Lines Written in the Program for the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists: A Poem in 3 Sessions

Figure 1. Adam naming the animals: Old English Hexateuch, Canterbury, England, first half of the 11th century (BL Cotton MS Claudius B IV, f. 4)

by EILEEN JOY

Currently, I am happily ensconced in Madison, Wisconsin for the biennial meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists, a conference I am attending for the first time in my career. So far, Day 1, so good: some wonderful papers, beautiful weather, Wisconsin beer, and a lakeside view from the Pyle Center, where the sessions are taking place. In place of the usual overview of papers heard at the conference, I offer the following poem, with thanks to the authors of the papers, Drew Jones, Andrew Rabin, Robert Upchurch, Alice Jorgensen, Leslie Lockett, Colin Mackenzie, Peter Darby, Rosalind Love, and Mercedes Salvador-Bello [and also to Ælfric, Alfred, Bede, Isidore, Gregory, King Edgar, and other Anglo-Saxon luminaries]:

Lines Written in the Program for the Biennial Meeting of the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists: A Poem in Three Sessions

Session 1. Holy Bodies: A Benedictional

Loosely associated with Lent, she was taken up whole from her tomb,
called down for negligence ranging from incontinence to neglect of duties;
the place was dedicated in olden days to honor the holy Peter.

Against the vision articulated here: the pastoral imaginary.

I am sorry to tell you that we will be getting liturgical.
We imagine a seminar of bishops sitting around saying,
"okay, what do we want?"
I recently re-read Gregory's Pastoral Care,
but we arrived too late for coffee and couldn't make the link
between Alfred and Ælfric.

That secular dossier was around since the 940s: I'm trying to suss out
how that works, between the new and the old.
The issue for a male body is not so much that it needs to be enclosed:
I certainly follow your argument, but . . . am I right?
Who do you think the audience for this is, exactly?
(I speak of myself.)

Session 2. Models of Mental Activity: The Handout

I see that the handout has almost reached the back of the room.
It's not immediately clear what we learn when we detect the shame-rage spiral;
a typical sequence would involve a patient
who seems first to view self from the vantage point of the therapist,
and not just in the major rituals of an Australian tribe.

Turning now to the life of St Agatha,
I promised her jewels and golden adornments.

Now, this is an openly aggressive exchange: lines 66 to 68.
I'm using the Acta Sanctorum text here, the 1863 Paris edition.
I said I was being a little speculative: Ælfric has it both ways.

This is item 1A on your handout: the logic of the hydraulic model of the mind--
mental heat: "I must bear in my breast an agitated heart."
This model of the mind is exclusively cardio-centric,
and might become more roomy, as in Judith. This is item 6.
And item 7C: He swelled up in his breast,
a real spatial phenomenon.

This can be characterized as: "mental cooling."

I haven't put this on your handout, but,
what larger conclusions can we draw from this comparison?
Thank you.
Before I begin, so,
the mind is called grain-sheaf;
one should paraphrase it by terming it grain or stone or apple or nut or ball:
number 5 on your handout.
It just doesn't appear to be the case in Old Norse.
It seems reasonable to conclude that there is a definite functional structure,
so, for example:
í óvit óg þa stöðvaðist.

I have a question for Leslie: is there any alternate model?
There are a lot of passages, um . . .
I hate to bring up the stuff you didn't talk about.
In the 13th century, people had "moved on," but,
who is this "we" that sympathizes?
But just to undermine my own argument,
let me ask Colin to answer that question.
[applause]

Interlude. Lunch on Your Own.

Session 3. Enigmata, My Beloved

He will be looking at Bede's orthodoxy and heterodoxy.
The handouts are coming around now.
I was most grateful for your letter in which you have taken care.

To put themselves more firmly
in mind of the Lord's incarnation, Bede addresses a bishop with the epithet,
"my beloved."
It reads like a thinly veiled attack on the iconoclasts of the East, but,
it is fine to make pictures, fine, I tell you.
I cannot help but notice a touch of irony.
Now, this last point is significant: carved into the walls of the temple.

She's going to be talking about the consolation of diversity;
yet, she seemed so ancient in all her cross-eyed majesty.
Nearly 80 manuscripts survive, but what kind of engagement was it?
Not that there were not, however, what we would call "jottings" in this book.

This is a snippet you've got at the bottom of your page:
a teacher, not a pupil.
EXCLAMATIO! (all caps)

A kind of orderliness prevails, yet this also belies the untidiness within.
Who let these theatrical tarts come near this sick man?
Blah, blah, blah: the Pope's bathtub, this is section 3 on your handout.

Lights were poured down on you
at the right time from heaven.

Throughout the years, it has not been easy to convince editors
of my hypothesis.
The headings and the indications of the different sections
are my own.

Are they terrestrial animals? Aerial? Clean? Unclean?
Mouse, weaver, mole, cricket, ant, etc.: Subgroup A.
By way of concluding, in the case of the letter "i,"
all this suggests the enigmata format.
Thank you very much for your attention: you can use the mic
in answering questions.

I was surprised, I don't mean to be so judgmental, sorry, but,
in the case of the C4 manuscript, it isn't the "brains."
I think George is next.
But then they were put into Latin subsequently, but in a sense,
they're ten a penny.

But perhaps, not as far as this.

Just Get Yourself High: Join the BABEL Working Group

by EILEEN JOY

But when we sit together, close . . . we melt into each other with phrases. We are edged with mist. We make an insubstantial territory.
--Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Myra Seaman and I are delighted to announce that the BABEL Working Group is launching today a brand-new website, which you can see here:

NEW WEBSITE: The BABEL Working Group

If you are not already a member of BABEL, why don't you join? As we like to say [often], BABEL is a non-hierarchical scholarly collective and post-institutional assemblage with no leaders or followers, no top and no bottom, and only a middle. Membership carries with it no fees, no obligations, and no hassles, and accrues to its members all the symbolic capital they need for whatever meanings they require. Our chief commitment is the cultivation of a more mindful “being-together” with others who work alongside us in the leaning towers of the post-historical university where we roam as a multiplicity, a pack, not of subjects but of singularities without identity or unity, looking for other roaming packs and multiplicities with which to cohabit and build glittering misfit heterotopias.

A little more conventionally, we also like to say that we are a collective and desiring-assemblage of scholars (primarily medievalists, but also including persons working in other temporal periods and fields, such as early modern and Victorian studies, critical and cultural theory, film and women’s studies, critical sexuality studies, and so on) in North America, the U.K., Australia, and beyond who are working to develop new cross-disciplinary alliances among the humanities, sciences, social sciences, and the fine arts in order to formulate and practice new “critical humanisms,” as well as to develop a more present-minded medieval studies and a more historically-minded cultural studies.

To join BABEL [which does provide you with a discounted subscription rate to postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies], simply email me [at: ejoy@siue.edu] and ask to be added to our list-serv, which is a news-only [not a discussion] list-serv, and therefore will not clutter up your email inbox. Every month or so, you will receive email digests of where BABEL is going and what projects and events it has cooking, and also various calls for assistance with our ongoing events and projects, such as [don't forget] our 2nd Biennial Meeting in September 2012 in Boston:

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

Or our panels for the 2012 International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo, Michigan, which you can see HERE [and if you are interested in participating on any of these, please let us know, also at: ejoy@siue.edu]. You can also follow us on Facebook HERE.

If you join BABEL today, you can start bossing us around, and we really like that. Plus, we'll send you a free case of "no regrets." Cheers!

good bye / g'day

From the PP that accompanies my talk: Avebury, 2006

by J J Cohen

So I've barely blogged of late, and do you know why? That evil person at that other medieval blog made me write a lecture, and now she is forcing me to go all the way to Melbourne to deliver it.

So, look, we could all complain about Stephanie Trigg until we turn blue, but that won't change the world, and it won't shorten the 16 hour flight from LAX to Oz. Instead I will say: good-bye. I don't expect to have much internet access for the next few weeks, especially once the Cohens leave Melbourne for our family adventure. We are staying in some rural areas around Victoria, including a cottage on the side of a dormant volcano in a game reserve and a solar-powered Eco-Lodge in the mountains, surrounded by kangaroos and koalas. We'll also be driving the Great Ocean Road -- and, considering my lack of experience steering from the wrong side of the car, we may be turning the Shipwreck Coast into the Autowreck Coast as well.

So, wish us luck. I would say that I am dreading the long flight with the kids but to be honest, they are looking forward to the endless movies and snacks. The only thing they don't really want to do is sit next to me. Apparently I complain from time to time.

And oh yes: I will publicly acknowledge that Stephanie has been wonderful about setting all of this up, and I may have to retract some of my sourness. But as they say in Australia: better a sourpuss than a platypus. Yes, they really say that.

CFP: Active Objects

by J J Cohen

This CFP looks great: two intriguing sessions for the next Kzoo.

------------

Call for Papers:  Active Objects

Panels sponsored by the International Center of Medieval Art
47th International Congress on Medieval Studies, May 10-13 2012

Active Objects I: Optics and Transparency
Active Objects II: Agency and Phenomenology

Inspired by the recent exhibitions of reliquaries in Cleveland, Baltimore, and London, these sessions invite considerations of how object-centered approaches develop our understanding of reliquaries, vasa sacra, and other instruments of faith. If we conceive of those objects as active agents, and not merely as passive elements in devotional practice, how does that change our perception of their function and their aesthetic nature? How did the vivid nature of these objects -- their mass and texture, their form, their brilliance, their aroma -- shape the way people acted with them, or simply behaved in their presence? Also, is it possible to track the ways in which the agency of a specific object changed over time? Finally, should we, can we, and do we want to consider how the agentic power of medieval objects influences our own relations with them in the present day?

“Active Objects” is organized by the Material Collective, a group of medievalists pursuing collaborative discoveries, humane histories, and the interpretive possibilities of the material. We invite proposals that engage phenomenology, optical theories, relational aesthetics, Actor-Network Theory, Thing Theory, notions of affect, and other object-centered approaches; we seek papers that consider how objects matter in medieval Christian, Islamic, and Jewish traditions, as well as in the interactions of faiths.

Please send paper proposals (abstract of no more than 300 words, and a completed Participant Information Form<http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/Assets/pdf/congress/PIF2012.pdf>) by September 15, 2011 to  Karen Overbey (karen.overbey@tufts.edu) and Ben C. Tilghman (btilghman@gmail.com).

A Fourteenth-Century Ecology: Chaucer's "The Former Age"

by KARL STEEL

“The question of ecological morality is always approached as if it were a matter of authorizing or prohibiting an extension of the moral quality to new beings (animals, rivers, glaciers, or oceans), whereas exactly the opposite is the case. What we should find amazing are the strange operations whereby we have constantly restricted the list of beings to whose appeal we should have been able to respond.”
Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour, “Morality or Moralism: An Exercise in Sensitization.”

Five weeks ago, I had hoped to put Chaucer's "The Former Age" in conversation with the Alexander and Dindimus tradition and with fourteenth-century reactions to the European encounter with the Canary Islanders. 6000 words (my utmost limit) is not enough, and I had to drop the Canary Islands. No worries! Soon I hope to have something to say here about The Canarien, a bizarre early fifteenth-century chronicle of an attempted conquest (briefly: it gilds a vulgar chain of squabbles, failures, and slaving with the glory of chivalry and faith: the effect is grotesque and grimly hilarious, like a drunk senior research analyst in a disheveled clown suit). Meanwhile, here's a portion of the argument that, knock on wood (but gently, gently), will see print sometime next year.

If you don't know "The Former Age," it's structurally and thematically based on Boethius's The Consolation of Philosophy Book II, Meter 5 and a handful of other works. It describes a time when people were free of commerce, agriculture, or technology: they do not harvest grain, for example, but rather rub the kernels between their hands (l. 11). They're vegetarian communists who refuse to harm anyone or anything: not each other, not animals, not the earth or the sea, not wounded by the plow (l. 9) or carved by the prow (l. 21).

Criticism of "The Former Age" typically does souce or historical studies, the latter tending to see the poem's pessimism as a symptom of the politics of the late 1380s or early 1390s. That's fine. However, I'm reading the poem as a critique not only of human institutions but of the human itself. In sum, I read it as an antihumanist manifesto in the vein of Émilie Hache and Bruno Latour's wonderful "Morality or Moralism." I do this by attending, especially, to the former agers' unlimited moral sensitivity but also to Chaucer's additions to his sources, and its affinities with a thematically related set of texts, the British witnesses to the encounter between Alexander the Great and the ascetic philosophers of India, the Gymnosophists and Dindimus and the Brahmans. I plan to talk about this Dindimus material in another post.

Chaucer's few additions include a few animal comparisons and his despairing final stanza, which bemoans that the world is now full of lust, deceit, and murder, with no way out. Lines 7 and 37 in effect say that these people eat like pigs: "They eten mast, hawes, and swich pounage"; "noght but mast or apples is therinne." Golden Age people eat acorns: this is a cliché, mocked from Cicero to Petrarch, and sneered at by Lucretius, who says that primordial people traded acorns for sex. The pig-comparison's unusual, though, at least in the Golden Age tradition. In my book, I read this as a humiliating contrapasso against people who don't eat pigs: eat pork or be treated like pork. In medieval Christian texts, this happens to Jews, Muslims, and now to these vegetarians, who, like pigs, eat "mast, hawes, and swich pounage" in the woods rather than enjoying the products of the grange.

The other animal comparison comes in line 50, where Chaucer calls these people lambish. Perhaps not alarming, until you remember that for a dozen years Chaucer oversaw the wool custom and wool subsidy for the Port of London. In this time, few English were more involved in the sheep trade: worthy is the lamb &c. Note too that one of the witnesses of "The Former Age" traveled with Lydgate's "Debate of the Horse, Goose, and Sheep," a poem that the ram wins by arguing, in effect, that English industry commercializes every bit of the sheep, its fleece, meat, horn, hooves, and skin (here I think of Upton Sinclair's "they use everything of the pig except the squeal").

And then there's the despair of the last stanza, Chaucer's longest addition. Taken as a whole, "The Former Age" imagines a time without human domination, a time whose people recognize the constitutive vulnerability of everything as morally significant (see Derrida on the "nonpower at the heart of power" in The Animal that Therefore I am); a time whose people saw the face (in a Levinasian sense) everywhere and acted accordingly. "The Former Age" imagines this time, and admires these people, sure, but it also chooses to think of them as animals, there to be used and traded; and it chooses to imagine this time as irrevocably lost.

But Chaucer's other so-called Boethian poems ("Truth," "Lak of Stedfastnesse," and "Gentilesse") hope for something better. Why not this poem too? I read it as written in a voice unequal to its subject, a voice that cannot give up on human privileges (Nicola Masciandaro and Gillian Rudd have also read the poem's voice suspiciously). I see the failure of the poem's voice as indirectly asking us to do better, to try harder to get past the despair and sad domination of being human. Unlike the poetic voice, we readers, hoping better, can use this supposedly lost past to get at another future (infinite citations here, but Piotr Gwiazda's Former Age article, which uses Ernst Bloch, is more than good enough).

Yet there's another lesson. What would a life without human privileges look like? Without clear distinctions between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, vulnerability and breakability? One that took, say, the lessons of Vibrant Matter much further than Jane Bennett was willing to go, that allowed itself to know how enmeshed we are in everything (think Morton), that responded with the utmost sensivity to anything, as Hache and Latour might have us do?

Frankly, it would be kind of awful. These people don't eat half enough (l. 11); their food is scarce and thin (l. 36); and “no doun of fetheres ne no bleched shete / was kid to hem, but in seurtee they slepte” (ll. 45-6): the but sets their safety against their discomfort. Choose one or the other. Here we see what it may mean to open moral consideration to all, to attempt to live without harm, without the certainty of any distinction between subject and object, human and animal, nature and culture, flesh and the earth. It is a world of hungry and vulnerable people, intermeshed with and sympathetic to all. There is a kind of hope here, then, but—or and—it may be a hope that erases the human altogether.

(image from Bodleian Library, MS Douce 195, 59v, via here)

Crowd Review Now LIVE: Becoming-Media Issue [postmedieval]

Figure 1. Reading Room, New York Public Library

by EILEEN JOY

I am excited to announce that the papers for the Crowd Review of postmedieval's special issue on Becoming-Media [slated for publication in March 2012] are now live and available for comment on the Crowd Review's website:

• Seeta Chaganti, "Danse Macabre in the Virtual Churchyard"
• Eddie Christie, "Writing in Wax, Writing in Water"
• Arne Flaten, "Reproducible Media(s) in the Early Fifteenth Century (Mostly Italian)"
• Julia Lupton, "Thinking with Things: Hannah Woolley to Hannah Arendt"
  
• Eugene Thacker, "The Wayless Abyss: Mysticism and Mediation"
• Whitney Trettien, "Becoming Plant: Magnifying a Microhistory of Media Circuits in Nehemiah Grew's Anatomy of Plants (1682)"

In step with the mission of the journal, this issue represents a wide range of fields and subjects, including performance studies (dance), architecture, art history, poetics, medieval literature, history of printing and engraving, the decorative arts, movement studies, history of taste and judgment, object-oriented studies, intellectual history, new media and technology studies, composition studies, mysticism, philosophy, botany, the history of books, history of science, the vegetal, the animal, theology, etc. What all of the essays have in common, in the words of the special issue's co-editors, Jen Boyle and Martin Foys, has something to do with

our dependence on the recursive circuitry and tangle of technologies, bodies, narratives, spaces, and mediating technics, across historical periods and across literary, scientific, philosophical, and theological modes of expression.

And in some sympathy with the aims of our own blog here [In The Middle] and with postmedieval's objective to trouble and complicate the supposed divides between past and present times, Jen and Martin also write, relative to the aims of this issue,

. . . the casting of new media studies as itself “new” raises troubling questions. To what extent is mediation ever “new”? Indeed, as the medhyo at the center of “medieval” would suggest, mediation appears as an always incomplete “middling” and “meddling” – always becoming, to itself and something other than itself; a troubling, meddling, unstable go-between. This second sense of becoming-media extends questions about the mediating artifact within its historical context to include issues of embodied and historical temporality; periodization as “meddling”; the feedback loop of technics-consciousness; the glance, glimpse, and touch of the mediated image as political and aesthetic affect; and the unstable registers of the trans/hyper-mediation of multiple past-present-futures.

We invite EVERYONE to join us in what is, for now, an EXPERIMENT in the crowd review of the papers listed above, and which will extend from today, July 16th, through Thursday, September 15th. We have set up the crowd review on a very user-friendly weblog-styled WordPress website, which allows you to comment as little or as much as you like, on one or more [or any portion] of the papers, and you can find everything you need to know to participate as a reviewer here:

• Crowd Review: How To Comment

Vive la Crowd Review!

The multifurcation of social media

by J J Cohen

So I'm on Google+.

It's been about a week, during which time most of the conversations have centered upon how to distinguish the site from other social media. At first, I must admit, I thought G+ would simply mirror my activities on Facebook and Twitter. I posted that I wished some program existed that would cross-post to all three at once so that I would not have to do so manually. Then Sarah Werner shared Tim Maly's Unlink Your Feeds: A Manifesto. Maly's plea not duplicate information across these spaces but to craft ways of distinguishing each forum resonates with me: I do get tired of seeing the same information about the people I follow presented as a tweet, a FB link, a blog entry that appears in my RSS reader, and now as a Google+ post. Why not specialize what is presented in each location and thereby create something uniquely suited to each?

Google+ is in its mewling infancy, so it is difficult to predict what it will in time become. Right now it seems a concentrated and tech savvy space which has attracted those with an abiding interest in social media and scholarly -- as well as other forms of -- communication. (At least among those who are posting actively; there is also a large population of people who signed up and are wondering what to do next). The ability G+ offers to classify those to whom you are connected into various circles, though, means that inevitably much of what it accomplishes will replicate Facebook, though in a more controlled, private and specialized way: you can post the vacation pics to your family and the Latin blegs to your medievalist friends. Here is how -- tentatively, and for the time being -- I am using the service.

Facebook is good for all purpose social updates, comic interactions, and quick catching up on various friends' and family members' lives. It's a dive in and skim kind of space, an enjoyable break from (say) composing a public lecture about affect and stone. Twitter is great for sharing links, for some quick and spontaneous interaction, and sometimes even swift feedback on questions and ideas. It's where I learn the most about digital humanities and the scholarly uses of social media, as well as a locale where I interact with many non-GW graduate students, especially (but not only) those who for various reasons wouldn't think of friending me on FB. As a blog, In the Middle offers a forum for more sustained rumination on medieval studies, critical theory and humanities topics, since there is no character limit to posts. If it has become less interactive over the years (we don't attract nearly as many comments as we used to), that's not because it is less read -- our audience is at an all time high -- but because such conversations seem to have relocated to Twitter and FB. And many of us are experiencing social media fatigue: it's enough to keep up with email.

At present I am thinking of Google+ as a hybrid space, a cross between FB and a blog, where there is social interaction around posts that tend to be much more substantial than anything I'd put up in the House of Zuckerberg. Another description: G+ is a workshop, where current research and essays and talks in progress come together, and topics of interest (especially, so far, meta discussions of social media) receive more sustained conversation. Facebook is the most personal venue, Twitter more professional, Google+ (so far) even more academia-oriented, and this blog a professional space with the occasional personal excursus.

We'll see if I feel the same way in a month. Meanwhile, are you on Google+? How are you using it? And even if you are not, do use different social media differently?

my lithic totem

by J J Cohen

Yes I should be writing that "Feeling Stone" talk, but then again I have 15 hours locked in an airplane journeying from Los Angeles to Melbourne, and what else am I going to do? Watch movies? Sleep? Please.

Well, maybe I should at least have a draft. Here is a picture of my desk this morning as I attempt to harness the powers of an extinct marine creature become a rock. Ammonites are fascinating: Pliny gave them their name (ammonis cornua) because they look like the horns of a ram (Ammon was an Egyptian god who was sometimes depicted with horns, or so says Wikipedia). They survived a good 300 million years before they vanished. Neolithic tombs like Stoney Littleton worked them into their decoration, seemingly an art born of stone itself. Fossils will make a minor appearance in this talk, which contains a section on stone as an artistic agent.

marking infinity

by J J Cohen

I'm just back from a swift, intense trip to NYC to view the Lee Ufan exhibit at the Guggenheim. Ufan is  Korean-born artist whose work is deeply influenced by his time in Japan. His fame comes from two rather different media: monochrome and minimalist painting (tansaekhwa), and sparse installation pieces that use rocks paired with industrial products like steel sheets, metallic bands, latex and pillows. The strategic use of blank space in both kinds of art can be annoying: there is something too precious, too screamingly aesthetic about these pieces, especially because having stone stand for nature and steel for culture is just too easy. But the exhibit is also suggestive. Ufan speaks of creating ephemeral networks of relation that include the viewer as well as the surroundings. It takes a commitment on the viewer's part to participate in that network, but once that surrender occurs the art becomes vibrant.

I learned this truth through experience. When I first started walking the exhibit I was underwhelmed. The pieces are modest and the museum is thick with summer visitors. I'd brought my daughter Katherine along with me, thinking it would make the trip to New York special for both of us. She'd been patient during the bus ride, and now I could see that she was wondering why the Guggenheim had been our destination. "So that's it?" she asked. "Just rocks on the floor?" She was voicing my own disappointment -- I must have expected a numinousness in the pieces that just wasn't there. To make it interesting I pointed to two stones that were separated by a metal sheet. "What do you think they are doing?" I asked. "What's the story here?" She rightly pointed out that the shapes of the rocks made it seem like they were peering forward, yet the screen and their own immobility ensured that they would never catch sight of each other. The piece seemed to be about yearning for something you are certain must be present, but forever out of sight and guarded from touch. Another installation was similar, but this time the second rock was under the seam of some metal sheets. Should the desiring rock ever be able to move forward, it would succeed only in crushing what it aimed to reach. Later versions of this series (most of them entitled Relatum, for things connected to each other), had rocks mischievously peeking from behind a screen, about to enter a ring for combat (said Katherine), or gathered in a circle and seated on royal pillows as if at some inscrutable parliament. You can discern from how I am describing these installations that what seems so still, so devoid of energy and motion, becomes as you walk around the pieces and start to link them to yourself and to narratives and to each other, metal and stone that is weirdly kinetic. The materials demand stories, and the stories grant them motion.

Of course, your reverie will be constantly broken by the museum guards, who with weary authority must repeat every few moments that the installations must not be touched. It is so natural for an onlooker to place a hand on the stone that despite the signs prohibiting this intimacy visitors perpetually forget.

My favorite moment was the exhibit's final segment, in a dead-end on the Guggenenheim's top floor. Not many people seem to make it that far; those who do behold only three tall museum walls that reach towards a small sky light. Each wall is adorned with a single brushstroke of grey paint. Ufan created these as site-specific versions of some of his famously stark canvases. I asked the museum guide who had been stationed to keep an eye on the walls what will happen to the three pieces once exhibit closes: would the drywall be cut and the strokes preserved? He told me no, they would be painted over. The artist never intended them to endure -- and indeed most of the stone installations were also transient copies of installations from elsewhere that would also be dismantled. Networks possess brief lives, even networks with rocks, but they create memories that persist, for a while. I asked the guide what kinds of questions people ask him, and he said most wanted to know if the skylight was part of the installation (it is not). Finally I asked him what he thinks about in that dead-end space, and he told me it was his favorite place to stand: serene, an end-point, an invitation, a place that would vanish soon, but a space that would haunt him afterwards for the time he had spent.

I wish I could have photographed the installations, but the Guggenheim doesn't allow pictures anywhere but the entrance foyer. I've therefore chosen to illustrate this post with one of my favorite scenes. Katherine and I sat on a bench and watched visitors enthralled by the museum's spiraling ramp fail to realize that they had become a part of one of Ufan's Relatum installations. Several bumped into the screen while snapping pictures of the ceiling. A harried guard was constantly reminding people that they were walking through art not mere metal and stones.

Besides re-learning how to live with and in art, another pleasure of this New York trip was Katherine's companionship. Despite our visits to the Central Park Zoo and Dylan's Candy Bar, the Guggenheim was her favorite destination: stories about the stones have haunted her since we started to imagine together what fables they relate. Her inexhaustible enthusiasm for pillow fights and jumping on the bed at the hotel helped us through a wet night that prevented much other activity. Two of Katherine's favorite people in the world, Karl and his wife ALK, were good enough to meet us in Central Park after the museum, and to have an early Indian dinner with us as well. For a weekend that focused upon stones, it was lively, powerful, and -- like those strokes of grey that Ufan left upon the museum wall -- not to be forgotten.

Beowulf in the Dark, Medieval Madness, and Blue: Some Items of Possible Interest

by EILEEN JOY

Readers of In The Middle may be interested to know that Blackwell's online journal Literature Compass, has just published a cluster of essays, "Beowulf in the Dark," edited by Francis Auld [Vol. 8, Issue 7: July 2011], that grew out of a 2008 MLA conference session on Beowulf and contemporary film:

Frances Auld, "Beowulf's Broken Bodies"

Bill Schipper, "All Talk: Robert Zemeckis's Beowulf, Wealtheow, and Grendel's Mother"

Eileen Jankowski, "The Post-9/11 Hero"

Robin Norris, "Resistance to Genocide in the Postmodern Beowulf"

As one of the Editorial Board members for the journal, I'm happy to pass on .pdfs of any of the essays for those who might be interested and whose institutions don't have subscription access to the journal.

Also of possible interest to our readers might be the recently-published volume of essays, edited by Wendy Turner, on Madness in Medieval Law and Custom [Brill, 2010], just reviewed in The Medieval Review by Michael Sizer who finds the volume a useful companion [and maybe also an historical corrective to] Foucault's work on the history of madness. I've been thinking about "madness" lately myself, partly because one of the sessions sponsored by BABEL at the Kalamazoo Congress this past May was on that topic, but also because there was a lively discussion on the topic recently across the speculative realist/object-oriented ontology/ecologies blogosphere:

• Levi Bryant, "Depression, Drugs, Society, and Politics" [Larval Subjects]
• Levi Bryant, "The Symptom and the Symptom" [Larval Subjects]

I myself began thinking recently about depression and ecology in relation to Jeffrey's new book project, Prismatic Ecologies, a planned volume of essays that had its genesis HERE and whose final list of contributors looks like this:

1. Jeffrey J. Cohen: Ecology’s Rainbow
2. Kathleen Stewart: Red
3. Robert McRuer: Pink
4. Lowell Duckert: Maroon
5. Julian Yates: Orange
6. Graham Harman: Gold
7. Vin Nardizzi: Greener
8. Allan Stoekl: Chartreuse
9. Will Stockton: Beige
10. Steve Mentz: Brown
11. Eileen Joy: Blue
12. Stacy Alaimo: Bluish-Black
13. Levi Bryant: Black
14. Jen Hill: Grey
15. Ed Keller: Silver
16. Bernd Herzogenrath: White
17. Ben Woodard: Ultraviolet
18. Tim Morton: X-Ray
19. Afterword: Lawrence Buell

My own thinking on all of this is sketchy at best, and I just KNOW it will change as I go along, but I'll share with everyone here the abstract I sent Jeffrey last week for my chapter [all comments and bibliographic assistance are much welcomed!]:

Blue

At a recent conference session (at the 2011 Kalamazoo Congress) devoted to ‘madness’ and mental illness as methodology (as well as particular forms of ‘medievalism’), an interesting question was raised: is madness partly the product (or even, ingenitor) of various social collaborations -- between people, but also between persons and their environments, both human and non-human? Is madness, further, something to be located on the so-called ‘interior’ of sentience and biological physiology, or is it in the world somehow, with the ‘becoming-haptic’ of the human mind only one of its many effects? Is madness, in other words, ecological -- does it have, or signify, an ecology?

Following Timothy Morton’s argument that too much of current ‘ecological’ thinking hinges upon the spectrum of ‘bright,’ optimistic, ‘sunny’ greens that are ‘holistic, hearty, and healthy,’ often leaving aside ‘negativity, introversion, femininity, writing, mediation, ambiguity, darkness, irony, fragmentation, and sickness’ (The Ecological Thought, p. 16), this essay will focus on sadness and melancholy as forms and signs of deep ecological connections, as well as ethically valuable modes of ‘plugging in’ to ‘worlds’ as always already post-catastrophe. More specifically, through readings of the Old English poems Seafarer and Wanderer, this essay will trace the co-implicated and also affective relations between the human figures and the non-human ‘strange strangers’ of post-apocalyptic (post-war, but also post-human) medieval landscapes in order to formulate a ‘blue’ ecological aesthetic that might take better account of our world as both empty (alone) and full (intimate).

whatnots, trifles, novelties, gewgaws, knickknacks and whathaveyous

by J J Cohen

Some scattered doohickeys, along with some gimcracks, doodads, thingamajigs and veeblefetzers.

• Three days ago Katherine asked me the meaning of "whatnot." She's been keenly reading the "Little House on the Prairie" series, and occasionally comes across a word that has gone out of use that she'll ask any nearby adult to explain. I told her that whatnot is a placeholder term. It doesn't mean anything, really, it just gestures towards words that haven't yet arrived for the speaker. I then went on to give her a list of similar terms (see above). "Remind me to never ask you what a word means again," she stated, returning to her book.
• I had so many of these terms close at hand because Cary Howie and I have been working on the introduction to our special issue of postmedieval, New Critical Modes. When we were brainstorming the contours of the issue, Cary had (unforgettably, for me) associated New Critical Modes with novelties and ice cream trucks. The word novelty and its relation to novel ("a small new thing," from Latin novellus) -- that is, to a term that means new as well as indicating a kind of writing -- seemed perfect for this project: seasonal, maybe; ephemeral, perhaps; inventive, we hope; sweet, I think; a time-knot, most certainly. So our introduction uses novelty a bit, as well as gewgaw and nugae (why not employ the Latin version of these terms? We are medievalists after all.) The whole thingamabob is almost ready to enter production.



KEC with the whatnot she wore to crazy hat day

• Speaking of Katherine, she and I are making a quick trip to New York together next Friday to visit the Guggenheim. I am desperate to see this exhibit. She on the other hand is eager to go because the building plays a significant role in a film she just saw. We'll take the bus early in the morning and return the following afternoon.
• With this sudden trip to New York, a looming second trip there in September (at least Myra Seaman found a cool hotel to stay in), a family trip to Bordeaux for Thanksgiving -- and most looming of all, a Big Trip to southern Australia in a few weeks --I've been doing a great deal of travel planning. My favorite discovery so far: the Aquila EcoLodges at Grampians National park, where we'll spend a few nights after we leave Melbourne. We'll also be visiting Tower Hill Reserve, located on an inactive volcano -- and staying for a night in a glass cottage built into the hillside. If we are not ambushed by marauding kangaroos while out in the wilds we will be sorely disappointed; Katherine has been teaching herself karate.
• Speaking of Melbourne, here is a glimpse of what I will be doing there. All the Cohens are going, but only one of us has to give a lecture. Though I dread the flight itself, I've never so looked forward to a trip. Just have a pesky keynote to compose ...
• Other than my second life as a travel agent, it's been a summer of meeting deadlines. My race essay is off to the editor. A late addition: an excellent and thorough two part essay by Geraldine Heng, "The Invention of Race in the European Middle Ages" from Literature Compass (here and here). I've just finished a book review and will submit that tomorrow. The abecedarium is done, another book project I am working on is nearly finalized, etc.
• Lastly, I am looking forward to Alex returning from camp in West Virginia this weekend. Every day brings a few pictures of him posted to the web, and he's written us some hilarious letters, but I miss the guy. The novelty of a quiet house I can do without.
  

CROWD REVIEW: Becoming-Media Issue [postmedieval]

by EILEEN JOY

Myra Seaman, Jen Boyle, Martin Foys, and I are thrilled to announce postmedieval's first experiment with CROWD REVIEW: this will be an open, weblog-based review of essays selected for our Becoming-Media issue, co-edited by Jen and Martin, to begin in about two weeks at our crowd review site HERE. As Jen and Martin write in their Vision Statement,

First and foremost, the system for Becoming-Media’s crowd review is “webby.” At a recent THATCamp “un-conference,” an open-format gathering of scholars, students, librarians, and public intellectuals invested in a thoughtful integration of the humanities and technology, the comment was made that some of the recent experiments in open peer review had perhaps inadvertently reproduced aspects of the insularity associated with traditional blind review. That is, some of the interfaces and online environments meant to facilitate a more open review process were structurally isolating: the pre-emptive granularity of paragraph-by-paragraph interfaces for commenting on individual essays; a general platform for the review process that structurally dictates the taxonomy of importance to various approaches to commenting on the texts.

What difference might a simpler interface make? What if scholarly crowd review had the look and feel of the webby blogs that academics and academic institutions have begun to become accustomed to? The interface for Becoming-Media’s crowd review is designed to work very much like a blog, and to allow commentators to generate emergent threads of commentary on parts of an essay, or even an entire essay, with emphasis and focus of their choosing.

The webby system has implications beyond the technical elements of the interface. In a recent PMLA forum, David Theo Goldberg contributes his thoughts on the larger implications of web-based environments in re-structuring intellectual, social, and religious affiliations (“Praise the Web,” PMLA, Vol. 126, No. 2, March 2011). Goldberg goes so far as to position the influence of the web as a force that re-distributes the “practices,” experiences,” and “processes” of communities of “truth” (drawing on Foucault’s earlier explorations of these terms) (448). While some might find Goldberg’s inclusion of “webbies” alongside the tags of “ancients” and “moderns” a bit hyperbolic or even reductive, he draws forward a significant and compelling re-focus that is at the center of both the technical experimentations and conceptual under-girding of this issue on Becoming-Media — temporalities.

As Goldberg points out, what draws together the long-standing academic quarrels over “ancient” and “modern” stances toward scholarly method (either referenced historically as the early modern debate over learning based in imitating the models of antiquity versus knowledge production that took up the challenges of contemporary political and cultural forces; or more recent invocations as a metaphor in contestations over the merits of the “old” and “new” humanities) is their reliance on the importance of a discrete “time” or “period” that signals change, that remediates what has come before. In the case of “webbies,” by contrast, there is an emphasis on a relational re-forming. This is not to say that such an emphasis is not historical; certainly, this issue is all about the “new” in new media being brought into contact with the deep textures of historical reading. But it is to say that the re-forming tendencies of “webbies” (webby nodes and interstices; their dispersal and distributedness) call forth formal events as “lines of connectivity” (past, present, and future) more so than as singular “time[s] of being” (452). In this sense, the crowd review for this issue is intricately inter-woven with the question of emergence. Rather than expending energies dictating structures that reassuringly mimic the features of traditional blind peer review, we offer an open “webby” in-time editorial process that we hope will lead to some interesting reflections on “webbies” as a historical, scholarly, editorial, intellectual, and social emergence.

Why not invite a crowd? The concepts and frames of webby/webbies are likely to produce some anxiety. The “web” has become somewhat of a pejorative among some professionals, evocative as it is of the crowd on the street and “average” Joes and Janes. The concept of the crowd to some might seem particularly inimical to academic institutions or professionalism. Crowds imply mobs. Crowds imply amateur opinion, cajoling, and yelling. But crowds also now connect with activities like “crowdsourcing,” an open call for collaboration among a large group of informed participants interested in exploring, creating, or solving. And crowds also change things. The crowd potentially embodies an exciting challenge to the isolation and insularity of traditional academic organizations, as an opportunity to experiment with the re-structuring of professional and disciplinary affiliation.

For our part, we offer this invitation to Becoming-Media’s crowd review in the spirit of experimentation rather than expectation.

This issue features essays-in-progress by Seeta Chaganti, Eddie Christie, Arne Flaten, Julia Reinhard Lupton, Eugene Thacker, and Whitney Trettien, and it is my great hope that our readers here at In The Middle and elsewhere will participate in the crowd review of this issue. You are invited, furthermore, to participate in whatever manner suits you: commenting on just one or several of the papers or even on just one or several portions of a paper, and so on and so forth. To find out everything you need to know to participate with us in this experiment, go HERE.

Cheers to everyone.

Cruising in the Ruins: CALL FOR SESSIONS -- 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

Figure 1. David Fried, Way of Words, No. 1 : “Lose your mind so you have something to find.”

by EILEEN JOY

32. Listen carefully. Every collaborator who enters into our orbit brings with him or her a world more strange and complex than any we could ever hope to imagine. By listening to the details and the subtlety of their needs, desires, or ambitions, we fold their world into our own. Neither party will ever be the same.

38. Explore the other edge. Great liberty exists when we avoid trying to run with the technological pack. We can't find the leading edge because it's trampled underfoot. Try using old-tech equipment made obsolete by an economic cycle but still rich with potential.

--Bruce Mau, "Incomplete Manifesto for Growth"

Myra Seaman and I are excited to share with everyone -- and with great thanks to Kathleen Kelly, Marina Leslie, Arthur Bahr, Julie Orlemanski, Erika Boeckler, Robert Stanton, Alexis Kellner Becker, and Diana Henderson -- that Northeastern University, M.I.T., and Boston College will be joining hands with BABEL to co-host the 2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group in Boston, Massachusetts from 20-23 September 2012: "cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university." The conference, as with our first meeting in Austin, Texas last November, is partly inspired by Bill Readings' book The University in Ruins, and his proposal there that, instead of abandoning or exchanging older disciplines for "a simply amorphous disciplinary space in the humanities," we should permanently "keep open the question of what it means to group knowledges in certain ways, and what it has meant that they have been so grouped in the past."

The university and the disciplines traversing it (and the disciplines traversed by the university as super-structure) are phenomena with medieval roots and uncertain futures. Medieval university studies were ostensibly contained by the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), but the meanings of, and divisions between, these subjects were under constant interrogation and revision, even as older, newer, and alternate designations (dialectic, philosophy, theology, natural science, forensic, polemic, etc.) continually remade, and eventually unmade, the traditional taxonomies. “cruising in the ruins” seeks to engage both the architectonics and mobility of knowledge; the cleavages between ways of knowing; the impurities of cross-contamination between disciplines and fields and temporalities; the threat/promise of post/humanism and the post/humanities; the shape(s) of disciplinary crisis today; the aesthetics of scholarship; discipline & pleasure (and pain); the secession or amputation or orphaning of the humanities; how to foment disciplinary glamour; DIY medievalist agitprop; the personifications of knowledge; intra-university affects; the reservoirs of metaphors in other people’s jargon; what the “uni-” in “university” and “universe” might mean; what the “after” in “after inter-disciplinarity” might portend; what misfit heterotopias might be possible in a new multiversity; what the “cruising” in “cruising in the ruins” might invite.

You can read the full CALL FOR SESSIONS below and also bookmark it HERE, and please, join us in Boston!

2nd Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group

cruising in the ruins: the question of disciplinarity in the post/medieval university

20-23 September 2012

Boston, Massachusetts

[co-organized by the BABEL Working Group, Boston College, Northeastern University, M.I.T., postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, and punctum books]

We all know what severe pressures the University is under today—economic, social, and cultural—pressures that have led to a certain amount of disciplinary hand-wringing and jockeying in relation to the practical “use-value” (or valuable non-practicality) of some disciplines and fields versus others. Some have argued that disciplinary security is best assured when disciplines merge with each other and form new, cross-disciplinary alliances. And while faculty both distance themselves from and ally with each other over these matters, university administrators and state legislatures are de-funding departments and programs, weakening general education curricula, and undermining faculty governance of the University’s mission and programs of study. In his book The University in Ruins, Bill Readings argued “the University’s ruins offer us an institution in which the incomplete and interminable nature of the pedagogic relation can remind us that ‘thinking together’ is a dissensual process; it belongs to dialogism rather than dialogue.” And what might be needed now is

not a generalized interdisciplinary space but a certain rhythm of disciplinary attachment and detachment, which is designed so as not to let the question of disciplinarity disappear, sink into routine. Rather, disciplinary structures would be forced to answer to the name of Thought, to imagine what kinds of thinking they make possible, and what kinds of thinking they exclude. (Readings, The University in Ruins, p.176)

So, let’s not be interdisciplinary for a moment, nor necessarily anti-disciplinary. Let’s re-sound our disciplinary wells, while also, inevitably, bumping into each other and occasionally hooking up, like Democritus’s atoms. Holding on to our disciplinary objects and methods and ways of knowing, while also keeping them open to futurity and the surprise of the stranger, let’s cruise each other. Let’s swerve, without steering, through the movement-filled “void” that is the university, cyberspace, society, the world. Atoms, monads, particles, singularities, seeds, souls, kernels, cells, events, appearances — gathering in molecules, crowds, assemblages, drifts, swarms, parliaments, strikes, clouds, hives, cascades, collisions, waves, one-night stands, spontaneous acts of metempsychosis, a fine spray of perfume through the atomizer, hanging in the night air. ATOM is from the Greek “atomos,” meaning “uncuttable” — don’t cut our budgets, don’t try to reduce us any further, to liquidate and consolidate what we do. We’re what’s irreducible in the university — so many modes and methods of being and acting, of chemical reaction, of natality, of swerve. As Lucretius tells us, the detritus of destroyed objects is the atomic dust that gives rise to all things. In 2010 we convened “after the end” of the post-catastrophe of everything. In 2012 we’re meeting in the post-post-catastrophe dust, to reassert the atomic weight of our respective fields, disciplines, and methods and, of course, to give rise to new things.

We are often tempted to demonstrate what the humanities can do for the sciences, and what the sciences can do for the humanities, but the 2012 Biennial Meeting of the BABEL Working Group, “cruising in the ruins,” proposes that the question NOT be, “How can the sciences be more humanistic?” or, “How can the humanities be improved through science” (the “merger” or “inter-” approach). Rather, how can we reconstitute our atomized projects in new ways as we collectively rethink the stamp, the style, the value of distinct disciplinary approaches to common concerns and questions, while also cruising each other's “bodies” of knowledge?

We seek medievalists, humanists of all stripes, scientists, social scientists, and artists to experiment with performing their respective methods in proximity to one another. This is a speculative practice because, despite being uncuttable or irreducible, we’re falling through space and time, falling into one another, and always in the process of swerving. What we do next is uncharted. So let’s not reduce disciplinary difference to one yawning crack between the humanities and the sciences. The divisions of disciplinary knowledge are legion and manifold, capillaried and filigreed. The idea is to have a conference in which disciplinary and field differences are sharpened as we converge on shared objects, subjects, terms, genres, tools, materials, concerns, methods, and approaches:

archive, body/embodiment, crux, gene, map, matter/hyle, memory, mind/mentality, museum, narrative, relic, trope, record, life, bios/zoê, surface/plane, autopoesis, geometry, encyclopedia, gender, trial, principle, disease, parasite, immanence, physics/physis, adaptation, speed, study, laboratory, element, animal, angel, posthuman, experiment, species, reproduction, genius, ledger, laboratory, classification, tool, semblance, earth/ground, recess, affect, demon, ontogeny, machine, deconstruction, ipseity, fold, frame, collective/assemblage, trans-, virus/viral, architecture, vein, geometry, depth, creature/creaturely, camera, set, ecology, dwarf, outside, exemplarity, network, cyborg, proof, book, time, immunity, web, surplus, logic, force, mesh, neighbor, environment, planet, contingency, psyche, liminal, digital, mineral, haeccity, architecture, ghost, word, page, pocket, artifice/artificial, humanism, dream, sovereignty, calculus, program, animate/inanimate, monster, residual/remainder, complexity, code, case study, plant, waste, anomaly, queer, being, speculum/mirror, form, intelligence, star, thing, self-organizing, space, dualism, history, abstract, image, person/homunculus, media, metaphysics, dynamism, tradition/history, organic/inorganic, vitalism, computer, prosthesis, wild/wilderness, perspective, velocity, avatar, chart, virtual, liquid, theorem, random, splicing, techne/technology, sex, chaos, etcetera.

The university and the disciplines traversing it (and the disciplines traversed by the university as super-structure) are phenomena with medieval roots and uncertain futures. Medieval university studies were ostensibly contained by the trivium (grammar, logic, and rhetoric) and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy), but the meanings of, and divisions between, these subjects were under constant interrogation and revision, even as older, newer, and alternate designations (dialectic, philosophy, theology, natural science, forensic, polemic, etc.) continually remade, and eventually unmade, the traditional taxonomies. “cruising in the ruins” seeks to engage both the architectonics and mobility of knowledge; the cleavages between ways of knowing; the impurities of cross-contamination between disciplines and fields and temporalities; the threat/promise of post/humanism and the post/humanities; the shape(s) of disciplinary crisis today; the aesthetics of scholarship; discipline & pleasure (and pain); the secession or amputation or orphaning of the humanities; how to foment disciplinary glamour; what the Situationists can tell us about pedagogy; DIY medievalist agitprop; the personifications of knowledge; intra-university affects; town and gown; the reservoirs of metaphors in other people’s jargon; what the “uni-” in “university” and “universe” might mean; what the “after” in “after inter-disciplinarity” might portend; what misfit heterotopias might be possible in a new multiversity; what the “cruising” in “cruising in the ruins” might invite.

Think about sessions as working groups, as demonstrations, speculations, drag shows, hypotheses, clinical trials, love letters, conservatories, plea bargains, theorems, performances, séances, salons, discographies, bills of sale, slams, manifestos, postcards, recording sessions, lab reports, embassies, mash-ups, and other experiments that aspire to make strange or re-estrange the chosen object of study via close-reading or any other techne currently practiced or yet-to-be-imagined: distance studies, the new materialism, materialist history, a demography of things, speculative realism, object-oriented ontology, deconstruction, networkologies, genome mapping, hermeneutics, discontinuist histories, hypothesis, post-historicism, carnal phenomenology, vibrant materialism, guerilla metaphysics, morphology, Latourian sociology, anachronism, case study, queer touching, taxonomies, machine reading, dark ecology, eliminative nihilism, erotohistoriography, the fine arts, philology, science-technology studies, rhetorical readings, codicology, thin and thick description, flat ontology, new scholasticism, ludology, etc. — and let’s not forget the nominalists. And when in doubt, consult Bruce Mau's Incomplete Manifesto for Growth.

Please send us e-proposals for sessions by 15 December 2011* to Kathleen Kelly and Eileen Joy at: babel.conference@gmail.com. Our goal is to offer a variety of presentation and performance formats—anything but the standard panel with 20-minute papers, please. Sessions of 4-5 papers at no more than 10 minutes apiece would be ideal, but we’re open to any number of configurations that can be imagined. In your proposal, provide a title, name(s) and contact information of organizer(s), and a 250-500-word description of the session's aims, objectives, and format.

*After December 15th, we'll advertise the finalized sessions, to which anyone can submit individual proposals, and we'll also accept random individual paper/performance/other proposals which, if approved, we will then assemble into additional sessions.

Henry David Thoreau and Me

by J J Cohen

I mentioned a while back that rereading Vibrant Matter as part of my spring graduate seminar had inspired me to pick up Walden as well. In a post summarizing an evening's work in the class I wrote the following (and please excuse my quoting so large a chunk, but it is the spur to what I am composing this morning):

We turned to Thoreau's Walden, since the work is among Bennett's favorite texts (Vibrant Matter is underwritten by American and British Romanticism as well as the philosophers it examines; there's as much Whitman and Coleridge in its underworkings as Spinoza and Deleuze in its citations). We looked at the beauty of this early passage, in which Thoreau pauses in the woods while constructing his cabin by Walden pond:

The ice in the pond was not yet dissolved, though there were some open spaces, and it was all dark-colored and saturated with water. There were some slight flurries of snow during the days that I worked there; but for the most part when I came out on to the railroad, on my way home, its yellow sand heap stretched away gleaming in the hazy atmosphere, and the rails shone in the spring sun, and I heard the lark and pewee and other birds already come to commence another year with us. They were pleasant spring days, in which the winter of man's discontent was thawing as well as the earth, and the life that had lain torpid began to stretch itself. One day, when my axe had come off and I had cut a green hickory for a wedge, driving it with a stone, and had placed the whole to soak in a pond-hole in order to swell the wood, I saw a striped snake run into the water, and he lay on the bottom, apparently without inconvenience, as long as I stayed there, or more than a quarter of an hour; perhaps because he had not yet fairly come out of the torpid state. It appeared to me that for a like reason men remain in their present low and primitive condition; but if they should feel the influence of the spring of springs arousing them, they would of necessity rise to a higher and more ethereal life.

Great stuff, and almost irresistible, so stunning is the narration: just as the warming sun lifts the cold from the earth, lifts the snake into better communion with the woods that surround it, so Thoreau in his lucid solitude is lifted to empyrean life, to a perspective denied those men held by common society's chill torpor. Thoreau is proud of the retreat he constructs, and gives us every detail of its rising, even the total price. A bit later he informs us that the boards for his walls were purchased from an Irishman named James Collins, whose shanty he demolishes. Thoreau inspects Collins' house before taking possession, noting the scant but treasured possessions within -- a parasol, a gilded mirror, a coffee mill -- as well as a cat at the window and an infant "in the house where it was born." The next day he journeys to collect his purchased materials:

At six I passed him and his family on the road. One large bundle held their all -- bed, coffee-mill, looking-glass, hens -- all but the cat; she took to the woods and became a wild cat, and, as I learned afterward, trod in a trap set for woodchucks, and so became a dead cat at last.

It's an oddly dispassionate scene. We want Thoreau to have his experience of the Wild, want him to narrate to us the allure of serpents that bask in vernal sun and invite the mind to transcendence, but what about the Collins family? What about their cat? Does it matter that the material of his retreat arrives from the ruins of their life? That their pet comes to no good end? Or should we take the transaction for what it was, an economic exchange rather than a space for affect? Does Thoreau's discovery of his own vibrant materialism come at a cost, and should we hold him to account?

We returned to those questions throughout the term, but couldn't exactly solve them.

So I came again to Thoreau's Walden in part because Jane Bennett makes such good use of the book in her work. But I also wanted to overcome, at last, some of my lingering ambivalence that clings to all things historical having to do with the Boston area, my natal geography. As I mentioned in this post, growing up in Massachusetts as the United States was celebrating its bicentennial (yes I am that old) so drenched me in colonial history that I became a medievalist out of spite. Boston, Cambridge, Lexington and Concord were places I could ride my bike through (here was one of my favorite destinations), lived landscapes rather than domains for historical reverence. All the flag waving at spaces that seemed to me ordinary was tedious. I didn't get it.

Thoreau lived and died long after the Revolutionary War, of course, but he paid a price for my childish turn against American history. He may as well have written in 1776, because the pond was a place to swim, not a sacred grove for history-driven nature worship. Walden was an easy drive from my family's house, so my mom or aunt would often pack the Cohen children into the car and take us for a dip and a picnic. Walden isn't a large body of water. Though a state park, it's hardly pristine. I remember quick boredom at the place because it was always crowded. The water was too warm and too still. I love the ocean, its briny tang and its ceaseless churn, the suggestion of danger that a pond can't bode. I am sure that as a child I was a joy to be near. Eventually at the urging of whoever had brought me to Walden I'd hike the rim of the pond. Wandering that dirt trail made it easy to be lost in thought. Sometimes there was no one else around, and it'd be surprising to come to the railroad tracks that cut through the landscape -- the very tracks that Thoreau describes in Walden. I believe that even when I was a child a replica of his cabin had been erected somewhere near the pond, but if so I always avoided it.

I read Walden in high school, as part of an American Literature course. I don't remember the book making any special impression on me, other than its describing a place bearing little relation to the pond of childhood swimming and picnics. I vividly recall, though, that my teacher admitted how when he'd read Walden in college he had decided to simplify his life. He lived without any technology (easier to do back then), and discarded most of his possessions. He confessed that he now wished he hadn't jettisoned so much. He'd like to still own his yearbook, childhood photos, objects that meant more to him than he realized in his ardor for austerity. He warned us to be open to literature's invitations, but not to allow texts to ruin our lives.

Rereading Walden a few months ago, I was struck by Thoreau's restless mind and unstoppable curiosity. We see him inhabiting the minds of ants; boating across the water to plumb its depths; speculating on India and Greece. The pond becomes an actor in the narrative: a source of mystery and inspiration, always changing (crystalline in summer, in winter an immobile and yet kinetic block of ice), ever alive with birds, mammals, and human wanderers. There is nothing lonely about his cabin. Thoreau's self-righteousness annoyed me, as did his mythicization of Native Americans and his inability to feel sufficient sympathy for the impoverished Irish and African Americans with whom he shares his "wild" space. But I don't think I quite got the complexity what was going on in the book (it seemed lovely if semi-oblivious nature writing) until I came across Lawrence Buell's account of Thoreau's vulnerability:

Even Thoreau's Walden, the most canonical text in all US environmental literary nonfiction, might be rethought in terms of an uneasy mediation between the prideful standoffishness of the author's voluntary simplicity experiment and his inability to ignore the genuinely impoverished, extruded Irish and black denizens of the Concord outback ... He cannot help also acknowledging his interdependence with these outcasts. They are a mocking echo, impossible to romanticize in the way he romanticizes Native Americans elsewhere in Walden, of his own half-confessed, half-suppressed inability to balance his own accounts and his awareness of being thought a failure, driven to a state of dependent squatterdom in the eyes of many in his community ... struggling with concerns of poverty, downward mobility, and chagrin at being socially reduced to the equivalent of an ethnic other. (The Future of Environmental Criticism 122)

Buell's reading doesn't quite get Thoreau off the hook. Henry David still fails to feel anything for those whom he is most like, and lives his simplified life at the edges of their ruined ones. Yet Buell's point that Walden is "a more searching ecocultural inquiry" than the "voluntary simplicity literature" it inspired is a good one. Buell reminds me of the limits of my own sympathy, of my own childhood propensity to be a sourpuss. A way of not thinking, a way of closing roads of inquiry down. Buell's reading reminds me of the wider world (historical, geographical, philosophical) that we must never cease working to envision if our writing and our criticism is to be as kinetic and as restless as Walden might be when freed from the constraints of memory and the injustice of predetermination.