That Leeds Keynote

by J J Cohen

I don't intend to blog much of the content of my Leeds presentation, since I would like some of what I argue there not to be known in advance, but I will offer some fragments as I proceed.

Today, though, for your amusement -- and for those who don't follow me on Facebook -- a recent interchange about that Leeds presentation.
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Jeffrey J Cohen 491 words, the first of which is "If." That's something. 11:08am · via Twitter · Comment · Like

Eileen A. Joy at 11:21am June 8

Is the first sentence something like, "If both Jews and Christians had been able to purchase fondue pots at a medieval Crate-and-Barrel-type store, history would have turned out very differently"?

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:22am June 8

It is now.

Eileen A. Joy at 11:24am June 8

Perfect. Because seriously, things would have been so different between Christians and Jews after all those get-togethers over cheese and chocolate fondue.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:29am June 8

Be serious: they would have poked out each other's hearts with those long thin forks and dipped them in the gruyere-emmenthaler mixture for tasty eating.

Sarah Werner at 11:36am June 8

although not the Jews, since surely mixing heart and cheese would be unkosher, yes? maybe if there was a non-dairy chocolate fondue that would be an option.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 11:50am June 8

My research reveals that Jews SOMETIMES violated halakha in order to feast upon Christian hearts as fondue. These cheesy organs were not kosher, but they did melt in the mouth.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:01pm June 8

But the best part, for the Jews, was not so much the taste of the melting, gruyere-covered Christian hearts in their mouths, but the sight of the heart-less Christians writhing around under the tables with all of those fondue pots with thoughts of "oh cruel world!" in their about-to-be-extinguished minds.

Jeffrey J Cohen at 12:27pm June 8

You've got it: cruel because they would die before the chocolate fondue with strawberries, bananas, and pound cake was even served.

Eileen A. Joy at 12:31pm June 8

That's fairly accurate, I think, as Christians pretty much lived for the final fondue course--that, and the bodily Resurrection.

[OK, don't take that too seriously. Believe it or not, folks, fondue will not actually make it into the Leeds version]

2 Posts by Graham Harman I Wish I Had Read 2 Decades Ago

by J J Cohen

1. another advice post on writing productivity
2. quick follow-up

I know many of our ITM readers are graduate students: perhaps you will find some inspiration here.

EDIT 3 PM: A third post, definitely worth contemplating.

Manuel de Landa, Deleuze, Latour...

by J J Cohen

Readers of ITM who also enjoy the philosophical ruminations of Gilles Deleuze will want to watch this video, kindly sent my way by Mike Smith as a way of thinking about objectal agency in Gil Harris's Untimely Matter. I've been a fan of De Landa since I taught his A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History in a graduate seminar on "Hybridity and Complex Systems" in 2002. I've recently returned to his work as a way of thinking about Mandeville as well: more on that later in the summer. Warning: watching this video will make you desire to grow a pony tail.

Speaking of returns, reading Michel Serres and Gil Harris recently have brought me back to a fellow traveler of De Landa's, Bruno Latour. He and I go way back to 1999 (warning: following this link will remind you of how garish web pages were a decade ago; wear sunglasses before clicking) when I taught my first serious course on temporality. I know We Have Never Been Modern is the text most frequently cited by us medievalists, but let me put in a plug here for the amazing second half of The Pasteurization of France as well as the experimental, over the top, odd and wonderful Aramis, or the Love of Technology. These latter two books showed me that scholarship should be practiced not only as a rigorous discipline but also as a form of art. Aramis especially is a book I find myself returning to frequently.

The Timely Arrival of Some Untimely Material: J. Gil Harris, Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare

by J J Cohen

Jonathan Gil Harris (or "Gilly" as I frequently call him behind his back) is my colleague here in the GW English Department. He is also my friend. Posting about his new book is therefore both pleasurable and a little daunting. Readers of ITM may want to take what I say below cum grano salis: it hardly counts as unbiased peer review. Indeed, this post is going to sound (I fear) like a fan letter.

And how could it not? I am an unabashed devotee of Untimely Matter in the Time of Shakespeare. I've read it cover to cover twice, and believe it to be one of the liveliest and most perceptive works of scholarship I've encountered.

Time is a subject that has long preoccupied my own research: the "Midcolonial" section of The Postcolonial Middle Ages, "Time's Machines" in Medieval Identity Machines. I've deployed a proliferation of terms (midcolonial, extimité, inhuman circuit, difficult middles) to describe what Harris succinctly labels the polychronic , the simultaneous cohabitation of heterogeneous temporalities within a material object -- where materiality and temporality are active components of a hybridizing, mobile network rather than solitary and self-segregated pieces of a still world. The arguments of Untimely Matter are as relevant to medieval studies as they are to early modernists, insisting that temporality can be thought as something other than straightforward, historicist chronology. Untimley Matter is pitched strongly against what Harris calls the "national sovereignty model of temporality," in which each temporal moment is essentially its own country, with its own rules and borders and determinations of meaning (p. 2). Against synchronic (past as bounded and determinate field of meaning) and diachronic (past as array of discrete eras) readings, Harris argues for the "multiple traces of time embedded in things" (9), what Kathy Biddick has called "the temporality that is not one." His point of departure is Nietzsche's idea of unzeitgemässe, which might be translated as the temporally improper, "resisting absorption into a homogeneous present" (11) -- spurring us to think "how we might use the past to imagine alternatives to the present and to chronology itself" (13).

Harris's central figure in the book is the palimpsest: the work written over by other works, creating an evident simultaneity of times. Palimpsests can be textual (the Archimedes Palimpsest), architectural (Pisa cathedral has a stone embedded within its façade imprinted with IMPCAESAR, rendering evident its origin in a pagan monument; all cities are palimpsests), or conceptual: they are always, however, material and capable of agency, especially future-directed agency. The palimpsested past, in Harris's account, is thick with possibility:

1. supersession (just as one text might be written over another, one time seemingly yields utterly to another ... and yet that other endures within it, as the earlier text remains legible, as Jews lived among Christians long after the triumph of Christianity)
2. explosion (a heterogeneous past temporality is embedded in the new, like Jewish letters on a Christian London wall, triggering an "untimely irruption" that "shatters the integrity" of the present)
   
3. conjunction (uneasy cohabitation: "polychronic matter can activate a heterodox temporality of conjunction, one that disregards the entrenched partitions and distances informing the geometric lines of chronological time" (171).

Though positioned last and certainly valorized, conjunction is not a synthesis in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung, which would smooth away time's wrinkles and act in a way that is supercessionary. Any synthesis here is in the sense propounded by Michel Serres, who along with Bruno Latour is a patron god of Untimely Matter: "synthesis as a proximation rather than a transcendence of supposedly disparate elements," "an embrace of alterity" rather than an obliteration of difference, "synthesis that refuses singularity, that opens up to heterogeneity" (146). Conjunction is also the only temporality that opens the possibility of dialogue (16).

Given my own looming date with scholarship destiny, I read Untimely Matter with an eye towards how it might spur a rethinking of Jewish-Christian relations in the Middle Ages. The figure of the Jews wanders through Harris's work like, well, a Wandering Jew: surpassed but not quite in Herbert's The Temple, bequeathing explosive inscriptions to Stow's London, written as new Cabbala by Cavendish. Related figures are also central: the Oriental Other, the queer. Heterogeneity in temporality is inseparable throughout from cultural and geographical difference. Untimely Matter provides a rich vocabulary for describing the multiple temporalities that necessarily come into play when Jews lived among Christians in places like London, Lincoln, York and Norwich. Harris's idea of conjunction also ensures that I will be examining Jewish-Christian coinhabitation as dialogue-producing space (or network) where both identities are susceptible to change, to narratives and futures not given in advance.

I did wonder throughout the book about the place of its own author. Maybe that is simply because I know him ... and yet I found the traces of Harris that he leaves throughout the volume to cry out for more story. Photos of statues from Ludgate, now in St. Dunstan-in-the-West Church, are attributed to the author: with whom did he tour the church, and what did he seek, and what unfolded at the moment of beholding these statues mediated by Stow? The translation of the Hebrew characters Stow inscribes is attributed to Stella Harris: I could not stop myself from yearning for a story about this, because it seemed to me that something had to be at stake that was unspoken, something central to the book itself. In a brilliant chapter on Margaret Cavendish and Hélène Cixous, Harris suggests that three authors are touching ... but the one in "Washington, D.C., 2008" gets only that line. But I don't want this to be the kind of review that takes the author to task for not having written the kind of volume the reviewer would write: indeed, I get the feeling that the small traces without narratives were in fact a deliberate strategy on Harris's part.

Long story short: this is a brilliant book. I haven't enjoyed reading a work of scholarship so much in quite a while. I'd highly recommend that In the Middle readers add Untimely Matter to their summer reading lists.

Medievalist(s) Rock

by Mary Kate Hurley

In case you needed more proof that medievalists are not only talented, creative artistic souls, but also just really, really cool: Dry Island Buffalo Jump, an effort to raise money for students at Saint Andrews suffering from the financial crisis.

Medievalists? Check.
Flute in a rock band? Check.*
Catchy tune? Check.
Good cause? Check.

More proof that Medievalists are awesome. Thanks to Stephanie Trigg for the initial link, and I join her in applauding the efforts of Chris Jones and the band.

____

* Okay, so if I were being entirely honest I'd tell you that that's more something I look for in a band. But flutes do in fact make rock bands cooler. I should know. I play one, and therefore am entirely unbiased.

And Then There Was One: A Semi-Erotic Anti-Hagiography

Figure 1. Petronas Towers, Kuala Lumpur

by EILEEN JOY

[yet another story written expressly for In The Middle]

for Anna Klosowska, and also for my brother whose heart, if I were able, I would help him to unbind

Is it possible that we know nothing about young girls, who are nevertheless living? Is it possible that we say ‘women,’ ‘children,’ ‘boys,’ not suspecting . . . that these words have long since had no plural, but only countless singulars?
—Ranier Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge

They were two. Everywhere they went, they subtracted things from people who couldn’t put two and two together. For example, at dinner parties, when no one is looking, they will take all of the raspberries out of the fruit salad and eat them one by one while standing side by side in the dining room when everyone else is still outside drinking beers and telling the children to stop hitting each other. Since most people can’t put two and two together, nor can they ever relax and enjoy themselves with all the children running around, they can never understand where the raspberries went or maybe don’t even remember them being in the bowl to begin with. Other times, these two will take someone’s boyfriend, or girlfriend, and no one ever knows what happened.

They were twin sisters and had perfected the art of multiple sleights of hands and lips—while one would entertain the unsuspecting victim with stories of raspberry embezzlement, the other would slip out a back window with the boyfriend, or girlfriend, and not being able to put two and two, or one twin and the other, together, the woman, or man, or sometimes a duchess, would look all over the house, or castle, and never figure it out. Wasn’t she interesting? the duchess would say to herself, shutting the castle door behind her, the one who steals raspberries? And then: has anyone seen my boyfriend, girlfriend, husband, wife, mistress, fiancée, daughter, maid, horse, dog, the brass andirons inherited from Uncle Harold? And what about the silver?

* * * * *

Then there is the heroine of our story, distant cousin to the twins, who were two, and we really regret to tell you that she really could not put two and two together at all. As our story opens, she is sitting by the side of the road waiting for someone to come by and help her put two and two together, but being the type that can’t put two and two together, she has completely neglected to notice that she is sitting by the side of the road—Highway 64, to be exact—that has been shut down for almost six months for bridge construction. So here is our heroine, who in a former life had been the Roman emperor Titus’s daughter Lavinia who, believe us, could really put two and two together (Tamora + Chiron and Demetrius = trouble in the woods), but she had neither the tongue nor the hands to make it clear or palpable, whereas our heroine, she had tongue and hands but could not make sums or compilations or glosses with them, of herself or of any combination thereof.

Although it goes without saying how beautiful she was, there were days when she couldn’t tell her ass from a teakettle, even when she was falling over one (a teakettle). Likewise, trips to the grocery store were fraught with peril because, not being able to put two and two together, she did not understand the differences in weights and measures and could not see why, for example, a .85 oz. tube of toothpaste wasn’t the same as or at least comparable to a 6 oz. tube, and always opting for what was cheapest (because, at the very least, she did understand that there was never enough money), she never could figure out why there was never enough toothpaste in the tube when she needed it each night after dinner. Extrapolate this anecdote to containers of milk and ice cream, and even to gallons of gasoline, and you can understand why she was stranded on the side of the road. But because we do not feel we should burden our readers with the dilemma of moving our heroine along, we will leave her here for a little while and return to this spot when the sumac along the highway has turned a blazing red and, miracle of miracles, our heroine is on her way, rolling with the tumbleweeds into the city where all of this takes place because, in addition to not being able to put two and two together, she also does not have the wherewithal to withstand the force of rolling tumbleweeds.

* * * * *

Our heroine has a sad brother who can only ever see, and feel, half of everything. He had a weakness for logic and thought everything should move along the lines of so-called common sense and that was a set-up for personal disaster if ever there was one. Time and again he would insist on rationality, and lo and behold, other people would never oblige him, being married, as they tragically were, to their fickle emotions. As a result, nothing made sense to him, not even the weather, and in order to cope he started to squint so that he could only ever see half of everything—that way, he could pretend that, if the other half were visible, everything would make sense and he was just choosing to forgo a foregone conclusion in order to save his sight from its dazzling radiance. He also looked down at the ground a lot while he was walking, as that saved him the occasional trouble of squinting too much.

As a child, the brother had made the mistake of believing in someone who, strictly speaking, wasn’t real: Henry, the trusty servant to the Frog Prince in the story by the Brothers Grimm. You see, everyone remembers the Frog Prince and the little girl (the insipid little girl, as the brother always remembered her) who angrily throws the frog against a wall (or reluctantly kisses him in the less violent, and therefore not as exciting version), thereby turning the frog into the handsome prince who marries her and makes her a princess. But what most people forget, but the brother never forgot, is Henry, the faithful servant who comes in a carriage to retrieve the prince and his child bride at the end of the story, and who, while the prince was in his state of amphibious bewitchment, had bound three iron bands around his heart so that it would not burst from grief and sorrow. While driving the prince and his betrothed home to the castle, each of the three bands cracked and broke, one by one, as Henry’s heart swelled with joy. The brother had spent his whole life looking for Henry, and although it may be obvious to say so, the brother was eternally bereft of him and there is no remedy for that in this world. Everywhere he went, there was a constant strain of Bach’s Suite for Solo Cello No. 3 in C Major echoing in the chambers of his shackled heart.

* * * * *

And then there was the anchorite, who was one. The lost sister to our heroine and her sad brother, she lived in a walled-in enclosure on the east side of a mansion owned by a couple who felt they simply had to have everything. At that time, it was simply de rigueur to have an anchorite and all of the fashionable houses had one. It was not uncommon, when waiting in the foyer of one of those estates in the best neighborhoods, to see a sign that said, “please don’t spoil the anchorite.” But of course you had to spoil the anchorite, anyway. You would bring her almonds, maybe some cognac, and an issue or two of Vogue, if you could get away with it. Anchorites were a bit more exciting at the time of our story than they were in the Middle Ages. Instead of just sitting and praying and contemplating the beyond and imagining what it would be like to be married to Christ and to kiss his wounds—technically speaking, an hallucination, which had never been much to look at through the narrow window (hence, medieval anchorites were never the spectator sport they could have been), these more modern anchorites would set interesting little tasks of endurance for themselves. With just a small bit of petrol and a Bic lighter for instance, an anchorite might draw a circle of fire around herself and will herself to sit very still as the flames danced around her, or she might kneel, with bare legs, for hours and hours, on a scattering of Aegean sea salt. Or, she might engage in staring contests with visitors. You could never win a staring contest with an anchorite, even with Aegean sea salt under her bare knees, although many tried.

Now the anchorite of our story, Lisa of Cincinnati, lost sister to our heroine and her sad brother, and therefore also a distant cousin to the twins who were expert at subtraction, was especially fond of playing dead. No one could play dead better than Lisa of Cincinnati, and no matter how many visitors peered through the narrow window of her reclusorium and rattled things around, like their bags of Skittles or coffee tins filled with pennies, nothing could disrupt the look on her face and body of beatific deadness. As you may already know, being the educated type of person who can put two and two together, an anchorite’s cell was designed for lifetime enclosure, and the anchorite was literally walled in to the foundation of a church, rectory, or house, with only a small opening cut into one wall through which food, water, and small books could be passed in, and leavings and waste products could be passed out. Ideally, there was no window to the outside as that would ruin the feeling of having been sealed inside one’s own mausoleum. The anchorite was dead to the world, as it were, but to herself—oh, to herself, and to God, she was more alive than you could possibly imagine.

As we were saying, Lisa of Cincinnati excelled at playing dead and spent endless hours in this game of self-mortification. Lying prostrate upon the stone floor, which was also her bed, Lisa of Cincinnati had trained herself to be so still that you could not even tell if she was breathing, and those visitors who brought small battery-powered fans and pointed them toward her through the opening cut out in the wall, hoping to make her shiver, never succeeded in accomplishing anything except rustling the pages of the Vogue magazines that lay here and there on the floor in between the tins of almonds and empty bottles of cognac. And as Lisa’s body lay on the floor, dead to the world and to curious tourists, her soul, which was also her body, made such passionate and violent love to God (who, in her mind, bore an uncanny resemblance to Uma Thurman) that the walls of her enclosure were shattered into a thousand flying shards of concrete that flew across Cincinnati and pierced unsuspecting citizens in their hearts, out of the wounds of which their lost child selves tumbled out and ran down the streets, shrieking with wild elation at their sudden freedom from the cages of the adults they had sadly become. And this is why, even today, and even though this was only the anchorite’s hallucination, the parks of Cincinnati are filled with wild children speckled with bits and pieces of concrete who live in the treetops and whose laughter can be heard rippling through the grass and the small green petals of the violets on late summer nights.

* * * * *

The authors are beginning to wonder where this story is going. We honestly don’t know, but what we can tell you is that this story concerns a certain moment late one humid August night when all of the characters in our story came together in the same place. By “came together,” we mean they all ended up in the same city on the same night—even more so, they practically brushed up against each other at the intersection of a particular longitude and latitude—but by “came together,” we also mean that, in different ways and in different beds, and not really in beds, but on the stone floor of a reclusorium, down a windswept street, and under a proscenium arch separating a living room from a foyer, they arrived together in the ex-stasis of arriving, by which we mean, a general coming together.

The brother was a glass-hanger, or as it was said, he worked in curtain wall construction. Curtain walls were the façades—glass, aluminum, steel, and stone—that were hung on the outside of buildings, usually skyscrapers, and the brother had worked as a hanger on many projects, including the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lumpur, which were built on 120-meter foundations. As soon as a building’s structure was erected, the brother would show up to hang the façade, thereby turning the hulking mass of steel and concrete into something that glittered like a palace, or a spaceship, or the future. At the time of our story, he had recently arrived in Cincinnati to hang a façade of pink quartz crystal on Lisa of Cincinnati’s enclosure, for the couple who owned her, although they understood that Lisa needed to live in a state of complete and bare and stony deprivation, they did not understand why her enclosure should not be pretty to look at from the outside. Unbeknownst to the brother, his distant cousins the twins had also recently been summoned by the same couple to install new security technology for their moat, as wayward and drunken teenagers had been sneaking in at night to taunt the anchorite. The twins were experts at home security systems and had their own company and they felt you could never be too safe from those who were always trying to subtract things from you. There are no better security experts than those who are themselves talented thieves. Their plan was to install crocodiles in the moat, and they had brought several of them from the Everglades in their black Cadillac Escalade specially fitted with tinted windows, wet bar, and amphibious wading pool.

You will wonder how it could be that, at a certain point on a humid August night, the twins, who were two, the heroine, who could not put two and two together, the brother, who could only see half of everything, and the anchorite, who was one, could all be together in the same vicinity—even pass each other in the hallway, as happened with the brother and the twins, or one look upon the other, as the brother did with the anchorite, or roll by the open windows in full sight of the twins, as our heroine did—and not recognize each other. It is a depressing but true commentary on our times that siblings and cousins grow up and lead separate lives and, little by little, no longer resemble themselves. Promises are made to keep a better correspondence and then the years go by with no messages, or only a pre-printed card bought in a store with harsh fluorescent lighting that says, “Happy Birthday,” signed Your Brother, but it could be anyone’s birthday and anyone’s brother. Eventually, there is not even that and the years roll by like so many unclaimed shirts and dresses at the drycleaners that were once beloved.

Once, they had all been children together and instead of his bald spot, the brother had possessed long curls of golden hair that their mother refused to cut because they were so beautiful, even though their father always said, with some irritation, he looks like a girl. Every summer, the brother and his two sisters, and their twin cousins who had grown up with them after their parents drowned in a boating accident, would be sent to Dublin to live with their two spinster aunts while their parents would travel to Turkey and Greece to pretend they were lovers again, unburdened by children. Times were different then and no one begrudged the parents their happiness in the sun-blanched whiteness of the grottoes, caves, and hills of an ancient Mediterranean world. Because the aunts were so permissive and kind and thought children should lead unencumbered lives, they would send the brother and his two sisters and the twin cousins out into the city each day to have “adventures,” with the instructions to only come home at 6:00 for supper, and again, after supper, when the sun was setting, which in that part of the world was never until 10:00 or so.

The world of children is a secret one and we are reluctant to peer too closely into those past summers and to violate them. Suffice to say that the brother, two sisters, and twin cousins explored every nook and cranny and shop and alley and park of the city and they ventured out into the country as well, looking for shallow sun-drenched pools of water in the rocks above the sea, where they would swim for hours, and for orchards whose apples they could steal and eat until they were doubled over with pain. Suffice to say that they often traveled for miles and miles, concocted secret rituals and games together, and loved, especially, to sneak into empty houses when no one was at home, rummaging through cupboards and under beds, and trying on other people’s clothes. Suffice to say that they loved to climb hills and to make forts in the underbrush of forests and outposts in the tops of black pines, but that they were always too timid to go into the cold, black waters of the north Atlantic Sea. Suffice to say, they befriended many stray dogs and were expert shoplifters of candy, especially Smarties and Crunchie bars, and they often had a difficult time explaining to their aunts why they weren’t hungry at suppertime. Suffice to say, their service to and friendship with each other was a type of holiness and all their worship. Suffice to say, this chapter is now closed.

* * * * *

But what of that humid night in August and everyone coming together, arriving, as it were, at the same place, while also arriving, together? It all happened, or began to happen, when the brother, who typically only saw half of everything, was applying the last pink quartz tile to the frame of the narrow opening into the anchorite’s cell and, so concentrated upon his work that he forgot to squint, he looked through the opening of the enclosure and saw, with all of his eyes, Lisa playing dead, and he was suddenly seized with the desire to lie down beside her and also play dead. Having spent so many years winnowing and saddening and squinting himself, it was no problem to get through the opening, which he did handily. And lying on the stone floor next to the anchorite, who was one, but now was two (or was it three?), he stretched out his body so that he was on his side, facing but not touching her, and closing his eyes he saw Henry driving the carriage toward him, and one by one, the bands around his heart began to break at just the same moment that Lisa was ravished by God’s fire, the concrete splinters of her enclosure hurtling through the dark night of Cincinnati.

Although the time cannot be set precisely, and it may have been a matter of physics more so than of chronology, at about the same time, or place, the twins, having just installed the crocodiles in the moat, had been arguing in the foyer, while the couple waited for them in the living room, over whether or not, after serving the bill and distracting one or the other with their calculations, they should subtract the husband from the wife or the wife from the husband. Although they could never explain it later, to either their friends or themselves, they were both suddenly seized with a compulsion to add instead of to subtract and there, under the proscenium arch dividing the foyer from the living room, without even worrying about the bill, they added the husband and wife to themselves, and in the midst of this delicious operation, or sum, the twins, who were now four, saw through the open window of the living room the heroine of our story, rolling in cartwheels down the street with the tumbleweeds of summer. But what they could not see, or know, was that at the moment they saw our heroine, who was also their cousin, roll by, was that their cousin was just then seized by what can only be called a tumbleweed jouissance—this is the feeling you get, or rather, a kind of explosion that occurs, after you have been blown, with and like the tumbleweeds, through the prairies and towns and cities of the Midwest, until suddenly God appears beside you and, reaching into your body, pulls you out of yourself, and yet, there you still go, rolling along your way.

This is the moment at which the heroine ascended above herself and above the tumbleweeds and above the street and above all of the houses and the entire city of Cincinnati and, like an angel, looked down through the clouds and a small window into the one apartment, on the tenth floor of a nondescript and sad brown building at the end of a dead-end street, where her brother, not a glass- or pink quartz-hanger at all, but a tax accountant, lay sleeping, dreaming all of this into existence, because none of it really happened at all, except for the childhood. That chapter is closed, as we said, but it was real and alive in the foreign country of the past, and his sister was in the heavens above him, blessing him with her tumbleweed jouissance. And that is why she is the heroine of this story, because even though she can’t put two and two together, she is always watching over the brother like that.

* * * * *

And to Henry, wherever you are, faithful servant and carriage-driver to the Frog Prince, consider our tale, if you will, as an emergency flare that has been fired into the stars from the sad brother’s heart. Do you see it burning there among the constellations, where it will burst and then scatter, like red stardust, raining back down upon those of us who are only trying to live our lives, walking with our heads bowed down along the grey avenues of all the busy cities? This is our signal to you, Henry, a momentary cry for help, and for assistance. We have only the one flare, and we have decided to stop being prudent with it. Henry, we appeal to your loyalty and to your steadfastness and even to your once-begotten sorrow. If by chance you receive this our flare, this our letter to you, come unto the brother of our story with your carriage and your horses, by which we mean, Henry, come unto us, and take us away from here, for the brother—by which we mean, we—we have great need of an hallucination such as you. In other words, Henry, we have need of love. We have need, also, of your limbs and your arms and your lips. So make yourself palpable among us, like God, who, when the anchorite, who was one, came alone, but was not really alone, God licked the edges of her heart with his tongues of fire.

Behold, the Beowulf Bullet (and Automatic Rifle)

by EILEEN JOY

Yes, my friends, what you see in this photograph is the Beowulf bullet, specially designed for an AR-15 automatic rifle [also called the Beowulf rifle]. Here is how one gun enthusiast describes the bullet and rifle:

The Alexander Arms .50 Beowulf cartridge packs awesome power in the AR-15 system. Think of it as a lightweight, handy, semi-auto .45/70 but with a larger diameter bullet and greater velocity. The .50 Beowulf uses a bullet of a true .500 caliber, with loaded ammunition offered from the factory in either a 400-grain soft point or a 325-grain hollow point, with velocities listed at 1800 and 1950 feet-per-second, respectively. This kind of power radically changes the performance aspect of the AR-15 type rifle while retaining the excellent handling and shooting qualities of the weapon. The .50 Beowulf cartridge utilizes possibly the maximum diameter bullet in the biggest case that can be made to reliably function in an AR-15, while operating at a relatively low pressure to assure smooth operation and longevity of the rifle.

Oh brave new world, with such weapons and bullets in it! If this sort of thing really intrigues you, you can read more about it here and here. Note also that the same company, Alexander Arms, has also recently developed a Grendel rifle which can shoot targets at even longer range than the Beowulf rifle. Of the Grendel rifle, the company claims, "Currently in testing with the US Military for widespread adoption, the 6.5 Grendel® seems assured a place in history." Oh yeah, baby.

A Short Ode to the Concordance

by Mary Kate Hurley

Before you do anything else, make sure you read the fantastic news about the progress on Postmedieval from Eileen. Then you can read this, if you want.

There may be readers who are wondering just where I've been for the past few months. The long answer will follow, in a kind of summary reflection on teaching the Introduction to the Major course that I was assigned this semester. The short answer:

Yes, you read that title right. It's an Excel Spreadsheet. Of pronoun usage in Beowulf. Every plural pronoun, and believe me, there are a bunch of them. I have been, in short, very much an Anglo-Saxonist this semester. More on that soon, too.

What I want to write about today is the hard-working Anglo-Saxonists who gave us the Concordance to the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records and A Concordance to Beowulf. These amazing -- and hefty -- volumes do for the ASPR and Beowulf what the online Dictionary of the Old English Corpus search function does -- albeit for fewer texts and set words. Essentially, these concordances provide every occurrence of a word in the corpus of Old English poetry or Beowulf, respectively. In short, they are a quick and relatively easy way to see the relative frequencies and usages of specific words in Old English. Although there are other concordances which I may speak of at a later time, I want to focus, just for a moment, on these two texts.

Both texts were compiled by Jess Bessinger, with the programming assistance of Philip H. Smith. What's so fascinating about Concordances is both their limitations and the advantages they give to the careful reader. Highlighted in their pages are the difficulties of Old English language -- the words that are written similarly but have different meanings, or a different word-history, for example. But also highlighted in the nearly 2000 pages of these two concordances is the kind of meticulous work that graduate students like me could not get by without. These aren't the only two concordances to Old English -- they just happen to be the two I'm using at present. Which even in my work-oriented scholarly moments, I find quite awe-inspiring. I suppose that what I mean to say is that sometimes it's the work I could never have the patience for (editing a concordance, compiling statistical data about half-line usages in OE poetry, etc) that makes my work possible, and for that, I'm exceedingly grateful.

cross posted at OENY.

volume one: postmedieval

by EILEEN JOY

I thought I would share with everyone here how volume 1 of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies is shaping up. Issue nos. 1 & 3 ["When Did We Become Post/human?" edited by me and Craig Dionne, and "The Animal Turn," edited by Peggy McCracken and Karl Steel, respectively] are now full and you can see the descriptions of each issue and lists of contributors here:

postmedieval: about 2010 issues

We are especially excited that, as part of our efforts to create new collaborations across the premodern to modern divide, that for "The Animal Turn" issue, Cary Wolfe has agreed to serve as a Respondent. Cary, as some may know, is the author of Animal Rites: American Culture, the Discourse of Species, and Posthumanist Theory [Chicago, 2003], the editor of Zoontologies: The Question of the Animal [Minnesota, 2003], and is also the series editor for Minnesota's new book series, Posthumanities. And for our post/human issue, we have lined up four exciting interlocutors who have been at the forefront of post/humanist, critical humanist, anti-humanist, and cultural theory dialogue within the humanities: Katherine Hayles, Noreen Giffney, Andy Mousley, and Kate Soper.

Each second issue of the journal [no. 2] will always be an open-topic issue, with room for small essay clusters as well [vol. 1, issue 2 will feature a cluster of essays on Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition by Stephanie Trigg, Louise D'Arcens, and Clare Monagle, with Bruce himself responding]. Therefore, consider this to also be a call for submissions from all interested authors. Essays and articles can be submitted to the Editors [Eileen Joy and Myra Seaman] at:

postmedieval@palgrave.com

Thanks to everyone, also, for all of the excellent suggestions and comments regarding the cover designs for the journal. Thanks to what we heard here and over on Facebook, we have managed to devise a new cover that we hope everyone [well, almost everyone, because you can never please everyone, right?] will like, and we'll share that with you as soon as it comes back from Palgrave's design staff. Cheers!

Stained Glass and Medieval Films

[image of window in Canterbury Cathedral from here]
by J J Cohen

Help Out Stephanie Trigg. Let her know what you know about movies and medieval stained glass. She has posed quite an interesting set of hypotheses on the subject, especially about the veering away from true medieval glass.

Postcard from Key West

by J J Cohen

Every few years my brother and I take trip together. Ireland, for example, in 2006. Last weekend we went to Key West and South Beach together -- both of which are islands, but after that most resemblance to the Emerald Isle ceases. Best parts of the trip: being away from the stacks of annual reports that have been my albatross lately; listening to the sound of waves on sand; drinking margaritas and mojitos, especially at the Rose Bar of the Delano; hanging out and doing nothing; biking; beach reading; swimming; eating well; etc.

But now I am back, and no one seems to have finished those reports for me while I was away.

Still, I did bring you a souvenir. Someone sent me this link via Facebook (and I am sorry that I no longer remember who did so). I believe this device will be very useful to you as you try to get some work done this summer. It is, after all, described as "medieval love" when applied to children -- and it seems to me that this device is fun for all ages: it will assist you in dissertation inscription, tenure monograph composition, book review creation .... Enjoy!

Once More, But Maybe With Less Feeling: Can There Be a Joy That Doesn't Break the Subject?

Figure 1. Pega taking leave of Guthlac and Crowland [Harleian Guthlac Roll Y.6, British Library]

by EILEEN JOY

I thought I would share here with everyone the paper I presented at Kalamazoo on the session organized by Dan Remein for the Society for the Study of Homosexuality in the Middle Ages, "Sex, Theory, and Philology: Queering Anglo-Saxon Studies." This was a somewhat difficult paper to write and in many ways it represents the rambling blatherings of a person [me] who was still not sure yet exactly what she was trying to say, or do, or . . . whatever. But this paper does represent what might be called the very nascent beginning of a project that I have decided is really important to me: trying to find alternatives to ascesis and abjection as modes of queer being and queer self-development and queer sex-love. Keep in mind that this is only a kind of sputtering engine start, and not much else. Give me all and any help you can. And finally, as I conceptualized and wrote this paper as a performance [and foregrounding] of my sputtering, as well as a sort of private letter to someone, keep that in mind, too. Which is to say: you kind of had to be there, but now you're here. So thanks for that.

The Light of Her Face Was the Index of a Multiplicity of Guthlacs: Desire, Friendship, and Incest in the Lives of Saint Guthlac*

*as always, the title covers more than what actually went on in the paper [why are we so ambitious with our paper titles, hmmmm?]

Kafka as Modernist Interlocutor for the Middle Ages: Some More Thoughts on Pleasure--no, Intensity--from Julie Orlemanski

Figure 1. Franz Kafka Museum in Prague

by EILEEN JOY-as-JULIE ORLEMANSKI

These comments are posted on behalf of JULIE ORLEMASNKI, for whom the comment function on another post just will not behave [nor even for me!]:

This is a response to Dan, and to his comments here in response to "Some More Thoughts on Pleasure" and to his blog post at wraetlic: “how the new middle ages will be a radiant modernism with a queer cowboy for its dean: kalamazoo 2009.” If we’re talking about matter, rather than human subjects, do we need to be talking about pleasure? Can intensity do the trick? What is the value-added of “pleasure”? Intensity, radiance, gravitational allure, pleasure--your terms move in a spectrum, from what is “proper” to matter to what is proper to a subject. The metaphoricity is (wonderfully) difficult to pin down—are you anthropomorphizing matter or materializing psychic states or . . . .? Pleasure raises the question of WHOSE pleasure, which again turns one (turns me) to the question of a subject, a self coincident with a body vulnerable to pleasure and pain, to ethics.

Of course, you are in good company with the (meaningful) slippage between material and psychological terms, and I am going to invoke one site where I’ve dwelled on that slippage. I am a wee bit obsessed with chapters 5 & 6 of Deleuze & Guattari’s Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature and the play of intensities, lines of flight, dismantlings, desire, and jouissance that constitute the life and decay and transformation of the bureaucratic machines therein. Kafka is of course another literary modernist we might think productively with and against and through an engagement with medievalism. Two quotes from D&G's Kafka stage, I think, the radical character of this desire and pleasure beyond consciousness:

“One would be quite wrong to understand desire here as desire for power; it is power itself that is desire. Not a desire-lack, but desire as a plenitude, exercise, and functioning, even in the most subaltern of workers. Being an assemblage, desire is precisely one with the gears and the components of the machine, one with the power of the machine. And the desire that someone has for power is only his fascination for these gears, his desire to make certain of these gears go into operation, to be himself one of these gears—or, for want of anything better, to be the materials treated by these gears, a material that is a gear in its own way.” [p. 56]

“And the cry of Franz, the warder punished for his thefts, the cry that K hears in a lumber room contiguous to the hallway of his office at the bank, seems to ‘come from some martyred instrument’ but is also a cry of pleasure, not in the masochistic sense but because the suffering machine is a component of the bureaucratic machine that never stops creating its own bliss (jouir de soi-même).” [p. 57]

D&G do achieve a way of talking about pleasures that is not founded on consciousness—but then conscious things become gears or material for gears, become suffering machines that rejoice in functioning (desire = energy = pleasure = function). The pleasures of function evoke the modernist topos of the man-machine, but we might also think of the Middle Ages’ own interest in an individual’s role/function/type (see estates satire; Theseus and his Boethian “faire cheyne”). Of course, what is wonderful about D&G is that there is no totality, we’re always left with n minus 1 and the machine dismantling itself and taking flight via its functioning . . . . But pleasure is so completely remade by D&G’s discourse that it blows my mind and makes me wonder how we can talk about our own pleasure. Where is it?

Is pleasure an inessential category, an epiphenomenon of consciousness in contact with intensity, with energy that might be registered sometimes as pleasure, sometimes as pain, sometimes as tedium—? Or are desire and pleasure the true names of intensity, and if so, why? “Whose pleasure?” I still want to ask. D&G’s discussion of cogs and gears is very different from the autodeictic and autoindexical movement you referred us to—but the autodiectic produces for me (in the cropping it effects, in its after-image or negative space) the machine or assemblage of which that moment is a part. My question is not so much about ethics, at this point, but about the utility of pleasure as a concept. (And also, tangentially, about Kafka as a modernist interlocutor for the Middle Ages . . . .)

Words of the fragrant portals, dimly-starred (Key West)

by J J Cohen

That title sounds so Eileen Joy, doesn't it? It isn't, but is stolen from her verbal doppelganger Wallace Stevens.

An early plane tomorrow whisks me to Fort Lauderdale, where I rendezvous with my brother and we drive the rest of the way to Key West. You know how I am drawn to the Caribbean, and this is as close as you can get from the US.

So, no blogging from me in quite a while. I will be communing with the ghosts of Hemingway, Stevens, Frost, Bishop, Margarita, Tequila...

From the Tiny Shriner's Twitter Feed

by J J Cohen

Yes we know, not everyone had the time and inclination and wherewithal to follow the Tiny Shriner's Twittered adventures at Kalamazoo. Below are some of his favorite tweets from the conference. Enjoy.

-----------
TinyShriner ....

is not sure which ITM co-blogger he finds more repugnant

wants you to know that he was born to Twitter. OK, he was poured into a mold in China by child laborers, but same thing.

is itchy and would like to remove his fez, but fears his head is hollow.

Got the invitation to the BABEL party (misaddressed to JJC). Going. Sweet. Hope not to vomit in fez this year.

is not pleased to be on that damn ITM blog so much. They should live their own lives, not vicarious bon vivanting via me.

was discovered rubbing himself with Renuzit® air freshener gel in the Super Odor Neutralizer scent. Is that so wrong?

snuggly in a bookbag munching Breathsavers like donuts

wonders what his shelf life is, because he has lived much of his life upon a shelf

wonders if the lascivious antelope on JJC's shelf will miss him while he is gone to Kzoo

wants you to know he types by jumping up and down on the keyboard. It ain't easy, esp. when the martini spills.

REALLY misses the Lascivious Antelope

is packing his tighty whities.

has decided to mail all new Twitter followers tiny plastic fezes.

warning: a tiny plastic fez that you may receive as a gift will bind to your skull and cannot be removed, even surgically

The surgeon general has determined that plastic fez wearing may be injurious to your cerebellum.

is ALMOST finished packing. Final count: 17 small suits, 33 miniature plastic fezzes, 6 photos of Kate Moss, and a cattle prod

@jeffreyjcohen dude where is my fez cleaning brush?

is in a snit. He may not go to Kzoo after all.

@jeffreyjcohen NO, you had it last

@jeffreyjcohen your ability to annoy is matched only by your propensity to irritate

@jeffreyjcohen never mind, found it, we r cool

is going to Kzoo after all

Landed in detroit

awaits his luggage while the UMD delegation has departed for rental car lot

is hellbent on beating Theresa Colletti to Kzoo. She has a head start.

may have to sabotage TC's car

Medievalist Highway Bumpercars

at Radisson, using coffee mug as jacuzzi. Beat TC -- woot!

feels like the bean burrito he ate on the plane is never going to leave his GI system

is happy to be at the Zoo again. The air is crisper, the hair taller, the grunge more scabrous.

Thinks Eileen is less charming than she thinks she is

failed in objective (there is some vomit in my fez this morn)

poisoned the olive in JJC's martini; now he thinks he has swine flu

can't seem to find the turquoise fez he packed; will go with the burgundy one today

can't seem to get his tie in the Windsor knot he prefers. Stupid clip on.

just ingested a scone roughly seven times his size

dwells at the gates of difference

BABEL party just ended not sure where I am

woke up in bed with Eileen Joyless, Stephanie Trigg, Dr Virago and a tall guy from the Babel party -- not sure of his name

glistens with day old Renuzit

has been spitting in the cups at the Kzoo wine hours, hoping to give everyone Shrine Flu.

dreamt he met a Tiny Anchoress last night

woke up in a champagne flute not his own

would attend the Kzoo dance tonight, but finds the plastic base to which he is melded an impediment.

declares the Best Kzoo ever then packs his spare fezzes to head home

wants you to know that he attended your Kzoo panel. Though he will quibble with your translations, it mainly pleased him.

wishes you safe travels homeward. Life after Kzoo = falling action and anemic dénouement.

is home.

realizes he left a chartreuse fez in Kalamazoo