Some Newish Blogs of Note

by J J Cohen

There's Fumblr, as Jonathan announced. And in other big news, Bruce Holsinger has a great new blog, Burnable Books. Broadly speaking, the blog is about the vitality of the past, and that life takes some intriguing forms. Today's installment is a video interview with Paul Strohm.

Though it isn't new, I hope you are reading Anne Harris's wonderful Medieval Meets World. Today's post involves Thoreau, which is odd because last night I dreamed that Eileen had illegally moved into his reconstructed cabin on Walden Pond.

Cory Sparks has a good blog that has recently featured rumination over birds, beauty (visual and sonic), and captivation. Keeping to the avian theme, some graduate students at Ohio State have started a blog called The Birds' Nest. In Romaunce as We Read is another group effort, also quite engaging, this time by graduate students at the University of Rochester.

Those are a few medieval themed blogs you might like to follow. What am I missing?

Quick edit (thanks for the reminder, Anne): a huge oversight was to omit James Smith, Fluid Imaginings. Not new, but if you haven't found it yet ... well, find it. 

FUMBLR IS (A)LIVE, Y'ALL

by JONATHAN HSY

Good news, everyone! Fumblr (originally dreamed up as the Academic Fail Blog) is now LIVE.

Check it out, and submit your own FAIL to the webmasters (Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran)!

For the inaugural Fumblr posting, see HERE.

UPDATE: The inaugural reader submission comes from Karl.

Two Roads Diverged in a Yellow Wood, and I, I Took the One Less Travelled By: Why I Resigned my Professorship

by EILEEN JOY

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

~Amy Hempel, “Tumble Home”

Hope springs eternal in the human breast;

Man never Is, but always To be blest:

The soul, uneasy and confin'd from home,

Rests and expatiates in a life to come.

~Alexander Pope, An Essay on Man

Part I. Fear of Flying

For several years now, I have been engaging in various processes of what I am now calling de-materializing. Some of these were painful and not exactly self-willed. For example, in 2006, I separated from a partner with whom I had lived for about 14 years, and in fact, we continued on, in fits and starts until 2009, and somehow managed to part as friends, even while much that transpired between us from about 2005 to 2009 was incredibly sad, occasionally terrifying, and heartbreaking. But in May 2006, while on a mini-research trip at Cambridge University, I remember standing in the narrow hallway of a B&B on a communal wall-phone talking to my partner and realizing, this is it, we’re separating (and not because I wanted to; I did not want that, not then), my life is now officially over, and I have nothing to live for. Thanks to a beautiful best friend of 27+ years, I would have a place to live in the hills of eastern Tennessee for the rest of the summer, and indeed, she and her husband tended to me so carefully for the next 3 months, I will likely never be able to repay the gift of their kindness. They gave me an enchanted respite; they made me laugh; they “entertained” me; they surrounded me with good company, elegant dinners, and several tuns of wine.

I’ve always connected my love relationships to my work; when they are good, I can think and write and extend my affections to pretty much everything, and I only see the light in everything, but when my primary relationships are breaking down, I can’t think straight and I pretty much shut down. Everything goes black. It did not help that, at the same time that my partner was effectively breaking up with me, that my stint at Cambridge was not going so well. I had chosen Old English as my primary research specialty (having finished my PhD in Nov. 2001), and at the time, whether just imagined in my own head or not, I felt like this: “Wow, everyone in Old English studies, with 1 or 2 exceptions, really hates me.” A less self-absorbed (but still personal) version of this might have been, “Old English studies is never going to accept the kind of work I want to do, and maybe I should stop striving so hard to be a part of a field that isn’t welcoming the approaches I am trying to devise. Maybe I should just go away. Maybe medieval studies, and even academia, isn’t for me at all.” BABEL was partly founded, in 2004, out of the collective depression of 5 women -- myself, Betsy McCormick, Mary Ramsey, Myra Seaman, and Kimberly Bell -- who just weren't sure anyone would ever pay any attention to us because we had no (or not much) institutional privilege, and maybe we should just do whatever the hell we wanted, anyway. Plus, we wanted to have some fun at conferences that struck us as stultifyingly boring. In addition, I had resigned my job at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville in May 2005 in order to accept a job at my partner’s university in South Carolina [with the hope of repairing our broken relationship], and now, in May 2006, after a brutal bid to re-apply and ultimately win back my job at SIUE [which only happened because a courageous department Chair, Charles Berger, overruled the hiring and department's executive committees to re-hire me, and let it be said, now, finally, and in public, what a debt I owe to him and others at SIUE who wanted me back, despite the “weirdness” of my having left to begin with], I was facing a scary and uncertain future.

In the midst of all this, while spending many days in Caffè Nero in Cambridge, when I should have been in the stacks at the Cambridge University Library, or in the manuscripts room at Corpus Christi Library, avoiding the work I was supposed to be doing on Anglo-Saxon law codes, I started reading and commenting at this “new” blog called In The Middle, which a friend (Betsy McCormick, who, like my friend in Tennessee, helped me so tremendously through this difficult time) had recommended I read (she also was one of the first promoters/early adopters of Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog, at a time when many people thought blogs in general were a waste of time and the Chaucer blog a pleasing trifle, but nothing “serious”). In short, during what was probably one of the most harrowing times of my personal life (exacerbated as well by the fact that my partner and I had adopted a daughter in 2000, 9 years old at the time, who was going through horrendous emotional problems and also engaging in illegal and self-harming activities that threatened to literally send all three of us into mental hospitals and also prisons: indeed, our family therapist actually recommended our separation and wanted the 3 of us far away from each other for that summer in 2006), I found, through Jeffrey and the commentariat he was building at ITM, a community, perhaps even a new family. I changed my mind about leaving academia, and something else extraordinary happened that same month: I wasn’t afraid to fly anymore.

You see, I grew up in a family that was always flying somewhere and I had always loved being in airplanes [having taken my first trip at 15 months of age to go to Ireland, which is where my mother grew up and where her family still lives]; my father, who worked for the government in DC [making a modest salary], never bought us a second car, never bought us a color TV, and really never bought us gadgets or shiny things of any kind, because he sank whatever capital he had into travel. He told us that travel would bring us riches we could never imagine and he was banking everything he had on that [plus his immense library of first-editions of poetry and his immense collection of ancient coins, which basically bankrupted the family as well]. But for some odd reason, after traveling to Denver in 1988 [or 1989?] to visit my younger brother, who was distraught at the time and having a sort of life-crisis and had asked me to visit him, and because of some experiences he and I had together in Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming, Canyonlands National Park in Utah, and also in an isolated place that I can only recall as having been 80 miles outside of Moab, Utah, I flew back home [Richmond, Virginia at the time] a suddenly fearful person when it came to flying. I was petrified, scared, and so jumpy on the plane ride home that one flight attendant threatened to sedate me forcibly. From that day, until my trip back home from Cambridge in May 2006 (so, for 18 years!), I was so afraid to fly that I would take every measure imaginable to avoid being on a plane. I would even get off of planes before the cabin door was shut, forfeiting my seat and the non-refundable money I paid for it, thereby driving some of my traveling companions crazy with frustration at me. I would purposefully miss connecting flights and rent cars to drive hundreds of miles instead of flying to my so-called final destinations. When I did get on a plane, it was only with the help of valium and Jack Daniels. 3-5 days before every flight [some to amazing places, like Corfu, where my parents generously hosted me in 1992 in a peach-colored villa in Barbati overlooking the Ionian Sea, as a gift for completing my MFA degree], I would not be able to sleep, seized by nightmares of crashing planes and internal physical stress that was so severe that I would throw up for days prior to getting on planes. I had so many talismans for flying [from special wrist-bands to lucky coins to lucky watches to lucky scarves . . . you see how this goes?], I was a walking gypsy caravan [no offense to real gypsies, to whom I might even be related on my mother’s side].

But in June 2006, leaving Cambridge by way of Heathrow Airport, knowing my relationship was over [well, it would go on for 3 more years, but still . . .], everyone in the airport looked different to me. I can’t explain it; there is actually NO rational explanation. I just looked at everyone coming and going and thought to myself: what a marvelous place an airport is. What an opportunity for losing oneself, for fleeting contact with Otherness, what a portal for . . . going somewhere, everyone here seems genuinely happy [with some exceptions] to be going somewhere, but also to be arriving somewhere. An airport, I realized, is a special site of open horizons, of open possibilities, of hopeful expectations, of starting over, of the world being scrubbed clean as you soar above the clouds. I suddenly realized: I want to go places. I want to feel more free than I have in a long time. I want to stop being so scared all the time. For the first time in my life, all of the anxieties, jealousies, stresses, self-loathings, fears, and other negative emotions often attendant upon thinking I can’t live without one other particular person in my life, without whom I am nothing, just fell away from me, like so many pieces of discarded clothing. Yes, I am still insecure about so many things [aren’t we all? isn’t that human?], and no one’s love life isn’t messy and occasionally striated by selfish anxieties and the need for this thing called “control,” but it was like, well . . . it was like being born again. I had this thought: we think so much, especially in Western-inflected intellectual contexts, about death. Everything is so post-mortem. Why don’t we think more about being born, about natality? I realized, too, on some perhaps deeper [and unconscious level] that I no longer had to confine my love to only one object, to only one person. The entire world could be my theater of love, my art gallery, and that filled me with joy. I could be what is called “happy-go-lucky” now. I wouldn’t read this until much later, but Sara Ahmed summed up for me in The Promise of Happiness something of what I was feeling that day, that

The happy-go-lucky character might seem unweighed by duty and responsibility; she might seem light as a feather. She might seem careless and carefree. But freedom from care is also freedom to care, to respond to the world, to what comes up, without defending oneself or one’s happiness against what comes up. . . . To be full of hap is to make happen. A politics of the hap is about opening up possibilities for being in other ways, of being perhaps. . . . A politics of the hap might embrace what happens, but it also works toward a world in which things can happen in alternative ways. To make hap is to make a world. [p. 222]

What comes up. What happens. This is what I live for now, I told myself, sitting in the terminal at Heathrow. If anything can happen, then I have something to live for. I was filled with excitement. I love to fly now, to rise above the clouds, to lean with the sudden turn of the plane to the right, or the left, to “get high,” to marvel at the beauty of the miniature earth and all of it inhabitants, its geographies, its different cities, its different moods. Hello, world. You look beautiful to me. Can I buy you a drink?

II. And Now Here We Are

As they say in the movies, or in novels: and then several years went by. Or, six years later. . . . So much has happened [insert here: BABEL Working Group]. I also came into contact, thanks primarily to Jeffrey’s [and now our] blog, with friends and thinkers whose reading recommendations literally changed my life. Here, I must especially personally thank Jeffrey himself, Michael O’Rourke, Noreen Giffney, Mary Kate Hurley, Karl Steel, Betsy McCormick, and Nicola Masciandaro. There are others, of course [many others, too many to number]: it’s just that, from 2006 through 2009, these persons especially helped me to re-shape so much of my thinking about what I wanted to do with my life simply by saying, “hey, read THIS” or "look at THIS." But it must be said: anyone and everyone who has ever commented at In The Middle from 2006 until now has, no lie, helped me to profoundly rewire and transform my life. If it is possible to crowd-source one’s life, and I think it is, especially one’s professional life, then I can only say, it happened to me. And here it also must be said, as Arthur Bahr said of Jeffrey when he introduced his and Lindy Elkins-Tanton's plenary session at BABEL's meeting in Boston 2 weeks ago, that Jeffrey Cohen has helped to model a new sort of scholarly life, one in which more open, processural, and even silly modes of "contact" and "dissemination" have helped so many of us to rewire our lives and work, and which have also created new opportunities even for association, affiliation, and dare I say it, employment [not in terms of positions, but for work: writing, publishing, discourse, etc.]. I also must say here that my growing friendship with Myra Seaman [begun at a chance meeting at a reception at a Southeastern Medieval Association meeting in Asheville, NC many years ago and re-ignited at a restaurant in New Orleans at yet another SEMA meeting], who never hesitated to say “okay, what do you need me to do?” to any hare-brained scheme I devised, allowed me to let folly -- quite literally -- dictate the course of my so-called “career,” whatever the hell that means. I also met Anna Klosowska, now my partner, who should likely receive some sort of lifetime achievement award for “best girlfriend ever in the history of humankind.” Her girlfriend methodology seems to be something like this, “let my beloveds be who they are, whether children, husbands, girlfriends, family, friends, or other creatures, and I will simply set my glow-lamp in that direction.” We are not often blessed with such friends, or such lovers.

But I mentioned at the outset of this letter -- for this is really a letter -- that I have been engaging for several years now in various processes of de-materialization, and while the first act of this play was quite a painful [and not entirely welcome] “letting go” of the idea that I would define my life in direct relation to whether or not one “special” other person loved me, or did not love me, the ensuing acts of de-materialization have been happily pursued by me. I paid off and/or negotiated downward, from 2006 to 2011, $58,000 worth of consumer debt. I sold my house in Saint Louis at a terrific loss, losing all of my original cash investment (substantial) and said “hahahahahaha!” to that loss. I will be moving everything in that house, which I actually have not lived in since my sabbatical 2 years ago, into some sort of storage facility this winter.

When I occasionally reflect on what is there -- for example, an urn containing the ashes of 2 cats, Tom and Huck, discovered by my daughter and I cowering behind a tombstone in a cemetery in South Carolina, and who both died suddenly and tragically at 3 years of age while I was compiling my dossier for tenure and promotion at SIUE; a framed photograph of my beloved sister from when she lived in the Central African Republic in the early 1990s; first editions of Beowulf spanning 100 years bequeathed to me by my father; a photo album recording my first trip to Paris with my previous partner and her parents in 1999; an original Maxfield Parrish print of Griselda; an old desk that I stole from a 19^th-century schoolhouse in Virginia and at which I conducted my entire PhD degree; my library of gardening books from when I worked as a landscape designer (1996-1999); a full collection of Waterford crystal glasses from my mother; a napkin dispenser I stole from Café du Monde in New Orleans [can you tell I’m a bit of a thief, yet?]; I could go on, but . . . . -- my heart actually feels sick at the thought of leaving these things behind, of not having them arranged all around me as a comforting backdrop to my work and personal life. As if someone died. And this is not to mention the gardens I designed and planted and had to leave behind, the rare plants I snagged from plant explorers like J.C. Raulston and planted around telephone poles and in various beds in different cities, etc. But I also know that letting them go lightens my baggage. Things matter, of course, but they are also . . . just things. If we have to let everything go when we die, then, can we not let them go now? What might happen as a result? Can we enlarge the ambit of our affections, beyond our narrow houses and the persons and things enclosed therein? It’s awfully hard, but I want to try. It might have something to do with being “alive,” in the fullest sense of the term. It might also have something to do with practicing generosity in ways we have not yet imagined: what are we capable of giving away? What new relationships might result? What thicknesses of experience might come rushing into our lives, whether painful or more joyful?

Speaking of which, over the past 3 years I have found myself more and more comfortable with a lifestyle in which I don’t really have a permanent home [although, of course, Anna’s house in Cincinnati is my primary residence, but I am often away traveling elsewhere, and she “leaves the light, and the glow, on,” so to speak], and in which I sleep on a lot of couches and the beds of friends’ houses and apartments, even when I am teaching at SIUE. I am embracing the practice of hotel theory, and over the past 2 years, especially, I have learned to go anywhere, whether for 2 days or 2 months, with the smallest possible suitcase and one backpack. More and more, and little by little, I am embracing this itinerant and vagabond life, one in which I never forget these lines from one of my favorite meditations by John Donne,

no man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a part of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if the manor of thy friend’s or thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

By which he meant, when you hear the church bells ringing for someone’s, maybe a stranger’s, funeral, remember: that is you. That is all of us. Or as Sean Penn’s character says in voiceover in Terence Malick’s film The Thin Red Line, after Pvt. Witt’s (played by Jim Caveziel) tragic death, “If I never meet you in this life, let me feel the lack of it.”

Let me feel the lack of it. Lack, I really believe, defines so much of our lives. As in, all the times we believe we haven’t received what we feel we have deserved, whether in love or work. Isn’t the university rife with such feelings of lack, such piercing envy of what others have, of what we don’t have? Such dissatisfaction -- much of it, I have to say, justly felt. Not just envy, but actual and sincere disappointment over all of the ways in which the so-called life of the university (or, mind) has devolved to filling out self-assessment protocols for administrators who don’t value all of our disciplines equally, working without merit pay, not having one’s research agenda supported, facing a contraction of opportunities for publishing one’s work as well as state legislatures who have perversely decided many of us are actually goofing off “in here,” dealing with new online teaching initiatives that might actually be aimed at our eventual elimination (or, at the least, the contraction of faculty), facing students who, increasingly and understandably, come to class weighed down with severe economic burdens and higher and higher levels of anomie that make it difficult for them to embrace what might be called the wayward paths of knowledge as well as this thing called a “learning community.” Not to mention the increasing numbers of people cut off from access to higher education altogether (because of its untenably escalating costs), the numbers of college graduates who can’t find jobs, and the post-graduate students who likely will find no regular foothold in the university to which they have dedicated all of their studies. How did it come to this?

It’s not this way everywhere, of course, and different colleges and even departments and programs in some places might be modeling much more successful learning communities and administrative structures, and there are many moments where we are enjoying our work and our scholarly communities (at home, away, etc.), but we might say that the larger picture of the university (here and abroad) has gotten bleaker: funding is decreasing at the exact same moment that intellectual life itself seems to be under attack. All of a sudden, especially in America, being stupid (or willfully ignorant), and also being stupendously selfish and anti-“Great Society,” is not only okay; it might even decide the fate of elections. All across America I feel as if I can actually hear the hardening of hearts, the locks being closed on the vaults of money moldering away in private accounts, and minds refusing to be open to the surprise of learning, or encountering, something “new.” The private, and privation, is winning out over the public and the open. Horizons are shrinking, and with them, our potential to be something other than what we are, to become-Other, to care better for this world and all of it inhabitants, human and nonhuman, animate and inanimate, and to embrace Auden’s dictum, from his poem “September 1, 1939,” “we must love one another or die” [and sure, we need to theorize love in really smart ways that recognize simply “loving” each other is not enough, and may even be harmful and deforming, and furthermore, love itself might have to be re-envisioned as non-selfish and non-self-serving acts of making room for alterity, and please, we can discuss this at length, and have, and will].

In the university as well, under pressures from the so-called outside [economic, ideological, cultural, etc.], we have somewhat turned against each other, or have been forced to make aggressive decisions: which disciplines are more useful, more practical, more valuable, than others? Which programs might we cut? How shall we make various humanities programs more application- and skills-based or more in conversation with other disciplines, and so on? We don’t want to be Luddites ducking every time a new technology or idea comes along that might help us to improve and re-envision in powerful ways our curricula, but at the same time, it doesn’t feel any more as if everyone within the university is working within a framework of solidarity. We need productive dissensus, but we also need a framework of solidarity, and that has been seriously eroded. We do not have solidarity.

Coming home last week after BABEL’s biennial meeting in Boston, or rather, parking myself in Saint Louis at my dear friend Valerie Vogrin’s apartment [which is also home] for a couple of days before departing again for Milwaukee and then Buffalo, I shed another skin. Similar to that moment in Heathrow airport in June 2006 when I felt as if parts of me were falling away and the world cracking open before my eyes, I knew what I would do, possessed of what Jonathan Hsy, under the sway of BABEL’s meeting in Boston but also of a recent talk by Jack Halberstam at GWU, has said must be our willingness “to think more creatively across languages, cultures, times, [to] engage in high theory and low theory, and go gaga on the university itself.” Further, Jonathan wrote, and it is worth repeating here, that we might engage new forms of

“co-disciplinarity” -- a being-together and becoming-together in, through, and among varied modes of knowledge and different cultural/social orientations towards the world. While it's easy to view this image as naively utopian, the light and dark portions of this panoramic vision . . . could suggest a range of unanticipated effects that result from radical modes of becoming-together: yes, there are the positive resonances of “co-disciplinarity” (collaboration, progress, pleasure, belonging), but we might also think about its unintended negative effects too (a broad sense of threat, vulnerability and “co-dependency,” jealously, failure, or persisting exclusions).

What I find so nice about coming-together-across-disciplines via the “co” (rather than “inter-“ or “multi-“ or even “trans-“) is the idea of simultaneity and concurrence as well the term's unintended resonances and connotations. If co-disciplinarity suggests “co-dependency,” so be it: we might be well served to think about striving among disciplines as a form of collective caregiving, attention to many modes of experience, and enabling forms of collective change. Co-disciplinarity -- to gesture towards disability studies -- might be a mode of articulation for disciplinary orientations with nonstandard bodies; as Eileen states in a Facebook status relating a dream she had post-BABEL, we might “create a new university as a work of art.. . . . developing new embodied social practices . . . and the citizenship model would be global and nomadic.”

. . . .

. . . we can also thrive and strive through the pleasures of an open confraternity: reinventing medieval models, we can reconfigure ourselves into a fully inclusive community that encourages acts of scholarly mercy, fosters earnest engagement in the world, and enacts mutual care. Whether or not a newly configured (in)corporation can ever be achieved, let us at least try, even if things don't work out. Let us boldly fail where no one has failed before.

Yes, Jonathan, yes yes yes. Let’s try that.

For me, that means resigning my “regular” job, which I did last Wednesday, with NO OTHER specific job in the offing, no specific place I might, or could land. For now. I am not saying we all have to leave the university now to start a new university, but what I am saying is that, for me, the pace of change within the university is too slow for me, I am getting older, and there is much to do, and much to see. You see, I would like to dream a new university into being [I don’t know how . . . yet], and for now, I just know that I need to spend all of my energies on running the BABEL Working Group and punctum books full-time, with or without an institutional salary. And I want to hang out more with folk like those with the Urmadic University, to see what wisdom I might soak up from others also pursuing radically new educational initiatives. You see, this actually has something to do with the confraternity Jonathan mentions in his post. Starting today, I work on behalf of this confraternity, with all of its attendant positive and negative effects, in order to foster a more collective “earnest engagement with the world” and “mutual care” and to also enlarge the chances of more persons having the their voices and thoughts heard and felt in a more radically open and global intellectual commons. We, or I, might fail. But it will be a beautiful failure, a grand love affair. And this has something to do with happiness as well: not happiness as things we get, or goals we accomplish, but happiness as activity, as that thing that never arrives that, nevertheless, we labor on behalf of. Happiness as work, the work we undertake together to leave knowledge permanently unsettled -- the work of Derrida’s university without condition, and Bill Readings’ university in ruins. To take our theories seriously. To live them. With some hap, and like the misfits in Wes Anderson's The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, we'll make a world together.

To be continued . . . .

Let's FAIL together, yeah yeah YEAH! *

by JONATHAN HSY

[Hi there, please read Karl's post!]

Post-BABEL: Co-Disciplinarity, or, We're All In This Together

Failing Together

Failure is much on my mind these days.

Not just because of THIS, but because of a recent visit to our campus from J. Jack Halberstam, author of The Queer Art of Failure (Duke UP, 2011) and the brand-spanking-new Gaga Feminism: Sex, Gender, and the End of Normal (Beacon Press, 2012). [See this video about Jack's week-long residency at the GW English department; note what Jack says about talking across disciplines and the importance of the humanities, at 2:10.]

For those of you who might not be familiar with his work, J. Jack Halberstam is unabashedly anti-disciplinary; if academic life were an animated Pixar film, the disciplines just might be ominous and threatening sharks and the kooky literary-cultural critic its queer fish-protagonist. In Jack's lecture earlier this week, Halberstam carefully distinguished "Lady Gaga" (the recording artist and performer) from the broader notion of "going gaga" -- something one could provisionally define as engaging in wild, crazy, and/or unintelligible modes of performance. This talk examined (among other things) the purported "failure" of #Occupy demonstrations and anarchist modes of collective disruption. Jack points out that such demonstrations might be seen as "failures" by some people -- in that these movements don't appear to produce concrete outcomes -- yet such manifestations aren't actually striving toward a known goal or seeking to articulate any univocal set of demands. They are social performances agitating to perpetually (re)remind us that another world is possible -- even if we don't know (or might never know!) what shape it would take.

Halberstam, in this anarchist mode of agitation, calls for the end of the English department as we know it; disciplines (as Foucault suggests) constrain knowledge and reproduce particular forms of mastery -- we need to think more creatively across languages, cultures, times, engage in high theory and low theory, and "go gaga" on the university itself.

I had the pleasure of sitting down with Jeffrey and other colleagues with Jack over dinner after his talk, and the conversation inevitably turned to "the fate of the university." Is it time to call for the end of English as a discipline? In my department we might already be "post-English" -- that is, we not only deal with the complexity of literatures in Anglophone settings across time, but more broadly speaking we engage in the study of language, culture, and theory in transnational, comparative, and global frameworks. But would we ever be so bold as to re-christen ourselves "Global Literary and Cultural Studies and Theory" (etc. etc.) ? Probably not -- but the reasons for NOT doing so are manifold: for some, this boils down to a belief there really is "something special" that we can gain by examining literature (literary history, literary theory); for others (and these things are not mutually exclusive) there's a worry that an expansive designation like that would fail to distinguish us from the policy-oriented professional schools that already seem to claim such prominence (something humanists are acutely aware of in DC). I happen to appreciate a degree of flexibility-within-structure: under the unassuming and (disarmingly) commonsense designation of "English," we are each able to each do our own thing -- from more "traditional" historicist literary work to "cutting edge" theory and cultural studies and everything in between (note the deliberate scare quotes throughout this statement by the way). There are ways, in other words, to rework disciplinarity from within, and (to some extent) do so under the radar.

Two Visions

Where might this blog entry be going? I'd like to think about where the post-BABEL conversation has gone over the past week or so -- and where it might take us -- through two different images.

Above: behold the stunning cover to the BABEL 2012 program (entire program available for download here). Featured here is an image by Lori Nix; I greatly admire this artist for using a meticulous craft of miniaturization to create evocative photographs of post-apocalyptic urban spaces.

As well-suited as this photograph is for the title of BABEL 2012 Meeting, this image ultimately struck me as way too bleak in capturing the spirit of the event itself. In my mind this gorgeously detailed mural captures my sense of what BABEL was all about [click to embiggen; see full hi-res image here].

This mural (a detail from "The Prologue and the Promise" by Robert McCall) once appeared in the Horizons pavilion in Disney World's EPCOT center (part of its "Future World" attraction, which permanently closed in 1999). One might say that McCall's utopian vision is "dated" in its style and fashions, and it is not without certain conceptual limitations. As much as this mural embraces a multiethnic society that includes non-Western cultures, its left-to-right unfolding scripts a teleological model of scientific and cultural progression -- only one "line" of history here -- and people at the "climax" of this timeline who gaze toward an unspecified source of light rising above a groovy space-age Minas Tirith comprise what appears to be a normative Western nuclear family: a blond, able-bodied social unit consisting of a man, woman, three children, and a dog.

While we might take issue with certain aspects of this mural, what I like about McCall's detailed vision here is a dynamic sense of collective striving, and its portrayal of what I might call (for the purposes of this blog posting) "co-disciplinarity" -- a being-together and becoming-together in, through, and among varied modes of knowledge and different cultural/social orientations towards the world. While it's easy to view this image as naively utopian, the light and dark portions of this panoramic vision (which you can see when you view the entire mural; again see here) could suggest a range of unanticipated effects that result from radical modes of becoming-together: yes, there are the positive resonances of "co-disciplinarity" (collaboration, progress, pleasure, belonging), but we might also think about its unintended negative effects too (a broad sense of threat, vulnerability and "co-dependency," jealously, failure, or persisting exclusions).

Co-Disciplinarity

What I find so nice about coming-together-across-disciplines via the "co-" (rather than "inter-" or "multi-" or even "trans-") is the idea of simultaneity and concurrence as well the term's unintended resonances and connotations. If co-disciplinarity suggests "co-dependency," so be it: we might be well served to think about striving among disciplines as a form of collective caregiving, attention to many modes of experience, and enabling forms of collective change. Co-disciplinarity -- to gesture towards disability studies -- might be a mode of articulation for disciplinary orientations with nonstandard bodies; as Eileen states in a Facebook status relating a dream she had post-BABEL, we might "create a new university as a work of art...developing new embodied social practices...and the citizenship model would be global and nomadic."

When I reflect upon the BABEL conference (which seems so long ago already!), I realized how wonderfully the plenaries enacted modes of co-disciplinarity, each through a different type of configuration: through Jeffrey and Lindy we witnessed an improvised and stimulating conversation between a humanist and a scientist (more HERE); the next day offered two individual presentations with themes that implicitly intertwined (Jane Bennett on sympathy; David Kaiser on collaboration and "productive failure") and BABEL concluded with two different co-presentations: one by public art instillation team sans façon (see the "Limelight" installation!) and one by Carolyn Dinshaw & Marget Long that each conjoined what we'd typically consider "academic" and "artistic" modes of thinking.

Beyond the "event" of the academic conference, we can rethink our ongoing work in the university itself and the perceived boundaries between "it" and "everything else" in any number of ways: from teaching free public courses in local communities to open-access publishing and building meaningful connections with the so-called "para-academy" and "alt-ac" worlds (and ugh, those terms really bug me as they posit the corporate university as the norm and everything else as deviance -- but I don't know what else to use at this point).

As I see it, the BABEL conference "cruises in the ruins of the university," but (to evoke another foundational medieval associational form) we can also thrive and strive through the pleasures of an open confraternity: reinventing medieval models, we can reconfigure ourselves into a fully inclusive community that encourages acts of scholarly mercy, fosters earnest engagement in the world, and enacts mutual care. Whether or not a newly configured (in)corporation can ever be achieved, let us at least try, even if things don't work out. Let us boldly fail where no one has failed before.

* In case you didn't catch the reference, that tile is an allusion to this excellent song performance (starting at 1:00).

An excellent job at DePauw University

by J J Cohen

This notice will interest many ITM readers. If you are on the job market this year ... very best of luck.

English Department. DePauw University. Medieval and Renaissance Literature.

Tenure-track position in Medieval and Renaissance literature beginning August 2013. Ph.D. required; publications preferred; rank and salary commensurate with experience. Teaching includes introductory and advanced courses in literature, writing-intensive seminar for first-year students, and other writing-intensive courses for majors and non-majors. Candidates should show evidence or promise of teaching excellence and commitment to undergraduate teaching in liberal arts setting. For information about Department, visithttp://www.depauw.edu/academics/departments-programs/english/. Pre-tenure leave and funding available for professional/curriculum development (http://www.depauw.edu/offices/academic-affairs/faculty-development/).Submit application letter and curriculum vitae to Harry Brown, Chair, English Department, Asbury Hall, DePauw University, Greencastle, IN 46135. Application review begins October 29 and continues until filled. DePauw is an Equal Employment Opportunity Employer. Women and members of underrepresented groups are encouraged to apply.

The Deep and the Personal: The Future?

A Jonathan Hsy eye view of the interview segment

by J J Cohen

(Read Karl mansplaining to you BABEL 2014 as well as what mansplaining is. Then read this.)

First, thanks to everyone who attended for the response Lindy and I received to our joint plenary at BABEL Boston, "The Deep and the Personal: The Earth, Time and Thought." We were a little nervous about the talk because -- despite having plotted its rough shape (two disciplinary specific presentations followed by an interview), despite knowing that we share some obsessions about stone, time and catastrophe, and despite having shared our slides beforehand to be startled by how much they possessed in common -- we did not prepare anything else for the talk that night. The interview segment was wholly off the cuff.

We are thinking of co-authoring a small book derived from the plenary. The problem is, the interview wasn't recorded and was the swiftest 30 minutes either of us has experienced. We know that the exchanges eliciting the most interest involved the framing of Big Questions and the rumination over beauty and science. We'd of course like to think about those more (and I believe they intersect in a rather profound way). It isn't our intention simply to recreate the plenary -- for that reason I'm kind of happy it wasn't recorded, because it was a performance of and for the conference moment -- but, if you have any to offer, we would love to gather some feedback on what questions explored that evening intrigued, as well as what additional queries a humanist and a scientist should be provoking each other with. Even if you were unable to attend, we would be very happy to hear from you, since the book would be intended for as wide an audience as possible. Because wasn't the conference conclusion that we need to collaborate as widely as possibly?

Looking forward to Babel Santa Barbara / Critique as Mansplaining

by KARL STEEL

Alsatian Santa Barbara, 1470-90, Met Museum of Art

Two unconnected thoughts:

Many folks have shared their Babel 2012 experiences. They've been brilliant. Look on this blog, of course, but also look at The Material Collective, Steve Mentz, Dan Onion's music, Chris Piuma's Facebook Note, which may or may not be public (if not, go here), and MIT, the little school that could. It's unlikely that I'll make more time to recollect (a great word) my wonderful experience than to say that no session received more intense attention from me than the one with 4 panelists and only 5 audience members. Bravo to Julie Orlemanski for her activism in the academy session, and bravo to the audience (me included) for, essentially, the 5-minute responses each of us had to offer when the presenters--in true activist style--asked us to step up and participate. I've never before kept my mind so well tethered at a conference. Bravo!

I'll look ahead to Santa Barbara, where the theme, I'm told, is beachy. I'm already anticipating putting a panel together called On the Beach, named in homage to a post-Apocalyptic novel that blew my mind when I was 14 or so and fully expecting Reagan to end us all, what with watching Threads and The Day After, and reading Revelations and Ezekiel a little too intently.

In 2012, and if I make it to 2014, I'm interested in the question of Why Bother? What's the point for the arts scholars when we're amid a massive extinction event, and perhaps the end of everything for us, or certainly the enormous increase of misery for everyone else? When we as a species have such an intense desire NOT to know (as Zizek says here), which means we're bound to continue till the thick air and rising oceans take us.

Why carry on? In literary terms, of course, the Middle Ages has a lot to offer for eschatological worriers like me, but is that enough to propel me onward, shuffling deckchairs on the Titantic--as I've clichéd elsewhere--for a better view of the doom that's going to take us all?

Look for me to share y/our doom with us in 2014.

POINT THE SECOND: CRITIQUE AS MANSPLAINING

In my Intro to Lit Class today, I explained "mansplaining." A delicate balance, not mansplaining while I did it.

The context: I decided a few days back that the Intro to Lit course shouldn't just be a march through my idiosyncratic representative works (Marie's Lais, Perceforest, Utopia, The Blazing World, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, and Songs of Innocence and Experience), but also a forced march through basic ways of reading literature in academia.

Today I wanted to talk about The Paranoid Style. Gesturing towards Sedgwick, I explained that the Paranoid Style of Critique always suspects or knows. It's sure the text is up to something. And when the text comes to us and wants to impress or thrill us or seduce us, or to confide in us, or to tell us its troubles, we let it go on for a bit, because texts do tend to go on, and then we cut it off and tell it about its Real Problems. We're the ones who know better, no matter what the text knows.

The Paranoid Critic, I explained, is basically a mansplainer.

Pause for laughter. None's coming.

Okay, who here knows what a "mansplainer" is? No hands go up.

So I mansplain explain it to them, because I guess my students are not familiar with all Internet traditions.

I do think I might accomplish a lot if I can convince my students--and me too--just to listen more patiently and lovingly and to be happy to be taught something, even from the most unexpected places. If only--and here I gesture towards Jane Bennett's BABEL plenary--I can encourage them to allow themselves to be drawn by sympathy for the texts that come our way.

(the limitations of what I'm saying are obvious, I know, since I'm just about to teach Perceforest's version of "Sleeping Beauty," which is, well, a date-rape story. Hard and perhaps foolish to be patient with that one. Still, maybe I'm onto something?)

Academic Failblog

by JONATHAN HSY

Greetings ITM readers: This special guest posting proposes a great idea for a new blog (dreamed up by Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran). Here's what Asa writes:

ACADEMIC FAILBLOG

The conclusion to my dissertation is clever. It is sharp and witty and pulls together many of the strands that run through the work, as a whole. It is also simply wrong. I bungled the etymology, and conflated a few Old English terms that I ought not have -- those macrons get me every time. Luckily, I sorted all this out before it became my first book, Maps and Monsters. Since hardly anyone (thankfully) has read the dissertation version, hardly anyone knows about my error, there. I benefited from having figured it out, but nobody else has benefited from this error.

The recent BABEL conference contained many moments of brilliance, as have been evoked by Jeffrey and Mary Kate and Eileen and Steve Mentz and Maggie Williams.

It was, though, not an unmitigated success. There were moments of failure, of stumbling and faltering, of awkwardness and outright error. And this is how it ought to be. If we are serious about embracing experimentation, we must also be willing to accept that not all experiments succeed.

In his plenary on "How the Hippies Saved Physics," David Kaiser discussed Neils Bohr, who was famously wrong in his model of the atom. While he was utterly mistaken about how atoms are composed, his errors were generative, spurring a generation of physicists and their research.

In discussing this subject, Shyama Rajendran and I came to wonder about the utility of being wrong. In the sciences, when an experiment fails, the results are often published so that the scientific community can benefit from the errors, can learn from the errors, be they algebraic or conceptual. In the humanities, we are less often demonstrably "wrong," since much of what we offer is interpretive rather than factual. You might disagree with my reading of the Donestre in the Beowulf Manuscript's Wonders of the East, but you would be hard-pressed to conclusively invalidate it. Still, we falter and fail all the time. However, many of us in the humanities are still in our 19th-century paradigm of the lonely scholar, toiling in the solitude of a garret, perhaps with a glass of absinthe at the elbow. And so our failures are solitary, which renders them of less use than they might otherwise be. When I head down a wrong-headed path, I (hopefully) learn something. But you don't, unless I share my failure with you.

Shyama and I therefore propose to create an Academic Failblog, as it were, a place for any and all of us to post our scholarly missteps for all and sundry to read and learn from. These might be related to research, teaching, job searching or any other aspect of the academic world. We have bandied about a few titles:

[Grandiloquent]: "Before the Phoenix Rises: Swimming in the Ashes of the Humanities."

[Goofy]: "Faceplanting: Tripping Over the Scholarly Cracks."

[Self-Abusing]: "Head, Meet Desk"

Ben Tilghman offers "Fumblr."

Mary Kate Hurley suggested "Scholarly Facepalms."

All are probably wrong, but perhaps one or more is productively so.

Shyama and I offer this post to accomplish three things: First, to see if there is interest in such a venture. Second, if so, to garner suggestions for titles. Finally, assuming 1 and B go well, to get the discussion rolling forward, so that when we have the site up and running, we have a stable of eager participants. What say you? Care to stumble with us?