The Chaucer Blog Book

by J J Cohen

By now everyone knows that the Chaucer blogger is not David Wallace but Brantley Bryant -- and I will here insist, again, that Brantley Bryant is not a fictional persona created by David Wallace to make it seem as if he is not the author of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog. For the record: "Brantley Bryant" is NOT the medievalist version of JT LeRoy, and though there are some superficial similarities uniting the two scholars, Brantley Bryant is not David Wallace in a nice wig and different glasses.

Nor is he Rita Copeland.

With all that cleared up, let me turn to a question that is no doubt on the minds of many ITM readers. The Chaucer Blog was entertaining, but how is the book of the blog? I've just read the volume through for a second time, and I'm happy to answer: it is also quite entertaining. You know already that I have an included essay, on "Blogging the Middle Ages": the essay was in fact blogged at ITM. And Brantley Bryant and David Wallace -- who are not the same person, and whose relationship involves no wigs, changes of glasses, or other disguises -- and who come to think of it have never actually been spotted in the same room together -- ANYWAY, they are both my friends, even if as I am typing this I am realizing that I know less about them than I thought I did and am finding it a little strange that they have never been observed, let alone photographed, anywhere near each other. I also note that Brantley Bryant is NOT on the program for NCS Siena, while David Wallace IS. How convenient.

ANYWAY, again, I am obviously well disposed towards the book, and indeed I do like the thing. From its bitter prefatory poem by John "the Wanker" Gower ("Beware, ye shal nat L O L / The while that ye burne in helle") to its concluding -- and new for the book -- road trip to Vegas, Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog is great fun. And why shouldn't it be? Brantley emphasizes in his narrative of origins "Playing Chaucer" that starting the irreverent blog was a relief from the seriousness of his dissertation (he was a graduate student when he created the blog, and is now an assistant professor at Sonoma State University). He observes that has been pleased at the "good bit of fun and enjoyment" the site has provided. But play is also serious; didn't Chaucer teach us that? So even though Brantley often veers away from his moments of acuteness with humorous lines like "imagine me in a clown suit if necessary," I would emphasize how useful for thinking about medievalism is the narrative he provides.

On the one had, since I've known Brantley from c. 2006 when I met him at Columbia, much of the history behind the blog isn't news to me. On the other, by invoking the work of scholars like Stephanie Trigg and emplacing the persona within the tradition of Chaucerian congeniality that Stephanie has excavated, he argues well for the project's relevance to Chaucer scholarship. Invoking as influences both BABEL and In the Middle (both of which were then "concentrating on rethinking the methods of medieval scholarship and on finding new configurations between the medieval and the modern"), he writes that "In its own jokey way, the blog aimed at the same effect through its simultaneous appropriation, disruption, and estrangement of contemporary concerns and Chaucer's text" (22). He dilutes the assertion by adding "please remember, however, that we are discussing a joke blog" -- and again I want to say, jokes are serious, important, and require no apology. We're generally not allowed to write with a jocular tone for Speculum, and that's OK; but a benefit of blogs and the new critical modes they enable is that we can speak in a way that is more direct, often more engaging, and potentially full of sober challenge beneath the seeming lightness. That, at least, is my take on it: the self-enforced sobriety of the field has its negative effects, and blogs widen the possible.

Along these same lines, the included essays by Bonnie Wheeler and Bob Hanning emphasize how venerable this history of serious fun is within the field. Bonnie's essay traces the "long tradition" of formidable academic levity, especially at Kalamazoo. Her account of how the impromptu convocation of "823rd Meeting of the Holy Foreskins Society" in 1974 became the Pseudo Society is hilarious, as well as a reminder of how far back these challenges to scholarly solemnity go. Bonnie writes that the seriousness of the Medieval Academy was a primary target of these "creative efforts of frustration," because "any society with women members that named its academic journal Speculum deserves the occasional parody" (10). This democratic carnival seems to have had many members, but its most prolific was Bob Hanning, whose amusing contributions to medievalist humor are collected in the book as well. His limericks, puns, and assorted verses are insanely clever.

The bulk of the book, however, is the print version of the Chaucer Blog itself. I wondered how well the posts would hold up three and four years on, since so many of them took as a point of departure ephemeral pop culture. Most remain hilarious, even when the films and celebrity gossip they reference are no longer foremost in our mind. "Ich and the Perle-Poet on Mount Dorse-Quassee," a rewriting of Brokeback Mountain, seemed to me as fresh as when I first read it. The interview with Reims Launcecrona, built upon Paris Hilton c. 2006, loses a little when references to "The Lyf Symple" take a few extra seconds to compute (for my old brain), but some of the lines remain priceless. Reims explains that she doesn't like blogs because she is afraid of falling into one: "Blogges are moost uncourtlie," she adds, "And ful oft ther ys sum dead Pict at the bottom of the blogge." Then again, another line (when asked about professors of literature, Reims breezily declares "Vntil they owene up to havynge no ethical use, I shal nat respecte them") brought me back to an interesting period at In the Middle, since the reference was meant as a comment upon the discussion unfolding here. Other posts, like "Serpentes on a Shippe," didn't seem quite as fresh; but "Ask Chaucer" and "Flayme Werre" are timeless.

My advice? Buy the book. It's in paperback, it's fun to read, and what else are you going to lug to the beach, the Confessio Amantis?

Busy, busy

[snapshot of a leisurely Sunday]

by J J Cohen

Saying no came easily while I was department chair. As much as I like to travel, present work, and even sometimes publish the odd essay in places other than blogs, my time to do so was limited. Remember that talk on Mandeville I did in Saint Louis? I have fond memories of returning to my hotel room that evening and allocating the faculty merit raises for the year. Good times.

So I naturally convinced myself that once I was no longer department head, time would stretch languorously towards the bluest of horizons. Because of that misapprehension I have in the next twelve months committed myself to compose essays on Chaucer's (literally) rocky relation to Geoffrey of Monmouth; the sexuality possessed by medieval stones, especially diamonds; the publishable version of my York 1190 plenary; an abecedarium for the New Critical Modes issue of postmedieval; an introduction for a collection of essays on beheading; an afterword for a volume on monsters and monstrousness; a blurb for a new book on women and medieval disability; some lectures for a residency I'm doing at the University of Iowa; and piece on medieval race for a new critical theory handbook. A little further ahead, I'm co-editing another issue of postmedieval, this one on ecomaterialism. I also need to finish my book on medieval stone -- and with that in mind, will be applying for fellowships in the fall to try to get a year to write (a vain pursuit no doubt). Did I also mention that I am organizing a conference, the product of which will be a collection of essays? And, GW MEMSI (which has 54 fans on Facebook, so our impact is HUGE) enters its last year of funding in 2010-11 ... so I have to seek more support to keep the elephant well supplied with peanuts.

Then there's the travel. I'm fortunate, I get to be in many places during 2010-11. Several of these gigs are engagements I turned down while chair with the promise of doing them once my term was over. It's over, and so I am on the move. July brings New Chaucer Society in Siena, for which I've organized two sessions and will be presenting in a third, on blogging; September is a visit to the College of Charleston and a plenary in Berlin; October brings me to SUNY Buffalo, where the Medieval / Early Modern Student Association and the Center for the Study of Psychoanalysis and Culture have cosponsored me; November brings a trip to Copenhagen, where I've been invited to speak at a symposium on literature and identity formation at the Center for Canon and Identity Formation; then I'm off to Iowa in warm and beautiful February; April brings me to an invited talk at Northwestern; Kalamazoo looms in May; and, coming all the way round to July 2011, off to Australia to present at the University of Melbourne, where this person named "Stephanie Trigg" appears to do things.

And THEN I enter a cave deep within some hinterland and slumber for a few decades.

So, if you don't see much of me in the year ahead, you know why. Then again I am traveling so much you are more likely to in fact SEE me than you are to read anything I've been able to write. Here's hoping that your summer if off to a good start.

A Book Prospectus for "A Beginners Guide to Early English History"

[do stay posted via In The Middle re: the annual meeting of the Medieval Academy planned for Arizona in 2011]

Figure 1. Edwin the Nervous, first-known gay Viking

by EILEEN JOY

A couple of summers ago, I was contacted by an editor at Oneworld Publications in Oxford, UK [partly because she followed this weblog!], where they have this nifty little Beginners Guides book series, and she wanted to know if I might be interested in writing one of these guides for the Middle Ages, and for which I would have a certain amount of freedom to make it "quirky" [implication: like this blog's coverage of the Middle Ages]. I entertained the idea quite seriously for a few months but ultimately declined because, at the end of the day, I really don't think I'm any good at this sort of thing, and the thought of tearing myself away from my regular scholarship in order to write a guide, or a reference or introductory work, or "companion to" sort of book, is just not appealing, and even fills me with dread. My brain just doesn't work that way, although I admire like hell those who do write [and edit] such books, especially when they're such good ones [I'm thinking here, especially, of volumes such as Paul Strohm et alia's Twenty-First Century Approaches to Literature: Middle English, for Oxford UP's Approaches series, or David Wallace et alia's The Cambridge History of Medieval English Literature]. Of course, I sometimes regret a little bit saying "no," especially since the books in Oneworld's Beginners series are so small and beautifully-designed and affordable. And every now and then I think about what I could have done, given the opportunity, so this past weekend, with the help of a friend [Anna Klosowska], we devised a brief prospectus for a book we wish we could have written, given the chance, tentatively titled A Beginners Guide to Early English History. The main idea would be to focus each chapter on one (or two) lesser-known figures who would represent certain aspects of the historical period that remain, for whatever reasons, under-represented. And please, if we've missed anyone, do send in suggestions for additional figures and chapters. So:

Chapter 1: The First Gay Viking: Edwin the Nervous

Edwin hailed from a small freshwater fjord in medieval Norway. The third son of Halfdan Ragnarsson and descended from a long line of sheep-herders-cum-pirates and expert boasters, he accompanied Halfdan's expedition to England in the ninth century. As a small boy he liked to weave daisy crowns for the sheep and made small lambskin purses adorned with shells. Unlike the other Vikings, who liked to get drunk and sing battle poems all night, when he was a teenager, Edwin would stay in his room and read skaldic verses by Halfwilfrid, a Viking pacifist and great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather of the British poet Wilfred Owen. He earned his nickname, "the nervous," on his first raiding voyage on a longship when he insisted on having his own "privy" [and hence the origin of the idea of a private toilet] and also because he fainted whenever Brod-Helgi, the David Beckham of his time, took his tunic off to row with greater ease of movement. While the other Vikings were drinking rum at night, Edwin would lay in his sling, reading Halfwilfrid's "Anthem to a Doomed Norse Youth." As they used to say of Edwin, "he was not so much into the raping," and when it came to the pillaging, while others were carting off women, chests of gold, jewelry, and weapons, he was taking down the curtains and measuring them to see if they would fit in the windows of his cottage back home. He eventually set up the first interior design business in the Danelaw, "Edwin's Interiors," which was especially famed for Edwin's creative facility with chintz.

Chapter 2: The National Embarrassments: Alphonse the Not-So-Great and Æthelred the Unready

While Alfred the Great was busy fending off Vikings, creating the Danelaw, founding a fledgling nation, and establishing a national vernacular literature, his lesser-known brother, Alphonse, who was more of an "athlete," was busy founding the first fraternity house, Alpha Tyr Rad, with his triathalon practice buddy, Æthelred the Unready. When they weren't practicing the triathalon together [which at that time, in 9th-century England, involved downhill skiing, target shooting, and raping a nun], they typically could be found passed out on the front lawn of the Alpha Tyr Rad house in Wilton, surrounded by dozens of drinking horns. It is a little-known fact that the convent of Our Lady of Perpetual Frustration, located in East Anglia, was founded by a group of Wilton co-eds with whom Æthelred, after the twelfth or so drinking horn, was perpetually "unready." As to the idea that his name, when he eventually became king, also indicated that he was either badly-advised or unwise, both were true, but what is not as well-known, is that he also had a bad case of attention deficit disorder brought on by too many acid trips in the East Anglian fens with the Welsh hippies who maintained St Guthlac's shrine.

Chapter 3: Ælfric Bata: The Real Reason Behind the Failure of Beowulf as an "Epic"

As is well-known, scholars argue endlessly over the dating and provenance of the Beowulf manuscript, and now, thanks to the recent discovery of a missing volume of the Colloquies of Ælfric Bata, who was an early eleventh-century high school teacher in the Canterbury Cathedral school, we now know that Kevin Kiernan's argument for an early eleventh-century date is exactly the case. As it turns out, every year in April Ælfric Bata would ask his senior students to write a national Teutonic epic as a group assignment, and in 1009, as we know from marginal comments in his Colloquies, he was infuriated by the penning of a certain "Beo-wulf the Haughty Geat," which, according to Ælfric, did not properly follow his prompts, thus leading Petrarch to later refer to the entire period in which Ælfric and his students lived as the "Dark Ages." Here are some of the notes Ælfric wrote to himself concerning his students' homework: "although its egregious length certainly puts it in the class of an epic, its numerous digressions are the clear mark of pot-addled distraction, not to mention the missing fifty half-winters of Beowulf's reign as king"; "a monster who lives alone with his mother in an underwater cave? you must be kidding me!!!"; "the theology in this poem is all over the map!!! are they christian, pagans, or devil-worhsippers? who can tell??!!??"; "how is this a national epic? I never heard of the Geats!"; "other than killing monsters, what else does Beowulf do? does he found nations, like Rome? NO!"; "the irrelevances are in the center and the serious things on the outer edges--it is too SIMPLE!"; "what, finally, is the point? don't steal cups from dragons?"; "the meter is completely irregular!"; "I specifically asked for a Dido-like love interest, and did I get it?--NO!"; "while the moral and spirit of it can be matched among the noblest authors, the thing itself is cheap!"; "doubtful the king will be much interested in this, so let's just keep one copy in the trash files and beat everyone who wrote it with a stick"; "final grade: F-".

Chapter 4: Caedmon the Cadillac Dealer: The Real Origins of English Poetry

Although it is a commonplace of Introductory guides to and anthologies of Old English literature to place Caedmon, a lowly and illiterate cowherd monk living in Whitby in the seventh century, as the "father" of English poetry, because he supposedly fell asleep in a cowshed and dreamed that he composed a Hymn to the Creation, the real story is that Caedmon was the first licensed Cadillac dealer in North Yorkshire and he was famous for his witty sexual epigrams, such as, "I write, I must confess, for dirtier readers, / My verse does not attract the nation's leaders" and "Of course we know he'll never wed. / What? Put his sister out of bed?" But when the Norton missionaries arrived in England in the late seventh century looking for the "unique" and "humble" origins of English poetry and also for women authors, they quickly realized they had a "situation" on their hands if the so-called "father" of English poetry was a Cadillac dealer who composed sexual epigrams in the style of a first-century urban Latin author, so they engaged in a sort of literary canon whitewashing. Equally frustrating for the Norton missionaries was the lack of women writers composing in England before the Norman Conquest, so they made up a story about double-monasteries in which women supposedly learned to read and write and exchanged racy letters with each other.

Other possible chapters:

Thomas Becket: A Practical Joke Gone Horribly Awry

Bede the Not-So-Venerable: The First English Softcore Porn Film

The Not-So-Saintly: The Lost Volume of Ælfric's Lives of Saints

The First Butch Lesbian: Princess Aelfflaed

Important Update RE: MAA in AZ

by J J Cohen

Constance Berman, a councillor of the Medieval Academy of America, has left the following comment on this post, our open letter to the MAA (147 signatures).

I front page her comment now because of its importance:

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

I would like you all to know that enough Councilors of the Medieval Academy of America have indicated that we will not attend a meeting in Arizona to have called a virtual meeting of the Academy which will, I hope, take place within the next two weeks. One of the arguments being used to have the meeting continue in AZ is that there are 120 abstracts. While I'm morally opposed to having a meeting in Tempe, I'm trying to use the more easily made "practical" argument, that if we hold a meeting, no one will come. So, if you have submitted an abstract, but will not attend if it's still in AZ, then it would be good if you so indicate to medieval academy officers and council -- whose names have recently been sent out on the MAA list-serv

It'll make it easier for those who oppose it from inside the Council without having your abstract used against us. Thanks and hang in there,

Connie Berman, Prof. of History, University of Iowa,
Iowa City, IA 52245 -- and my email is
constance-berman@uiowa.edu

---------------
If you submitted an abstract, and if you do not wish that submission to seem a vote for keeping the annual meeting in Arizona, you should contact the councillors now. A complete list of the councillors and officers of the MAA may be found here.

New Critical Modes (postmedieval 2.3)

by J J Cohen

As announced and discussed here, here and here, Cary Howie and I are co-editing a special issue of postmedieval entitled New Critical Modes, to be published late next year. We thought you'd enjoy a preview of the essays that we are bringing together. Comments welcome.

------

New Critical Modes

postmedieval 2.3 (2011)

ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen and Cary Howie

This issue examines and embodies some of the new critical modes that are emerging among contemporary medievalists. Critics have often been content to adopt the voice, citational practices, textual apparatuses, forums and ambit of those who trained them, leading to a great deal of continuity in published scholarship over the years. Others, however, have become restless with such modes and models, choosing to disseminate their work and perform its content differently. This special issue will examine new modes of writing, new media, and the very idea or possibility of critical novelty. Possible topics include the reinvention of scholarly and authoritative voice; the affective turn in critical practice; performativity and embodiment; amateurism; popular medievalisms; anachronism; and hybridity of critical investments, genres and identities.

Table of Contents

1. Introduction (Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie)
2. Rick Godden, “"Getting Medieval in Real Time”
3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum, “On Medieval Blogging”
4. Catherine Brown, “The Writing on the Wall”
5. Eileen Joy, “Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill”
6. Dan Remein, “A Critical Poetics of Allure: 10 Antiphons for the Bringing-to-Appearance of the Place of Allure as a Complicity of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of the Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”
7. Karmen MacKendrick, “Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”
8. Anna Klosowska, “Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”
9. Jeffrey Cohen, “An Abecedarium of Vertu”
10. Cary Howie “Uncritical”
11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

Abstracts of Essays

1. Jeffrey Cohen and Cary Howie

Introduction

2. Richard Godden

“Getting Medieval in Real Time”

From making it easier to collaborate and share work to making manuscripts available through digital imaging that once would have been only available through costly and time-consuming travel, the emergence of new technologies such as email, digital media, Facebook, and Twitter have radically re-shaped what it means to do academic work. This essay explores the timeliness of these new technologies. Firstly, by “timeliness” I do mean a sense of fortuitous timing. As an academic with a physical disability, the advent of email and electronic databases full of searchable journal articles could not have been more timely. Without tools like these, pursuing a PhD would have been far more laborious than it already was. But by “timeliness” I am also asking the following question: How do we describe the time of the academic? Using my personal experiences as a starting point, I consider the intersection of Disability Studies and recent work on time and temporality in order to provide the beginnings of an answer. Rather than conceiving the time of the academic as that of working in solitude in our own pockets of time, I suggest that we consider how the social capabilities of new technologies produce a sense of being-together, of working at the same time.

3. Brantley Bryant and Carl Pyrdum

“On Medieval Blogging”

It is no great stretch to say that Carl Pyrdum and Brantley Bryant run two of the Internet's most successful medieval interest blogs -- so long as one defines "successful medieval interest blogs" as "blogs read by people not typically interested in medieval things." Got Medieval and Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, their respective endeavors, occupy a middle space between the academic middle ages and the rest of "teh internets," and in this paper, Carl and Brantley will attempt, through a collaborative mutual mock interview, to chart the dimensions and extent of this middle ground. Among the questions they will entertain are the following: 1) To what extent do the two blogs act as points of entry into the more serious academic medievalism on the web? And to what extent are they a barrier to entry? 2) How do the blogs manage to remain "in the middle" without becoming In the Middle or The Medieval Comedy Hour? In a sense, 3) Does their comedic discourse magnify or obscure their academic discourse? Over the next few months, Carl and Brantley intend to correspond via email about their blogs and about blogging generally, and the mock interview will be constructed out of these email exchanges. In other words, while the finished product will not be the transcript of any actual interview, it will take the form of one, a dramatized interaction between the two bloggers that attempts (with jokes!) to get at some meaningful truth about medieval blogging.

4. Catherine Brown

“The Writing on the Wall”

Imagine a graffito in Pompeii. Imagine it says this: Meet me here tomorrow and bring a stick this big with you. Since we’re imagining, it can say this in any language you like. What matters is that it says it, and you think, Here I am. Or: Imagine you’re at Belshazzar’s feast: “In the same hour there appeared fingers, as it were of the hand of a man, writing over against the candlestick upon the surface of the wall of the king's palace: and the king beheld the joints of the hand that wrote. Then was the king’s countenance changed, and his thoughts troubled him” (Daniel 5:5-6). Ephemeral writing as artifact and trope: the reading present articulated by figure and interpellation. And what is the reading present, anyway?

5. Eileen Joy
"Shafts or Freight Tunnels Constructed Between Objects that Otherwise Would Remain Quarantined in Private Vacuums: Chaucer’s Griselda and Lars von Trier’s Bess McNeill"

In their essay “Getting Post-Historical,” which serves as the introduction to their edited collection The Post-Historical Middle Ages, Sylvia Federico and Elizabeth Scala acknowledge that “historicism has become the Jamesonian ‘cultural dominant’ of our field,” and they call for a reexamination and redefinition of historicism’s dominant status, even suggesting that the Freudian, Marxist, and Lacanian approaches to the Real that have founded both the materialist and psychic historicist enterprises are ultimately inadequate to the task of a scholarship that might seek in medievaltexts a type of knowing “unavailable to their ‘original’ readers and beyond the intent of their writers” (pp. 1, 7).

My essay will entail a purposefully historically inappropriate (mis)reading of sacrificial ethics in the “lives” of the fictional characters (and queer saints of a sort) Griselda in Chaucer’s Clerk’s Tale and Bess McNeill (played by Emily Watson) in Lars von Trier’s film Breaking the Waves. I will follow the thought of Walter Benjamin, in The Origin of German Tragic Drama, that the work of art possesses its own history, one that is not readily reducible to the time period in which it was produced nor to the intentions of its maker, and further, that the goal of criticism might be to apprehend the historicity of the artwork that is not part of historical life, per se. And this would be best accomplished by considering the artwork as an object among other objects, all arranged in a non-linear constellation that does not privilege the place of one work over another and which produces certain dialectical images that give to historical time a particular shock. The work of interpretation, in this scenario, is the thinking — necessarily creative and non-teleological — that gives rise to the constellation, which is also formed when temporally disparate objects are seen to be in tactile and affective proximity to each other. Cadging from Deleuze and Guattari, my essay will also argue that texts do not form images of the world, but rather, they assure the world’s deterritorialization, but only if we can properly shake ourselves loose from the hegemony of the ways in which we usually read the signifiers of these texts, and for which enterprise we must get out of history proper through a process of critical hallucination and what the philosopher Graham Harman calls “vicarious causation”: what happens when “objects [Griselda and Bess as textual and visual networks; language; filmic image] confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles found only on the interior of some other entity [the reader-viewer-scholar-me]”? Therefore, this paper also aims to show that the “side-by-side proximity of real and sensual objects is merely the occasion for a connection between a real object inside the intention [my desire to be absorbed by these objects] and another real object lying outside it. In this way, shafts or freight tunnels are constructed between objects that otherwise remain quarantined in private vacuums” (“Vicarious Causation,” Collapse : Philosophical Research and Development, vol. II, March 2007: pp. 184, 185).

6. Dan Remein

“A Critical Poetics Of Allure: 10 Antiphons For The Bringing-To Appearance Of The Place Of Allure As A Complicity Of Human And Non-Human Matter In Writing, Or, The Physis Of The Whale In Anglo-Saxon England”

A truly new critical mode in the humanities might be considered as an act with illocutionary effects resulting in actually new structural and formal alternatives for the human to certain tyrannies of thought which have perhaps contributed to the need for a volume on new critical modes in the first place. Such a new critical mode—perhaps most importantly within medieval studies—could no longer prohibit critical writing from the production of poesis as its primary orientation, and perhaps should, without giving up close reading, consider how to move beyond constative statement. I attempt to ask, with the critic Walter Benjamin not only of the attitude of one’s work towards the relations of production of the time, but also of the work’s place within them, in terms of technique—and how to intervene or alter these relations (“The Author as Producer”). To alter and not just describe such relations we should consider attempting to produce writing we would not know how to read, which does not mitigate the difficulty of reading it with supposedly transparent self-explanatory framing. Given the current important discussions of the ‘posthuman’ and the ‘posthumanities’ (within Postmedieval, for instance) as one possible site of a current attempt to alter the above-mentioned relations with increasingly pressing consequences, I have explored the possibility of a new critical mode in relationship to the question of how a still-human poetics can maintain a commitment to history, the human, finitude, secularity, et. al. while operating as a collaborator to, or in complicity with, non-human matter. This essay names the place of allure as the place of complicity between language, human-matter and non-human matter, and attends to this allure in an operation of writing in complicity with whale-bone from Anglo-Saxon period England and the Old English ‘Whale’ Physiologus poem from the Exeter Book.

7. Karmen MacKendrik

“Always Already New: The Possibilities of the Enfolded Instant”

Friedrich Nietzsche considered himself an inverse, generally taken to mean anti-, Platonist. But in the admittedly strong interpretation of Pierre Klossowski, the eternal return shows affinity with the thought of Neoplatonists Meister Eckhart and Nicholas of Cusa: for all, the newly emergent and the recurrent beyond origin curiously coincide; no thing, and no time, is only itself. Eckhart demands an infinite birth of an already-crucified God; Nicholas mutually enfolds all possibility and all actuality in a God who is neither simply (actually) a being nor not. And Klossowski’s sense of affirming the return demands that we affirm not only the “tremendous moment’ in which Nietzsche comes upon the thought, but also every possible mutation of that moment, because everything returns, every possibility is unfolded from any actuality. For all of these thinkers, a revelation appears as the astonishingly new which is precisely the same as the old without a first.

8. Anna Klosowska
“Alcibiades and Sartre's Bad Faith”

I juxtapose two canonical scenes of flirtation: Alcibiades's drunken confession in Plato’s Banquet, and Sartre's bitter unveiling of feminine artifice that serves as the illustration of bad faith, one of the key insights in Being and Nothingness. The two scenes of flirtation not only help define and sustain philosophical arguments but, as if bound to demonstrate the functioning of a deconstructive dynamic, also disrupt them. However, while Alcibiades is supposed to disrupt the banquet, Sartre's scene of flirtation belies his demonstration of bad faith. The scene, as Sartre records it, undoes Sartre's reading of it, and undermines the concept it is supposed to illustrate. Alcibiades scripts his confession as a dialogue, with stage directions and a sublime sense of comic pacing. His interruption in the Banquet is analogous to a commentary: it is both in (with respect to the structure) and of (with respect to the theme) the text that hosts it. And yet, it is distinct from its matrix: like a commentary, it is an incursive vein cross-secting the matrix. Sartre, meanwhile, creates a distance from the scene of café courtship as a third-person omniscient narrator. For Freud, shame is a proleptic twinge of pain that directs the ego away from a risky trajectory that may result in an even greater pain. While this description fits Sarte's vignette of bad faith, Alcibiades's story cannot be subsumed to it. I would argue that a different mechanism is in play. I analyze it closely, and propose it as an alternative to shame as a both a seductive and critical modality.

9. Jeffrey J. Cohen

“An Abecedarium of Vertu”

Inspired by ludic and deconstructive alphabet books for children (Chris Van Allsburg, The Z Was Zapped; Edward Gorey, The Gashlycrumb Tinies) and biblical, classical and medieval abecedarian poems (Psalm 118, the “ABC of Aristotle,” Chaucer’s “La Priere de Nostre Dame”), this essay explores the polysemantic Middle English word virtu. An assemblage rather than word, vertu brings together the life force of animals and flowers; sidereal radiation and pull; cognition and the brain at war with itself; communicative and translational devices employed by the humors to bend the body to their desires; chivalric virtue; materiality as a matter-energy flow. Although some of its meanings are spiritual and theological, vertu also yields a way for medieval texts to frame a secular or at least non-teleological world where the only constants are strivings for movement, newness, and change. Virtu is more than life-force: it is an aesthetic impulse inherent in materiality, a creativity or generativity with irresistible allure for human, but in excess of anything the merely human world or even the divine world can contain.

10. Cary Howie

“Uncritical”

This essay attempts to think an uncritical relationship to its--to our--objects. Specifically, what value could there be in reading uncritically, where this kind of uncritical reading would be understood in light of other practices of unsaying? An uncritical reader would not, in this way, escape criticism (understood in its various modes as dialogical, interpretative, professionally-based, evaluative, and generally invested, overtly or covertly, in authority) any more than, for example, the practitioner of medieval apophasis would escape affirmation. But the coordinates would shift: if my drive to affirm is shaped by the ultimate excess of its object (in a certain tradition, God; in another, the world) to each of these affirmations, so too might my drive to critique (to criticize: and notice the ugliness of these verbs) be shaped by the ultimate excess of its object to the process and procedures of criticism. The uncritical reader might attempt to give voice to something that criticism is too hoarse (or, perhaps, too busy speaking) to express, something uncaptured by criticism: namely, the sense in which objects, even and perhaps especially literary objects, elude our capture. To read uncritically would, in this way, be to read attentively, but where attention waits, where scholarly scrutiny goes a little unfocused, reaching out without grasping (or grasping many things at once, or grasping only to let go). If crisis designates, in at least one etymological register, a kind of separation, this kind of uncritical practice would be a bringing-together, not exactly a unification but, perhaps, a drawing-close, a binding, a becoming-unseparate. (And this is where uncritical reading and uncritical loving have something else in common.) There is no sense in which I can ever 'be' uncritical (or 'be' uncritically); I require you, or something in your place, to be uncritically 'with': the uncritical gesture is unthinkable--but here is another puzzle: what would unthinking amount to?--in isolation.

11. Book Review Essay by Sharon Kinoshita

Diane Watt, "Why Men Still Aren't Enough"

by J J Cohen

The latest issue of GLQ (16:3) contains a substantial book review essay by Diane Watt that is well worth your time (subscription required to access; I'm happy to share the PDF though if you email me).

Watt observes that the promise and challenge of the April 1993 issue of Speculum -- the one that, oh so belatedly, announced that feminism had arrived in medieval studies, and should have been agenda-setting -- seem not to have been fulfilled. Feminism's victories, she writes, "seem short lived." The history of sexuality, with its special emphasis upon queer sexualities, receives more scholarly energy and attention. In the course of reviewing four books, Watt argues cogently that too often the queer sexuality within this field is the same thing as male sexuality. Whereas Allen J. Frantzen wrote in that issue of Speculum that masculinity and femininity require feminist analysis (“When Women Aren’t Enough”), in the seventeen years that have followed the former term has eclipsed the latter: women might not be enough, but men have certainly become too much. Watt makes the excellent point as well that Judith Halberstam's challenge to see masculinity as not being the exclusive preserve of male bodies has also barely penetrated medieval studies.

Watt reviews Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures; William Burgwinkle, Sodomy, Masculinity, and Law in Medieval Literature: France and England, 1050–1230; Lara Farina, Erotic Discourse and Early English Religious Writing; and Tison Pugh, Sexuality and Its Queer Discontents in Middle English Literature. She finds much to praise in each, especially as all four books challenge boundaries of various kinds (generic, national, sexual). She is an attentive reader, and therefore also finds much that is surprising -- arguing, for example, that despite Burgwinkle's male-centered project that he is a provocative interpreter of Marie de France as "lesbian-like," even though he does not use Judith M. Bennett’s term. Watt's favorite work is clearly Amer's, since Amer's scholarship truly gives erotic relations between women their due: "When it comes to writing the histories and literary histories of sexuality, men still aren’t enough" (463). And it is difficult not to agree. But I do wonder if the review would have been different had it included Anna Klosowska's Queer Love in the Middle Ages (MOR's ITM post on it here), a book that does admirably bring together male-male and female-female erotism in ways that mutually illuminate.

New issue of Hortulus online

 by J J Cohen

With a theme of "Monsters and Monstrosities in the Middle Ages," the latest issue of the graduate student journal Hortulus has just come online. The issue includes three essays and three book reviews (including one of an ancient tome by yours truly).

Enjoy!

Letter to the MAA

by J J Cohen



I have emailed the following letter and link to the officers and councillors of the Medieval Academy of America. You may find a complete list of the MAA governance structure here.

You may be interested to know that the bylaws of the Academy state that the annual meeting "shall be held at a time and place to be fixed by the Executive Committee of the Council." The Executive Committee currently consists of Peggy Brown, Alice-Mary Talbot, Maryanne Kowaleski, Connie Berman, Peggy McCracken, Brian Patrick McGuire, and Danuta Shanzer.


Thank you, everyone, who assisted with this effort. I know that not everyone agrees with the idea of potentially moving the meeting. The discussion post has had several comments about holding protests while convening in Arizona, and I've received a few emails on that subject as well. I realize that the issue is not without complexity. For me, though, discussing the Middle Ages in the air conditioned comfort of an Arizona hotel, even with a protest, is insupportable. I am a believer in protests, but would prefer to see ours unfold via relocation, and in a situation where it doesn't otherwise appear that we are conducting business as usual.


The letter, of course, does not say this; and I don't know that every signatory would go so far as me. The letter simply urges that the location of the meeting be given serious scrutiny. I have faith in our elected MAA leadership; I trust that this scrutiny will happen.


-----------------
Dear President Elizabeth A. R. Brown, First Vice-President Alice-Mary Talbot, Second Vice-President Maryanne Kowaleski, and Councillors Constance Berman, Rita Copeland, William Diebold, Robin Fleming, Bruce Holsinger, Peggy McCracken, Brian Patrick McGuire, Mark Meyerson, Danuta Shanzer, Carol Symes, Nancy L. Wicker and Nancy Wu,


I am writing on behalf of the 142 medievalists who have, to date, signed an open letter to the Medieval Academy of America. In light of Arizona's SB 1070, we urge the MAA leadership to consider moving the April 2011 annual meeting from the state, and to make this decision (which many of us consider ethical) without regard to financial loss. Our letter reads:

We the undersigned condemn the immigration bill signed into law by Arizona governor Jan Brewer as racist and inhumane. We urge its immediate repeal. To demonstrate our support to those in Arizona whom the law targets, we request that the Medieval Academy of America seriously consider not holding its planned annual meeting of April 2011 in the state if the law remains in place, even if this means canceling the meeting and incurring a financial loss. We further urge that a theme on "Immigration and Tolerance" be added to the meeting's program no matter where it is held in order to place these recent events in a longer historical perspective.

You may find the complete text and the signatures here:
http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2010/05/open-letter-to-medieval-academy-of.html

We thank you for your attention to this issue, which is of great importance to us.

It's Never Enough, or, On Being Fucked Up

Special Note: don't forget to read and consider signing our open letter to the Medieval Academy of America concerning their annual meeting being held in Arizona in April 2011.

Figure 1. a tattoo tribute to Plato's Symposium and Hedwig and the Angry Inch; inscription: "that's the pain / that cuts a straight line / down through the heart, / we call it love."

by EILEEN JOY

All beauty comes from beautiful blood and a beautiful brain. . . . your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body. . . . What balks or breaks others is fuel for [my] burning progress to contact and amorous joy.
—Walt Whitman, "Preface," Leaves of Grass (1855)

For this year's Congress on Medieval Studies at Kalamazoo, Anna Klosowska and Nicola Masciandaro organized two panels on the "post-absymal" that featured papers by myself, Nicola, Erik Butler [our non-medievalist interloper from German studies], Irina Dumitrescu, Dan Remein, Heather Bamford, and Cary Howie [with a response-poem by Michael Snediker and response by Anna]. The somewhat loose, working description of these panels, as they were first conceptualized about a year ago, was this:

The panelists are united in their belief that: 1) the study of medieval texts is aided, clarified, and furthered by a serious inquiry into the conditions and modalities of theoretical frameworks; and 2) a serious engagement with theory today calls for a reassessment of the Continental tradition, including the primacy of death, the supposed inaccessibility of meaning, and the linguistic turn. We want to argue against the “lack” model of theory as it stands today. This session, thus, is resolutely “post”: post-post-modern, post-lack, post-humanist, post-Heideggerian, post-Blanchot, post-silence, post-death, post-speculative realism, even. With Michael Snediker, our Respondent, we create “epistemologies not of pain, but of pleasure; aestheticize not the abdication of personhood, but its sustenance” (Queer Optimism: Lyric Personhood and Other Felicitous Persuasions); with Alain Badiou, we want “a theater of capacity, not of incapacity” (Handbook of Inaesthetic), as we “return to the place of life” (Saint Paul); and with Giorgio Agamben, we want to speak the “language in which the pure prose of philosophy would intervene at a certain point to break apart the verse of the poetic word, and in which the verse of poetry would intervene to bend the prose of philosophy into a ring” (Language and Death).

It was thrilling to hear all of these papers, which variously covered the subjects/figures of the commonplace, anagogy, disorganization/being fucked-up, smallness/radiance, melancholy/violent excitement, scars/closeness, the predicate "as if"/devotion, as well as the questions and matters of: 1) Why should our day be more vital than earlier ages, which confronted problems that have hardly vanished with time? Is it not possible that our era of digital reproduction, automation, and mass-mediated spectacle is less alive than any other? The demarcation between “now” and “then” has been erected to hold events in place artificially. Only when the border is suspended can the future — whether “post-modern” or “post-medieval” — appear. The eternal (should it exist) is not lighted by a sun in the process of combustion and self-extinction [Butler]; 2) Where is the anagogic sense now? Where has it gone? Nowhere. The anagogic sense is always present. Every hermeneutic realizes some form of non-dualistic psycho-sensual fulfillment. Every thought and interpretation revolves around a taste for something immanent to itself. The issue is: what? [Masciandaro]; 3) the possibility of a poetics of vertiginously small places, whose radiant unreadability (re)produces a literary modernism with a medieval heart capable of flouting the lack which would prevent a certain queer mixing of persons, things, pasts, presents, literary spaces and ‘real’ places [Remein]; 4) it is through the experience of sorrow, compunction and a sense of loss that deep reading — and laughter — may come [Dumitrescu]; 5) by accepting what Hans Gumbrecht might call "scars" (The Powers of Philology) on medieval artifacts as potential sites of contact with the past and by permitting discussion of the fuzzy questions regarding their creation, a different sort of contact with the medieval, albeit not a cognitive or historical one, can be brought about [Bamford]; and 6) the places where hope and cynicism meet, where the "as if" becomes not merely wishful but, in fact, effectual, and also opens the way to something like a literary-theological practice without the orthodoxy of having to sort what is right from what is wrong [Howie].

Within the next week or so, I hope to have posted most of the papers on the BABEL Working Group's web-page for this year's Congress, so that everyone can read them, but in the meantime, I thought I would share my own paper with you here. I must say that, where we started with our call for papers and where we all ended up represents, um, not an entirely coherent process [but in some sense, valuing incoherence as a "good" in the critical thinking/interpretive process was a big part of many of our papers]. On the one hand, we wanted to think a little bit about how to get beyond what might be called the "abysmal"/death drive-driven discourses that inhabit so many spaces in the university right now [although one of the insights that came out of our sessions is that it is not always a question of trying to get out of or beyond the abyss so much as it might be a matter of figuring out different ways to "live" there that could be hopefully conducive to more sustaining, affirmative, and in Cary's terms devoted modes of critical thought]; on the other hand, we wanted to experiment/play around with figures and modes of critical thought [sadness, anagogy, anachronism, smallness, as-ifness, closeness, disorganization, etc.] that might allow for certain "new" ways of looking at/getting close to/thinking about the objects of our studies that might get us beyond the "lack" theory of everything. And for some of us, getting deeper into the "abysmal," even enjoying it, was precisely the point.

For myself, I wanted to try and formulate, by way of the figure of Alcibiades in Plato's Symposium and also Eve Sedgwick's queer little gods [an idea/figure she was working with shortly before she died in relation to the works of Cavafy and Proust], the ways in which thought and affect can never be disentangled from each other and how thought/philosophy could never really stand outside of the bodies [and their mainly disorganized/fucked-up affects as well as their shining queer little gods] that "speak" philosophy/thought. There is, in a sense [for me, anyway], no Outside to thought, no pure space of negativity out of which or from which thought could ever begin, much less sally forth into the world as a critical methodology somehow shorn of affects [which is to say, shorn of bodily tremors and tics]. Philosophy, or thought, as an attribute of speaking/thinking bodies, is itself an affect, a form of feeling that also has the potential, in Alcibiades's own words, to strike us like lightning, to wound and hurt us, to burn us, literally, from the inside out. On that note, here is a link to the full text of my remarks:

It's Never Enough, or, On Being Fucked-Up

An Open Letter to the Medieval Academy of America

by J J Cohen

[Please go here for background and extensive discussion. If you would like to sign this letter, simply leave your full name and institutional affiliation, if any, in the comments section. If you are a member of the Medieval Academy, you may wish to indicate that fact along with your signature; you need not belong to the MAA in order to sign. A copy of and link to the open letter will be sent to the officers of the MAA in the hopes that its message will be considered as deliberations proceed about the April 2011 annual meeting.]


We the undersigned condemn the immigration bill signed into law by Arizona governor Jan Brewer as racist and inhumane. We urge its immediate repeal. To demonstrate our support to those in Arizona whom the law targets, we request that the Medieval Academy of America seriously consider not holding its planned annual meeting of April 2011 in the state if the law remains in place, even if this means canceling the meeting and incurring a financial loss. We further urge that a theme on "Immigration and Tolerance" be added to the meeting's program no matter where it is held in order to place these recent events in a longer historical perspective.

Arizona and the MAA

by J J Cohen

There's been some Facebook discussion about the fact that the Medieval Academy of America is holding its annual meeting next April in Arizona. Members of the Academy were notified of this long ago, of course, but the recent dissemination of a CFP reminded us of the location at a time when many of us are none too pleased with the terrible choices the state government has been making regarding social issues we care about. Governor Jan Brewer's signing into law an immigration bill that seems almost carte blanche for police intimidation and harassment is, to my mind, racist and just wrong. Now comes the possibility of banning ethnic studies.

So when the MAA CFP arrived in my inbox I wrote back asking "Given the recent and reprehensible choices that the Arizona state government has made, will the Medieval Academy consider moving its annual meeting to another state?" Today I received a reply from Elizabeth Brown, the Academy President. I am sharing the letter because it brings up several points that deserve a wider (public) audience:

        Thank you for your eloquent message, which Paul Szarmach, our Executive Director, has just forwarded to me.  On behalf of our Vice-Presidents and Treasurer, and Robert Bjork, who is organizing the meeting, I want to express our gratitude to you for writing to us. 

    The situation is very complicated indeed, and we are monitoring it carefully. We have been concerned about this problem from the moment the governor of Arizona signed the bill concerning immigrants.  We are all following developments closely and are keenly aware of the importance of the issues that are at stake.  I have responded to inquiries from many colleagues, and have followed up with Bob Bjork, who has established that cancelling the meeting now would cost something in the neighborhood of $30,000. 

    We at the Academy are attempting to monitor the situation attentively and are fervently hoping that the offending legislation will be nullified or radically changed -- which we understand is a very real possibility. Like you, we are concerned about the legislation's implications, which go beyond the federal requirement that identity papers be carried (as is true in many countries). In short, we are adopting a policy of watchful waiting.

    We will do our best to keep you informed about developments and would appreciate any further counsel you can give us as we attempt to deal with these problems.

    With every good wish,

     Elizabeth A.R. Brown (Peggy)

     Professor emeritus of History, CUNY; President, The Medieval Academy of America

I understand very well that the situation is complicated; that's why I wrote asking if moving the meeting was on the table, rather than insisting (with whatever insistence a member can voice) that the meeting must be relocated. And you know, maybe it is completely hypocritical of me to have ever written, because I am not attending the meeting in April for reasons having nothing to do with its location (though if I had been intending to go, I doubt I would as things currently stand). Still I'd like to think that I have an investment in this professional organization that represents me, and indeed I'm heartened that the political context is being taken seriously. I can hope -- as I think many of us do -- that the law will be modified or nullified soon. Robert Bjork has done a great deal of planning for the meeting, planning that I know can often seem thankless; I am truly grateful for the labor that Professor Bjork has undertaken. Yet I also can't help wondering: would it be the worst thing in the world for the MAA to be out $30K and skip a year of meeting if that sends a message to the state that the law it has enacted is so unjust that as a measure of support we medievalists will not convene in Tempe?

I ask that as an open question. I wonder what our readers think.

[EDIT 1:30PM More on the letter from President Brown at xoom]

Memories of Kalamazoo (2010 edition)

by J J Cohen

Monday, gray rain, and an office full of papers in folders and in stacks and in small messy strews. Before the return to that which must be done, though, some lingering over Michigan pleasures enjoyed.

1. Swag I. My Facebook status on the eve of Kalamazoo departure: "Do you like decorative accessories that can poke people so sharply as to draw blood? ESPECIALLY if this swag is emblazoned with an Englishman on an elephant? AND has a Latin inscription? Stop me and ask me for yours if you see me at Kalamazoo. I may poke you with it, but the gift is well worth the bleeding." Can you guess what I was distributing on behalf of GW MEMSI at Kzoo (besides pain and suffering)?
2. Swag II. The best swag was -- of course -- the free copy of the initial issue of postmedieval that Palgrave gave to those stopping by their table at the book exhibit. Palgrave also had gray plastic yoyos emblazoned with the postmedieval logo. None of the five toys I snatched actually worked (strings not tied properly? moron attached to the end of the string?). The yoyos did, however, make impressive weapons when swung around the BABEL suite. I brought two home for my kids, and they've been using theirs to annoy and attack each other as well.
3. Gifts. The following purchases from the exhibit area accompanied me home: a blue t-shirt with armored men in disco poses, the words Saturday Knight Fever across its back (for my son); a book of fairy tales involving dragons (daughter); chocolate bark made by Trappistine nuns (spouse; I told her that the confections had been imbued with the sublimated sexual yearnings of its chaste preparers, and that nothing adds to the flavor of chocolate like sublimated sexuality. Personally though I think conventual desires have a slightly leek-like aftertaste, but that's just me).
4. Music 1. Lowell Duckert, my traveling companion, put together a playlist of songs on his iPod for us to listen to on the trip from Detroit to Kzoo. Lowell is an old soul in a young body; most of the songs I recognized from having an older sister who adored the music when it was new. So in our electric blue Hyundai Elantra we grooved to Fleetwood Mac, America, Boston, the Eagles ... 
5. Music II. Late in the night in the BABEL suite we engaged in a Tuneless Karaoke. No machine is necessary for this one: you just sing as if you had a soundtrack, preferably with a serious introduction about how the music speaks to your soul. Favorite: a skillful version of "You Can Go Your Own Way" (J J Cohen, Dan Remein, Lowell Duckert; it began by my emphatic asking of the eternal question "Can you go your own way?") and a beautiful cover of "Grendel's Mother" (J J Cohen, Dan Remein, Brantley Bryant). 
6. Feats of Strength and Poetry. For reasons that escape me I frequently invent useless contests at Kalamazoo. I convinced Eileen Joy to arm wrestle Jonathan Jarrett to see whether Literature or History would prevail. Predictably literature was crushed, leading Eileen to exclaim: "History wins again! Literature is in second place, call it last place: whatever you want. We are the orphan of history and we like it that way. We gather in back alleys and we lose arm-wrestling contests all over Europe and Russia!" I don't know what that means. We later had a push-up contest (other medievalists possess very little upper body strength, I discovered) and then a 3 AM poetry recital that was, I must say, achingly beautiful.
7. The Abyss, I & II, plus Laurie and Marty.  I can't say that this was my favorite Kzoo for panels; in fact I attended one so poor I left before its conclusion, because I was afraid I might die (thank you, Mike Pryke, you weedy Englishman, for that near lethal event). Anna Klosowska and Nicola Masciandaro put together two panels on the post-abysmal that provided me with plenty to think about, while an evening session on Laurie Finke and Marty Shichtman's King Arthur and the Myth of History was pure enjoyment.
8. And Two Kisses. Hanging out with Laurie and Marty at the postmedieval launch party was also great. Marty surprised me with my first big wet kiss on the cheek that night; Garrett Epp startled me with a second. I would describe both as good kissers, in case anyone wonders.
9. Promiscuous Blurbing. Speaking of being startled, as I browsed the book exhibit I was a bit taken aback by the number of books I picked up that had an endorsement from JJC on the back. I hope I am making a lot of money by lending out my name so freely. Some day people will pay NOT to have their book blurbed my me, it's so predicatble. Don't believe me? Some evidence here here here here...
10. postmedieval I. Did you know that postmedieval is more than a journal, it's an event? I said that, I really did, and I meant it -- but who knew it would end up on brochures, posters, advertisements, and a mega-sized banner at the Palgrave booth?
11. postmedieval II. That my blurb isn't hyperbole, though, was suggested by the lavish launch party. We mingled to champagne cocktails and fancy finger foods. I got to climb a balcony to give a toast, an act I was happy to undertake until people spotted me up there and started chanting JUMP JUMP JUMP. Seriously, though: to Eileen Joy, Myra Seaman and Holly Crocker I say well done.
12. Exemplaria. Two panels and a reception thanked Al and Judy Shoaf for the twenty year labor of love that is Exemplaria. I attended the second panel and was especially impressed with Liz Scala's paper on women medievalists, work, and the messiness of human relations. Unfortunately I was late getting from dinner and missed the reception to honor Al and Judy, for which I am very sorry. Congratulations to Liz, Patty Ingham, Tison Pugh and James Paxson for taking over the editorship of the journal: long may it flourish.
13. Plotting and Scheming. Sure, there were the usual intrigues (who will murder whom and who will pay for it and how will it be hidden), but I was also happy to conspire on two future issues of postmedieval: New Critical Modes with Cary Howie, and Ecomaterialism with Lowell Duckert. More information on both soon. I also think I told about 17 people I'd give them essays for various projects and collections. I warn you now, I was drunk and I didn't mean it so don't even try to follow up.
14. The Chaucer Blogger reveal.
15. Things I am forgetting. More happened at this conference than I can keep track of or relate. If you don't see your name here, it isn't because seeing you wasn't a highlight; there were just too many highlights for me to type out without my fingers wearing down to bloody stumps. So to all the friends old and new who made this an enjoyable and provocative experience ... thanks.

What did I miss? Please add your own observations in the comments below.

On Natality and the As If: To My Friends With Love

by EILEEN JOY

Although, of course, we've already announced here on the blog the publication, a few weeks ago, of the inaugural double-issue of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies, because the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies is now officially over, and because we had a party Friday night at the Rose Street Market in Kalamazoo to celebrate (see photo), and because I've just spent 4 intensive days of intellectual over-stimulation while also engaging in all sorts of foolishness with what can only be called a radiant circle (or is it--nod to Nicola--a constellation?) of friends who helped me, Myra Seaman, and Holly Crocker to make this journal an actual possibility (a space--possibility--in which I hope it ever remains), I hope I will be indulged this Sunday morning in using this space to offer my thankfulness and gratitude to everyone who helped and continues to help me actualize a vision of our field as a mobile and restless series of movements of possibilistic "middles" of thought, work, and to be frank, life-practices that can be said or hoped, in the words of Lauren Berlant, to tilt toward the "emotional time of being-with, time where it is possible to value floundering around with others whose attention-paying to what's happening is generous and makes liveness possible as a good, not a threat" ("Starved").

What do I hope for with this journal? In a word, natality. In the face of master signifiers, death drives, and what often appears to be the general meaninglessness of everything (which, granted, can also be re-thought as a productive series of incoherences; in other words, voids and abysses aren't always so bad, as Anna Klosowska's and Nicola Masciandaro's two panels on the post-abysmal amply demonstrated on Thursday, and as Erik Butler said in the first post-abysmal session, the world we're in is a kind of hell, but it's also where everything interesting is happening), natality is not a popular term in the academy at present, and I will be viewed by some as hopelessly naive, heteronormative, and maybe even stupid, but my friends, we can have queer natality, even in an abyss. But more particularly, I take my idea of natality chiefly from Thomas Carlson, who in his book The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and the Creation of the Human, writes,

There is perhaps no act less loving than to step in for another, or indeed all others, so as to make everything already actual for them, given ahead of time; and there is perhaps no act more loving, or more difficult to define, or quite simply more difficult, than to give another the actuality of possibility itself--to give another time and life. (p. 216)

So, in perhaps an idiotically roundabout way, I'm trying to say that my chief hope for the journal is that it will serve as a space, a site, for the cultivation of the actuality of possibility--for others' work to emerge in ways that none of us could ever predict in advance; in other words, as a sort of cleared ground (or cloud) within which thought, work, and things can arrive, which is to say, can be born/e (which is to say, can both "come to life" and "be carried"). This has something to do as well, and I have no shame in saying it, with how, over the past three years especially, I have been trying to formulate my thinking on love, or friendship, as a politics of queer natality. As I said in the comments to a post I wrote after last year's Congress,

I guess I want to also resist the notion that love is always, somehow, an object choice, and there are therefore certain "objects" that glow or darken as a result of the attention they receive, or don't receive. For me, love is also a kind of force field that may not even be directed to any particular objects or persons at all but actually radiates out toward the entire world and loves everything in it, or practically everything. Now before everyone jumps all over me I am decidedly NOT talking about some kind of goofy "I love everyone & everything!" kind of love. I am talking, rather, about a sort of orientation to the world that is always fixed/attentive upon its possibilities, rather than upon its already-thereness as an object. We have, of course, attraction to all sorts of *specific* persons and objects, which we sometimes call love, and which usually ends badly. The love that I want to try to practice does not fixate upon specific persons and objects, although it certainly *lands* there on occasion and, if I'm lucky, helps to light things up from within and *between*, but more importantly, the love I'm for is a kind of clearing of space that allows for something to be left alone as well as for something to unfold in just the way it always needed to whether I was there or not, but it didn't have the space, either, maybe, before I cleared it. This also means love as a kind of making way for natality, for things to be born that you couldn't anticipate. I think it is possible to love this way, and bad as I am at it, I see this as the only way to love.

This also has something to do with what Cary Howie talked about in his typically gorgeous and very moving paper at the second post-abysmal session, "As If: After Ciappelletto," in which he asked us to think, through a particular story in Boccaccio's Decameron about the sanctification of the notoriously wicked Ser Ciappelletto, about the question: what slips past perdition (?), and to also consider the predicate "as if" as engaging in a poetics of suspension of belief that clears a landing site for the divine stranger, without drawing limits around the landing site itself. This would be like a literary-theological practice without the orthodoxy of having to sort what is right from what is wrong. This would be poetics, and criticism, as a form of hospitality that puts one thing on hold in order to allow for the arrival of something else. As if: an undulation between loss and finding. This is the inbetween space we're so fond of at In The Middle, and practices of affirmation in the space of the as if, if we're willing to risk them, are simply a way of responding to what we don't know: "the void which isn't one" (to gesture back again to the post-abysmal panels as a whole). This is to also realize, as Cary pointed out, that we will always be more than the sum of our vices and the ruses we devise to hide them. As always, Cary ended with a poem, Mary Karr's "Sinners Welcome," which, if the BABEL Working Group had an office, or a home, or a stalagmite-studded cave or cloud somewhere, this "sign," which is also a portal, "Sinners Welcome"--this would hang over the door.

Chaucer Blogger Revealed!

by J J Cohen

A great many things keep happening at Kalamazoo, all of them good. If you are not here you should wish that you were, or at least wish that you were wishing that you might wish you were here, because you'd be enjoying yourself.

And you would have attended last night's dramatic revelation of the Chaucer blogger's identity. SPOILER: the Chaucer blogger is NOT -- despite the disinformation campaign begun by me in 2007 and continued by the man himself -- David Wallace. Second spoiler: the Chaucer blogger is

Wait for it.

The reveal happened at 6 PM last night. About a hundred people had gathered in one of those lounges that dot the Kzoo dormitories. The champagne flowed, anxious eyes cruised the room, everyone whispering theories. Bonnie Wheeler in her deviousness had distributed scores of "Y am the Chaucer Blogger" stickers, so it seemed the lounge was filled with People Who Might Be He. The heat in the room was nearly as unbearable as the sense of expectation. At 6:15 Bonnie ascended to a table top and asked, "Are you ready to learn the secret identity?" As everyone shouted YES, a man who identified himself as John Gower (and looked uncannily like Bob Yeager) ran forward and announced "I am not a wanker!" Bonnie acknowledged that Gower might not be -- contrary to many assertions on the Chaucer blog -- a wanker after all, and then asked Chaucer to come forward. Silence, and eyes everywhere.

Then I stepped to the table. "Yes," I said, "it's me."

There was a gasp. I heard some people say "I KNEW IT." But then I laughed and said, "Just kidding" (Bonnie had put me up to the stunt). "It's Brantley Bryant."

Brantley smiled and raised his glass of champagne. The crowd applauded enthusiastically. And with copious bubbly and a sweaty book signing the greatest mystery in contemporary medieval studies came to its end.

(You should buy the book.)

Codex Fetish, Anyone? BookBook Laptop Case Raffle @ Kalamazoo

by EILEEN JOY

For those traveling to Kalamazoo, Michigan for the 45th International Congress on Medieval Studies (13-16 May 2010), the BABEL Working Group, thanks to a generous donation from TwelveSouth, will be raffling off not one, but TWO, of these "I'm a medievalist, I must have one of these!" BookBook laptop cases [one each of the 13" and 15" sizes]. Raffle tickets will be $5.00 each and will be available at the following locations and times:

1. "Post-Abysmal" roundtable sessions: Thursday, 1:30 p.m., Valley III, Stinson Lounge & Thursday, 3:30 p.m., Bernhard 210

2. Palgrave Booth, Book Exhibits, Valley III, Rm. 302: Friday, 3:00-4:00 p.m. [during the "meet & greet" the Editors of postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies event]

3. BABEL Business Meeting: Friday, 5:15-6:00 p.m., Bernhard 158

4. BABEL Party to celebrate launch of "postmedieval": Friday, 9:00 p.m. - midnight, Rose Street Market [303 N. Rose Street, downtown Kalamazoo]

5. BABEL's sessions on "Style" and "Collaboration": Saturday, 1:30 p.m. & 3:30 p.m., Fetzer 1005

The winner will be announced here on Facebook on Sunday, May 16th!

More details about the laptop case can be found here:

TwelveSouth: BookBook Hardback Leather Laptop Case

For the most part, BABEL runs on martinis, WD-40, ramen, loose change, the kindness of strangers, old Talking Heads albums, matches, a glitter ball, and chewing gum. But every now and then, we appreciate whatever donations our members and friends may be willing to spare. Thus, proceeds from this raffle will be used specifically to help us defray: a) travel expenses for graduate students to participate in BABEL-sponsored conference events; b) travel expenses for featured speakers in BABEL-sponsored conference sessions and other events, such as BABEL's newly-inaugurated biennial conference and our upcoming Speculative Medievalisms event; c) operating expenses associated with BABEL-sponsored conferences and other symposia; and d) costs associated with BABEL-sponsored social events.

You know you want one of these: