward a Queer Phenomology,” GLQ 12 (2006), 551), in which our contact with something, or someone, is also the contact that it makes with us, a contact that conjures us into a mutual, mobile identity of being-with. In this model, neither self of the two birds is “the same” (38) so long as they brush against one another. Theirs might also be thought less a touching and more a disaggregation of boundaries, yet still without the complete disappearance of the two selves. After all, while the “double name” of “single nature's double name” clearly refers to the two names of the birds, Phoenix and Turtledove, as Christine Gilham observes, “double name” might just as well mean an ambiguous name (“Reply,” Connotations 3 (1992/3), 125), something shifting and ultimately unknowable, something without the borderings, however intimate, of the contact described by Howie and Ahmed. Certainly about the precise borders of identity, or indeed certainty about the self-presence of identity, is lose in an ambiguity that might be considered through what Tom Boellstorff called the copresense without incorporation of a queer meantime (“When Marriage Falls Queer Coincidences in Straight Time,” in GLQ 13 (2007), 227-48), or what Cary Howie, drawing on Kaja Silverman, called “participation” (33), a merging rather than mutual touching, yet without a reduction into one being; this might be thought a being together rather than a being with. Or, following the suggestion of the co-presence in “either was the other's mine,” theirs might be yet another model of being, by which they become so intimate that they render the concept of relationship itself inadequate. In this model, the concepts of interiority and exteriority no longer function (echoing Bersani, “Psychoanalysis and the Aesthetic Subject,” Critical Inquiry 32 (2006), 170); it may not be possible to talk accurately of touching, or of the stimulated contact of phenomenology. Given the multiplication and expansions of being that such contact brings forth, this should not be thought a mutual possession, with its connotation of a possession shared out between a pair, but rather a multiple co-possession in which all hold each other in common. Finally, with the declaration “number there in love was slain,” the two birds model yet another model of desire and its effects, one in which identity is altogether obliterated. This is a “radical disintegration and humiliation of the self” (Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave,” 217), by which the Phoenix and Turtledove “reject personhood, a status that the law needs [for] discipline” (Bersani, Homos 129). With this approach, the birds have slipped altogether from the poem's sad progress. Not being directed at satiation, nor at community, conjugality, or, for that matter, progeny—certainly the very image of the future-as-child that Edelman has so repeatedly decried—theirs is a contact of pure ends that aims at nothing: by refusing to make the gift of oneself in contact, by not expecting a flowing of their being into the other, without even mutual recognition, the birds in this moment have “trace[d]...the untraversable path that leads to no good and has no other end that an end to the good as such” (Edelman, “Antisocial Thesis in Queer Theory” Roundtable, PMLA 121 (2006), 822).

Whatever the model of desire, of contact, of presence—and my uncertainty about precisely what's being modeled requires me to stop speaking of desire, contact, and presence and to write, instead, “whatever is being modeled”—the truth of the Phoenix and Turtledove is not a truth of unification, nor a truth of loss. If the birds have been rendered a coherent whole, the whole is only the cinders before which the birds of death raise their anthem and join together in sighing; if anything is lost to this world, it is because Reason demands that it be put away. Without Reason, and here I use without spatially, there can be witnessed another kind of truth, one that can only confound the rigors of Reason: it is no transcendent, unattainable abstract, but rather a truth of the moment that continually emerges into existence, under different forms, at the time of being with, being together, or even the absolute abandonment of being. What truth is here is the truth that is in no way an absolute, that in no way stands apart from the crowdings of bodies in contact, unless, as the middle stanza of the lyric demonstrates, it stands in a watching that is itself ecstatic participation.

If anything has been united, it is the image of pure constancy and pure motion, the emblematic traits of the Turtledove and the Phoenix: one always wending toward the other, refusing to swerve aside, and the other always on a course towards giving itself up to its own self-obliteration and to its own unceasing renewal. If such birds have progeny, it is only themselves (James H. Sims, “Shakespeare's Phoenix and Turtle: A Reconsideration of Single Natures Double Name,” Connotations 3 (1993), 65), not this melancholic community; or it is also this record, which is witness both to their contact and to Reason’s techniques of oblivion. Together the Phoenix and Turtledove form one image, which, however, should not be thought a unity, nor as something fixed in eternity, but instead as an ever-shifting image of dedicated, perpetual falling into one another. Wondering at such an image, I want to imagine—certainly not identify—the unnamed "bird of loudest lay" of the opening line as the two purportedly dead birds, who, by slaying number, by slipping the confines of Property, can sing at their own funeral, unknowable but perhaps not unheard for a procession that would rather give Reason the last word.

Sunday Morning

The opening lines of the Wallace Stevens poem that provides my post with a title come to me, uncalled, almost every Sunday. I love them for how they calmly juxtapose the demands of ancient ritual with pleasures near at hand, communal reverence with the solitary tug of dreams:

Complacencies of the peignoir, and late
Coffee and oranges in a sunny chair,
And the green freedom of a cockatoo
Upon a rug mingle to dissipate
The holy hush of ancient sacrifice.
She dreams a little, and she feels the dark
Encroachment of that old catastrophe,
As a calm darkens among water-lights.

My life is not and never yet has been one in which the Sunday sunrise offers complacencies or green freedom ... though I have found other ways to dissipate the holy hush. Around ten past nine every Sunday my son Alex and I take the ten minute drive from our home down Wisconsin Avenue to Temple Micah, in a quiet area of DC called Glover Park. We buy a bagel and share it before entering the sanctuary, where we sing some Hebrew songs and listen to a brief, hilarious, and profoundly philosophical meditation on this week's Torah portion by the rabbi. I leave Alex at 10:00 for his class, focusing upon a Deep Issue (today was death and the the nebulousness of Jewish conceptions of the afterlife), followed by a unit on Israel (as problem rather than as propaganda). He typically enjoys both.

While my son is being indoctrinated into Good Jewdom, I take my book bag and hike along Wisconsin Avenue south into Georgetown. The walk is beautiful, a highlight of my day. I stop at the Marvelous Market at P St, buy a coffee and an orange muffin, and read frantically from whatever text I am going to lecture on to eighty students come Monday morning. I say frantically because no matter how many times I've taught a work, I still obsess the previous day about how to make the coming class one which my students will not -- amid the deluge of demands for their attention -- quickly forget.

Today I was reading Marie de France; tomorrow I teach the final six of her lais. As I sat in the café thinking about my thinking about Marie, I flashed back to a picture I'd snapped at Temple, when Alex placed his hand over mine and crisscrossed our Mayan friendship bracelets (his gift to me last December). I'd glanced at the space between the two arms, and saw Hebrew letters peeking through -- an inscrutable allegory, I thought, suggesting some moral about endurance and history, about alliances with things and words and generations that you can know imperfectly, if at all (dark encroachments, old catastrophes). I then looked at the words of Marie's lai Yonec, a story about a woman imprisoned in a tower and saved from her hated solitude by a hawk who transforms into the king of a distant land. This visitor promises her a realm that has so far been denied to her, a realm possessed of histories and stories she can only imperfectly know. I thought how strange that something so fragile as a poem of love and transformation should have survived eight hundred years, and still speak of worlds as yet uncomprehended. And that is what my lecture will focus upon tomorrow: how at the moment in the lai when the lady feels so imprisoned in her present life that she will never escape its constriction, she dreams a past full of possibility and a bird arrives (not a cockatoo, but an avian full of green freedom nonetheless) to lead her to unimagined futures.

That's what I like about the scorpion bracelets from Mexico resting upon a Hebrew song ... a song that Alex and I have not been asked to sing reverently, but that we do sing well.

We'll Always Have New York

It doesn't happen often, but Mary Kate, Karl, and Eileen [and Nicola M.] and others can be found in the same room together this Friday night in New York City. Be there or be perpetually uncool. Or something like that. More details here: Medieval Club of New York.

Some random items

• I didn't know Karl very well when I read his animals essay for Exemplaria a few years back. At that point he and I had lunched together in Leeds, but otherwise were electronic acquaintances. His essay struck me as a major intervention into the rethinking of identities that has preoccupied medieval studies over the past decade. I stand by that judgment ... this is compelling work, Karl, and augurs for you being a molder of the field in the years ahead.
• A recent correspondence with Eileen has made me realize something -- or at least articulate an implicit knowledge. At this point in my life I've authored or edited or co-edited eight books and a circus of articles, book reviews, encyclopedia entries. All of that is fine; writing is something that I enjoy as much for process as product. Yet when I reflect upon what of importance I've accomplished in my career, it isn't this torrent of verbosity that comes first to mind, but instead the tangible way I've been able to touch the lives of others who write, and teach, and wonder: reviewing essays and books as an "anonymous" reader, for example, and being able to support projects that might otherwise not find the attention they deserve [do I need to remind any of our readers that we work in a cruel field, and that too often anonymous review -- like pseudonymous postings on the internet -- can bring out the very worst? Do scholars really need secret clubs?] I've also been asked to evaluate many tenure cases, a task that never seems a chore, because I know this process will likely have a lasting effect on medieval studies as some bright young-in-the-field scholar gets a job for life.
• For an independent study I'm leading, I've been re-reading Sharon Kinoshita's Medieval Boundaries: Rethinking Difference in Old French Literature. It's a great book, with lots to recommend, especially its savvy analyses of texts that once seemed familiar but end up quite transformed (Chanson de Roland as Crusade catalyst and re-writer of history rather than mere reflection of pre-existent reality; Marie de France's Welsh preoccupations). I wish, though, that when she discusses postcolonial medieval studies she would be more specific. Her introduction, for example, speaks about medieval postcolonialism in general, but mainly doesn't engage with particular works, other than to footnote them. This allows Kinoshita to make some wide characterizations and then differentiate her own project from this corpus ... a necessary move, perhaps, in order to sell a project. Yet I typically find such maneuvers unconvincing, mainly because it is often difficult to discover specific texts and critics who actually put forth the claims argued against. Kinoshita isn't the only one to do it: I'd put Bruce Holsinger, Ananya Kabir, and Deanne Williams on the list as well (this in no way devalues their work: all four of these people are excellent, excellent scholars). The medieval PoCo is a subfield that I'd like to think I'm well versed in, so here is my pet peeve exposed.
• Lastly, for your amusement, I reproduce below an electronic interchange that demonstrates why you should not allow your ten year old to open his own email account.

ALEX: u stink ur bad and mad in the brain!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
ME: no U STINK and ur bad in the brain so there hahahahahaha
ALEX: sikes thats not true smart one (sarcastic laughter)

Soon my family will revert to grunts and other inarticulate noises. Via email, of course ... and I must point out that my study and Alex's room are all of ten feet apart from each other, so why we were emailing such barbarisms to each other when we could have shouted them I have no idea.

Insert Hideous Progeny Joke: My article's here!

You have of course submitted something to the Carnival.

My long-awaited Exemplaria article ("How to Make a Human") is being shipped today, along with the rest of Exemplaria 20.1. Since it's my first article (putting aside a very obscure translation), I'm of course super excited. Let me thank the publisher, Maney, and the Exemplarians, especially Judy Shoaf and Al Shoaf.

And here (pdf) it is. I'm sure most of our readers already know the argument. If not, here's the abstract:

Derrida’s late investigations into the question of the animal chart a path past the persistent humanism of Lacan, Heidegger, Levinas, and animal rights philosophy; they also identify the essential role the subjugation of animals plays in human self-conception. This self-conception, an inheritance from the Christian Middle Ages, suffuses the Middle English encyclopedia Sidrak and Bokkus, whose popularity and ideological conservatism suits it for illustrating the discourse’s characteristic features. Sidrak and Bokkus claims a set of properties for humans and denies them to animals, all of which it construes as fundamentally distinct from, and inferior to, humans. Yet unmistakable but persistent resemblances between humans and animals baffle human claims to uniqueness. The resemblances are not merely a threat to the human, for by invoking, and then denying, animal likeness to humans, Sidrak and Bokkus models the subjugation of animals. Because the human was an effect of such acts of domination, no human could abandon the domination of animals without abandoning itself; the human was therefore constitutively restless, always seeking a foundation it could never obtain.

For nuance, look either here or at Kzoo this May.

Straight Outta In The Middle: Carnivalesque XXXVII

We're pleased to announce that the March Ancient/Medieval edition of Carnivalesque will be hosted right here at In The Middle, to appear roundabout the middle of March, just before the cruelest month that breeds lilacs out of the dead land and mixes memory and desire, yes, before that. If you've run across a weblog post in the past two months that you would like to submit for consideration, or even if you want to submit one of your own posts, email Eileen Joy at ejoy@siue.edu, or the carnival itself at carnivalesque@earlymodernweb.org.uk. Or, if you prefer, use the submission form at Blog Carnival.

Carnivalesque is not just for academics. We welcome perspectives from a variety of fields, especially history, literary studies, archaeology, art history, philosophy - in fact, from anyone who enjoys writing about anything to do with the not-so-recent past. You can nominate your own writing and/or that of other bloggers, but please try not to nominate more than one or two posts by any author for any single edition of Carnivalesque, and limit nominations to recent posts.

A Note on Symkyn's Nose

I taught as much of the Reeve's Tale as I could yesterday, but I must take it up again on Wednesday: for the extended discussion, I offer thanks, first, to the inspiration from the ill wind in Holly Crocker's Comment in this thread, where she characterizes the Reeve's Tale as "one of the ugliest pieces of literature in my scholarly ambit," and secondly, to my students' excellent questions: e.g., "there's a warning to turn the page in the Miller's Prologue. The Reeve's Prologue has no such warning. But the Miller's Tale is a lot less ugly than the Reeve's Tale. What's going on?"

Because I can't wait for Wednesday, here's some (minor!) material I couldn't get to yesterday.

We all know that the Reeve's Miller, Symkyn, aspires to be something more than a churl. Symkyn is in fact slightly better than Oswald himself at playing the clerk: after all, Oswald's sermon on old age is as notable for its incoherence as for its biliousness, whereas for all Symkyn's contempt for clerks, he's the only one in the tale who evidences any knowledge of contemporary currents of academic philosophy ("Myn hous is streit, but ye han lerned art. / Ye konne by argumentes make a place / A myle brood of twenty foot of space" (see William F. Woods, "Symkyn's Place in the Reeve's Tale," The Chaucer Review 39.1 (2004) 17-40). It's like someone in my family--not academics, not readers, unless one counts the Bible and assorted devotional guides--one day snapping at me, "You're the poststructuralist: you should know it's impossible!"

But clerkdom is the least of his desires: you know Symkyn's chief goal is to claim gentility, through his wealth, through his personal arsenal (which, as a figure of excess, is Robyn the Miller's wart in blade form), and, like any good gentil, by erotic alliances: he married the Parson's bastard daughter and hopes to marry poor Malyne, and himself through her, up past churldom.

Symkyn has problems, however, not least among them his name (in the following points I may have been anticipated: see #172). As a familiar form of Simon, it of course recalls simony (admittedly in a loose form): like his father-in-law, he is wasting the substance by which he should be nourishing the community. As morally dissolute as this is, it's not so bad: after all, it's through 'simony' that he hopes to transform his little place into an infinite realm (again, my thanks to the excellent Woods article cited above). But the name's also a learned pun on two other counts.

First, it recalls the Latin simius or simia, ape, surely (barring the pig) the most churlish of animals, and the animal most suited for accusing churls of mere mimicry. In its uncanniness, mimicry of course has its powers of destabilization (e.g., Bhabha, "Of Mimicry and Man: The Ambivalence of Colonial Discourse," Location of Culture Chapter 4), but whatever its powers, there's no compliment meant. Here we have, for example, a charge of inauthenticity through the implicit comparison between Symkyn's finery ("as eny pecok he was proud and gay") with the Squire's. And so forth.

Second, the Latin for snub-nose is simus (for this point, thanks to John M. Steadman, "Simkin's Camus Nose: A Latin Pun in the Reeve's Tale?," Modern Language Notes 75.1 (1960): 4-8). Symkyn's "camuse" nose (3934) and Malyne's "kamuse" (3974) of course recall the wide "nosethirles" (557) of Robyn the Miller. But if Steadman's correct--and why not?--we also have a pun. We should note that because the pun's based on rather obscure Latin (where "obscure" = vocabulary I don't know off-hand), it's one that only the learned would recognize. Whatever tidbits of clerical learning he's picked up, Symkyn himself would not be in on the joke. Only clerical readers--almost a pleonasm, and certainly a group that includes us--would know that he cannot escape his class, since his name and face are linked in an otherwise secret sign of his peasantness about which he would be totally ignorant. Whatever he is, he must be. It's written on his face: anatomy is destiny!

Seamus Heaney on Tara

Veteran readers of ITM know that I was last in Ireland in April 2006, when I wandered the island with my brother. On a day that could be kindly described as blustery and moist, he and I arrived at Tara. With its melding of the prehistoric and the contemporary, this regal mound surveilling burials pagan and Christian was just the place for me ... even if the post I offered was a bit snarky. Tara is, like Stonehenge or Avebury, a numinous expanse, but -- as with Stonehenge and Avebury -- it is difficult to say if that impingement is the result of knowing some fragments of the place's long history, or if the architecture of the space itself causes that feeling of being touched.

The Hill of Tara has recently become a controversial space, where the demands of a burgeoning and future-focused economy battle the desire to preserve a landscape which has come to embody the past itself. The Irish government would like to ease Dublin's congestion by building a motorway nearby. At stake: Ireland's national identity in its relation to modernity and to history. Letting go of Tara's enchantment and building the road has come to mean letting go of a heritage-focused Irishness (and by that I mean an Irishness which reveres a misty past that may never have in fact existed, but certainly seems better that what had been until recently a fairly dismal modernity). The lure of the ancient has long anchored what it means to be Irish. The booming economy on the island has deeply challenged this nostalgia, and the Hill of Tara has become the point at which past-loving and future-obsessed currents meet. The past that Tara is made to embody, I hasten to add, is as that of a temporally frozen heritage site rather than the landscape as it has actually been lived and is now experienced, with its church and its instructional signs and its temporal thickness and anachronisms and its busloads of pilgrims passing through. Tara is spoken about in the controversy mostly as space that answers the demands of the dead, or as a space that serves the needs of the living, not as a coinhabited geography.

Here's Seamus Heaney on the controversy. Needless to say, he sides with the preservation of history, but does so in an interesting way: by stating that Ireland's heritage was better preserved under its colonial administrators than under its present government:

On the attitude of the Irish government, Heaney said: 'Tara had been protection under British rule. I was reading around recently and I discovered that WB Yeats and George Moore and Arthur Griffith wrote a letter to the Irish Times, some time at the beginning of the last century, because a society called the British Israelites had thought the Arc of the Covenant was buried in Tara, and they had started to dig on Tara Hill. And they [Yeats et al] had written this letter and they talked about the desecration of a consecrated landscape. So I thought to myself if a few holes in the ground made by amateur archaeologists was a desecration, what's happening to that whole countryside being ripped up is certainly a much more ruthless piece of work.'

The Nobel literature prize winner said Tara was 'a source and a guarantee of something old in the country and something that gives the country its distinctive spirit'.