Manhattan, Stonhenge, Newgrange: same thing

One thing that has always annoyed me about tour guides at megaliths, dolmens, and stone circles is their obsession with describing these as "astronomical observatories." Yes, such structures might be aligned with stars or the movement of the sun. They might even do special festive things at the equinox, like suddenly brighten at their dark interiors. But it isn't as if their designers were mapping the galaxy through neolithic telescopes. Newgrange isn't an instrument of science so much as an architecture that harnessed knowledge of the skies to the rituals of fertility and grieving that were the fabric of its creators lives.

Anyway, some day in the future when a buried Manhattan is unearthed by archeologists, tour guides will solemnly declare that the city was built as an astronomical observatory.

The pale faced youth

For the miniscule segment of In the Middle's reading population who delight in the minutiae of the non-disembodied life of its primary author, I offer the following: an excerpt from a piece that my brother is about to publish in the newspaper he edits (Minnesota Lawyer). It touches upon the episode in my misspent childhood that touched off conversations here and here. This is the introduction to a forthcoming editor's column on tort reform and Ireland:

Here we are again in the middle of a sweltering Minnesota July. I could write about judicial elections (the filing period ended last week) or about Ken Lay dying. (Did Lay have it coming? In the words of one of my favorite Clint Eastwood movie lines, “We all have it coming.”)

But I thought this might be a good time to roll back the clock a few months and take you to the rainy wind-swept hills of Ireland, where I stood with my brother last March.

My brother Jeffrey and I were very close growing up. He was always the studious sort. I recall an entire summer that Jeff tucked himself away in his room reading J.R.R. Tolkien books. Not just the “Lord of the Rings” series -- which I also enjoyed -- but more obscure works such as the Silmarillion and various other tomes focusing on the languages of Middle Earth. When he emerged from his self-imposed cocoon, I mockingly called my tan-deprived sibling the “pale-faced youth.”

Little did I know then that Jeff was actually preparing for his future career. He got his Ph.D. in medieval literature from Harvard and is now a medievalist at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He written a number of books on such esoteric topics as medieval monsters and masculinity, and recently took over as the chair of GW’s English Department.

Every few years Jeff and I try to take a jaunt together as a way of keeping close and getting away from the hustle and bustle of our jobs and daily lives. After considering a variety of alternatives, we settled on the Emerald Isle for this year’s trip.

"Pale-faced youth," for those of you whose memory of Dickens is not what it once was, is the constant descriptor of Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations. Just goes to show that my brother might have had a brilliant career as a literary scholar, if only the gods of jurisprudence, journalism and commerce (he has an MBA as well as JD) had not earned his worship instead.

Look for some humiliating story about my brother Mark to appear in this space soon. It will be sweetened, though, by what he implies in his own familial anecdote: that we have always been and will always be the best of friends.

By the way, I continue to be tan deprived. No one likes a leathery scholar.

Mea culpa and new comment

Remember that interview from a former student in which I admitted I like books but not necessarily authors? (Or, to be honest, that I like the transformative and dynamic process of book-author-reader assemblages.) The one that spurred 30+ comments? Follow the link above and you will see that the interviewer, Amy Baily, has added to the commentary herself. Amy was a student in my Chaucer class a year ago, a deep thinker with a capacious mind. She gave me some spun flax that I now use to demonstrate what the Pardoner's hair was said to resemble (the flax is golden, fine and limp).

I place this link to the archive "on the front page" because I realize the post has now receded into hazy memory (remember the heady good times we had back in May of '06? Me neither, it was too long ago). I also want to say that I typically -- if appropriate -- will ask someone before quoting or posting, and in this case I didn't. Mea culpa; thanks for being so gracious, Amy.

Dead Lovers

In the Middle is your source for quick glances at books not yet published! (catchy new blog motto, soon to be trademarked). Here is the table of contents for an edited collection I just blurbed, followed by a short excerpt from each essay that provides a glimpse of what the piece attempts.


Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe
Edited by Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken
University of Michigan Press (forthcoming)

Introduction (Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken)

"What does it mean to enter the affective world of the dead, to embrace death as a site of erotic attachment? ... It is the claim of this volume that the study of dead lovers ... has something to tell us about our own investment in a 'dead' but eroticized past that we seek to recover, with 'we' here understood primarily as 'scholars,' those passionate, obsessive searchers after lost objects for whom notions of distance, objectivity and dispassion have traditionally been founding disciplinary practices."

The Best Lover (David Halperin)

"Little wonder, then, if, according to legend, Achilles fell in love with Penthesilea in the very moment of killing her. Greek vase painters never tired of depicting the supreme moment when, as the two bodies came together over Achilles's spear, their eyes met for the first and last time, each of them dazzled by the spectacular and rapidly fading vision of the other's beauty. It was, as Robert Mapplethorpe might have called it, a perfect moment, and it continues to find echoes in the work of Genet and Mishima. The entire subsequent history of occidental erotics has been downhill from there."

Propertius and the Blindness of Affect (Basil Dufallo)

"I will argue first that, although ["biographic" and "intertextual aesthetic" approaches] appear to be different and even opposed to one another, they may both be versions of the seemingly natural attempt to illuminate the personal affective life of the past. Even recent efforts, furthermore, to reconcile and move beyond this dichotomy may be grounded in its shared assumption about such literary representations as fulfilling this function. While they can be illuminating, I maintain, such readings may also blind us to the collective concerns of the society in which the literary artist works."

Wilfred Owen's Adonis (J. D. Reed)

"William Bell, my ninth-grade English teacher, used to begin his poetry unit with the admonition that 'poetry is not about daffodils in the meadow turning their cheeks to be kissed by the wind; poetry is strong stuff,' and he would then prove his anti-Wordsworthian point by reciting Wilfred Owen's 'Dulce et Decorum Est,' with its image of consumptive Tommies cursing their way through sludge. The present paper is about a similar point in another of Owen's poems that Mr. Bell read us. We are concentrating on an image of a wounded soldier about halfway through 'Disabled.'"

Embracing the Corpse: Necrophilic Tendencies in Petrarch (Alison Cornish)

"Taking violent possession of the beloved is eccentric to the usually passive attitude of the weeping Petrarchan lover. The revival of Rome requires the will to dominate, whereas the love of Laura demands humility, fear, pallor, servitude. Yet the similarity between these two loves, which I would like to explore here, is in an underlying morbid eroticism, the uncanny allure of scattered remains and lifeless body parts."

Orpheus after Eurydice (According to Albrecht Durer) (Helmut Puff)

"The imprint of Eurydice's 'double death' (gemina nece), to quote Ovid, on Orpheus's life after Eurydice's death is what interests me here. Nowhere does her hold on his life become more apparent than in tellings of Orpheus's own death, a death that reflects, inverts, and reinterprets the story of Eurydice's own. This focus on Orpheus after Eurydice skirts the question most frequently asked with regard to our myth (Why did he turn back?) and shifts the focus to: How did he continue to live (and die)? In particular, I will explore one motif, "Orpheus the first bugger."

Dead Letters (Catherine Brown)

"When I was little, I knew that time passed. I did not think I could stop it. I hid letters to a future self in secret places around the house: a cavity I found in the old bedstead in my parents' room, an imagined secret drawer in my father's desk. And on December 24, when all was dark and quite and lit against the night, I wrote a note about how all was dark and quite and lit against the night, scrolled it up tight, and slipped it down the neck of one of the balls on the Christmas tree. And then, in the trough of nothing special that follows Christmas day, I would look at the ball and secretly think of magic air suspended." [Thence follows a riff on the opening of King Tut's tomb ...]

'Until Death Do Us Part?' The Flesh and Bones of Politics in Early Modern Spain (Samuel Sanchez y Sanchez)

"The present essay focuses on the postmortem erotic bond between Juana and her husband Philip in order to elucidate the role of the dead body. Philip's cadaver [which Juana disinterred, embalmed and paraded around with her], despite its status as an ephemeral physical entity, was capable of serving as a solid political instrument for challenging patterns of royal authority, protonational identity and marital status."

Dead Children: Ben Jonson's Epitaph 'On My First Sonne' (Silke-Maria Weineck)

"The death of the child is not only the central motif in father-son narratives - 'only,' as if that weren't noteworthy enough – but it seems to function as nothing less than the condition of their possibility. One should hasten to add that this is only the case as long as these are, if such a distinction may be allowed, the father's stories, told in the father's voice, articulating paternity rather than filiality. The sons are more eloquent, speak more freely, and triumph more easily. Sons' narratives abound, and they come in all shapes – it is only the fathers who must write in, with and through blood."

'Give Sorrow Words': Emotional Loss and the Articulation of Temperament in Early Modern England (Michael Schoenfeldt)

"In this essay I will look at the physiology of grief in the era we somewhat narcissistically call the early modern period. I will try to locate this powerful emotion amid the fecund incoherence with which early modern culture confronted the passions. I want in particular to explore the ways that this singular physiology imagined speech might be an effective venue for purging the fierce and corrosive emotion of grief."

Dead Lovers is, admittedly, a mixed bag. Some of the essays are old fashioned historicism; some are ambitious attempts at new kinds of writing; some are field specific; others open up all kinds of questions across time periods. I'd certainly recommend reading the book; it's an enjoyable glimpse into some passionate scholarly minds. I don't think its omnivorous approach to the topic works against its cohesion. My personal favorites in the collection are the essays by Halperin (snarky, insightful, sometimes infuriating) and Weineck (very useful analysis of how dead sons serve their fathers well). The strangest piece belongs to Catherine Brown, a gyre of intertextuality that swirls together Henry James, the Tremulous Hand of Worcester, Howard Carter's letters, personal recollection, Nietzsche, Pliny, A. S. Byatt, and oh so much more.

"Whoops, there goes humanity!"

Bill Benzon has posted at The Valve his reflections upon a recent article by Geoffrey Harpham ("Science and the Theft of Humanity"). Harpham has many lines that will sound familiar from the debates that have unfolded at this blog (e.g. "While humanistic scholars have been presuming core facts about human nature, human capacities and human being, scientists have been getting to work"). Harpham's conclusion:

We stand today at a critical juncture not just in the history of disciplines but of human self-understanding, one that presents remarkable and unprecedented opportunities for thinkers of all descriptions. A rich, deep and extended conversation between humanists and scientists on the question of the human could have implications well beyond the academy. It could result in the rejuvenation of many disciplines, and even in a reconfiguration of disciplines themselves—in short, a new golden age.

Benzon's rejoinder:

No doubt, but first we have to get to it. The (in)famous structuralism symposium at Hopkins back in the 1960s had similar aims. We’ve got more interdiciplinary centers now than we did back then, but the same old departmental structures still run things. The ground plan is still the one we inherited from 19th century Berlin.

I’d like to see it happen, I’ve been waiting 30 years, I’m not holding my breath.

The unfolding comments also make good reading.

New World Medievalists, Fantasy and History

In the comments to the previous post, a frequent and perceptive commentator going by the moniker N50 wonders:

My other question is whether the UK is different - let's say from the US since that is where you all are. I teach a lot of Americans with a great fascination for the middle ages and great scholarly abilities. My slight impression is that there is a greater tendency for them to be drawn into the subject through an interest in the fantastical. Lots of them are also into fantasy writing, dressing up and so on. This is also true of some Brits and Europeans - but much, much less so. My speculative, and provocative, suggestion is that Old Worlders are more likely to feel a continuity between their own world and the medieval past.

What do you New Worlders think about the past - does the fact of your translation to the New make you think about the past differently?

Another Damn Medievalist responds:

Don't know about anyone else, but History in general was always where I felt most at home. I've always read sf/fantasy, and probably read more fantasy now than I did when I turned my focus to the MA. For me, it was combination of deeper connection to the ideas and values of the Classical and Medieval worlds and a deeper sense of community among the grad students and faculty at Beachy U, who took me under their collective wing.

That said, Big Name UG Advisor #1 was reputed to have belonged to the SCA, and he wrote history filks, which he sang in class. I think a lot of students here do come to medieval history in the way you've noticed, but most of mine don't stay unless they are willing to separate the myth from the reality.

I've already made public my embarrassing revelation about how a certain famous medievalist who also wrote works of fantasy convinced a young me that studying the Middle Ages might be more fun than devoting myself to astrophysics (my other obsession at that time; thank you, Carl Sagan). Then again, I've never even contemplated joining the Society for Creative Anachronism and -- much to the shock of the many students who ask me this question -- would never under any circumstances have wanted to live in any prior time period.

It probably didn't help that Cambridge, Boston, Bedford, Lexington and Concord were the geographical ambit of my childhood. I remember declaring as a kid that if forced to walk the Freedom Trail once more I would vomit (this was in the days of US Bicentennial hoopla). A surfeit of colonial history made the ancient past of a distant island all the more attractive. I've observed elsewhen in this blog that the Middle Ages most dominant in the American academy is anglophile and Christiancentric; I wonder if it was my early impatience with places like Plimouth Plantation that now spur such a remark.

So, has anyone --British, Irish, American, or any other nationality -- other stories to offer about the role fantasy did or did not play in their coming to the Middle Ages? Does, as N50 hypothesizes, an attraction to the medieval fantastic lead more New Worlders to their medievalism than continuity-minded Old Worlders? Is there a disciplinary difference (historians vs. lit critics) that might be equally suggestive?

History Matters

Eileen Joy, in the extensive comment thread to this post, suggested five possibilities for why history matters. N50 just added this link to the History Matters: Pass It On website. I paste the argument for history that this site makes below:

Cultural importance of History
"The History matters - pass it on" campaign believes a society out of touch with its past cannot have confidence in its future. History helps us to know where we come from and to explain the world as it is.

Each of our personal histories is part of Britain's story. A better understanding of our shared history helps us to solve the problems we face as a nation.

Nothing controversial here: the function of the past is to account for the problem-ridden present in ways that move us onwards to a better future. That's not the most generous way of describing what the past is or what history might do, but I realize that it is a blurb for a big public website. It'll be interesting to see what kinds of views and opinions the site attracts; that to me is its most intriguing function.

for 7/7: outside King's Cross

I took this photo a year ago, shortly after the London bombings. The flag had been placed near a memorial garden that blossomed in front of the train station. Shortly afterwards I was in Leeds, arriving on the very day of the Beeston raids. An uneasiness from these events hung over the International Medieval Congress, but I can't say what effects the apprehension had on the work of scholars gathered there. [And by that I mean what historicists have staked their careers upon: the pasts we imagine cannot fail to be marked by the present, so much the more when we inhabit troubled times. Present calamity sends shock waves in every direction, a temporal backwash that can change profoundly the history we know. "The Flow of Blood in Medieval Norwich" was a 9/11 project, even though it never mentions the present world.]

Not coincidentally, I'll soon be posting a review of Peter Haidu's The Subject Medieval/Modern: Text and Governance in the Middle Ages, a book that examines violence in medieval texts and modern theory.

More Post-It notes, more quotes

From a hexagon-shaped Shakespeare's Globe note:

Life here below lasts a brief moment and is always in a state of flux. (Gerald of Wales, Itinerarium Kambriae, 1st preface)

From a neon orange Post-It:

It is a natural principle, deep rooted in the mind of man, that those who are ignorant of the arts are the first to condemn artists. (Apollinaris)

From a florid pink mini Post-It:

Possible title: Imagining the Past: Dinosaurs, Big Bangs and Time Before History (file that under "abandoned book projects")

From an Incontrare i Mostri conference notepad page:

But what then is philosophy today -- I mean the work of philosophizing -- if it isn't the critical effort of thought reflecting on itself? If it doesn't consist in the endeavor to know how and to what extent it would be possible to think otherwise, rather than merely in legitimating what you already know? (Valerie Allen's translation in "Middle-Aged Bodies" of Deleuze reading from Foucault (cf. James Miller, Passion 35-36)

Quote of the day: Donna Haraway

Scribbled on a scrap of paper two years ago (a Freudian Slip Post-It note), and rediscovered just now as I cull my fetishistic Post-It collection:

Feminist inquiry is about understanding how things work, who is in the action, what might be possible, and how worldly actors might somehow be accountable to and love each other less violently.

--Donna Haraway, The Companion Species Manifesto p. 7

Thoughts on authority ...

from Dean Dad that give me some pause. I am sitting in my new office unpacking books and files, wondering what it will be like to be chair. Wasn't I an anxiety-ridden assistant professor in this same place just a few days ago?

Kid #1 sits next to me, enjoying his daily half hour of media time (today spent with his rotund, pink friend Kirby on his Nintendo DS).

For July 4th: Freedom, Democracy, and Googled Diversity

This from Craig Smith of Free Exchange on Campus, on a recent report released by the National Association of Scholars. After googling the word "diversity" at 99 college websites, the NAS concluded that institutions of higher education in the US demonstrate "an obsession with diversity unparalleled in any other sector of American opinion leadership.” Patriotic words like "freedom," "democracy" and "liberty" do not appear nearly as frequently as this shibboleth of the liberal elite. You might think that googling a word and noting its prevalence is an excellent indicator of politics, ideology, and love of country. You might also wear a tinfoil cap to keep Al Gore from probing your mind. Smith writes:

Stop! Just stop! Stop putting out “research” that wouldn’t pass muster in a high school class! Stop surveying the “top” schools and suggesting that tells us anything about all 4,000 institutions in this country staffed by over 1 million faculty and instructors, teaching over 16 million students! Stop suggesting that higher education is some monolithic “sector” that is marching lock step to some liberal ideology! Stop screaming that higher education is leading the fall of our country! Please stop, and let us get back to the issues that really matter for higher education.

It is also worth noting that Hiram Hover, employing the same sterling methodology, discovered that Halliburton is in fact more obsessed with diversity than these googled universities.

Of boys and farts

A conversation is unfolding at Confessions of a Community College Dean on how low brow kid lit might entice boys to read. Mad Magazine in the 1970s inspired that blogger, just as he hopes books like Walter the Farting Dog will addict his son to the crack that is literature.

I'm a big fan of the Walter trilogy myself (latest installment: Walter takes a disaster-bound cruise with his family and saves the ship from becalmed waters via the locomotive powers of his flatulence). The books are in fact artistically illustrated, and wry in their narrative style. Kid #1 also owns a plush version of Walter that makes hilariously obscene noises when you squeeze his bloated abdomen (see illustration above).


On the one hand, I believe that everything possible should be done to get boys and girls to read. If that means handsome books about gassy canines, then hoorah for gassy canines. On the other, I can't help thinking that a better strategy is to (1) make certain that well written, exciting stories for kids are easily available (Redwall anyone?) and (2) ensure that children grow up in households where they witness all the adult members reading for pleasure. In my experience, many of the parents who complain about their spawn's lack of interest in reading have a hard time naming the last novel they devoured with joy.

My worry is that when boy's lit is a genre defined solely by bodily humor and animals with attitude, it becomes too much an extension of the same commercialized boy's world where you are supposed to enjoy sugary beverages in colors not known to nature; eat snacks that have flavors best described with modifiers like "radical" and "extreme"; dislike school; wear your hair spiked and keep your tongue sticking out of your mouth (didn't spiked hair die out ten years ago?). At least, that's what I've learned from candy wrappers and soda commercials.

I don't mean to seem like a (pardon the pun) old fart. I do, after all, teach Chaucer. And I really enjoy gross humor, especially when it is both sophisticated and gross. But I do wonder what happens when the majority of marketing towards boys assumes that it's all about farts, underwear, poop, X-Treme Green slurpies, boogers and slime. How can kids be subversive when the dominating message is the same as what used to be the secretly whispered one?

David Halperin on Eurydice

From "The Best Lover," an essay in the forthcoming collection Dead Lovers: Erotic Bonds and the Study of Premodern Europe (ed. Basil Dufallo and Peggy McCracken):

Eurydice never was the slightest use to anyone when she was alive. No poet, writer, or composer has ever succeeded in making the living Eurydice interesting. The entire point of her existence is to furnish Orpheus with an occassion for song -- to provide him with his most powerful inspiration, the source of a supreme masterpiece, a work of art stronger than death. But only the dead Eurydice can do that. Orpheus's mistake is to rescuscitate her; the revived Eurydice, querulous and uncomprehending, is nobody's idea of a good time. Fortunately for everyone, she doesn't last long.

I don't actually agree with the assessment, and think it likely speaks more about Halperin than Orpheus (surely the sadness of Eurydice fading from her husband's untrusting, backward gaze counts for something?), but I like the way he reverses the traditional reading of the loss. His essay is quite good, and I'll post more about it and the collection soon. Right now I'm reading the galleys in my role as blurbiste.

What classicists drink at breakfast

Vacation or no, I'd make the trip to Maine just for this caffeine delivery fluid, roasted in North Berwick. Favorite blend: "Thunderbolt" (of course).