Department Chair Stuff
A few years ago I was the Chair of Wheaton's Educational Policy Committee (Ed Pol). I had been on Ed Pol for three years, including the years in which we did our massive curriculum overhaul, and I'd been recording secretary (so I can say, honestly, that I wrote the new curriculum -- It would be more accurate to say that I typed the new curriculum, but let's not split hairs). But because I had been on Ed Pol in a challenging environment, I knew what I was getting into when I agreed to be Chair.
Ed Pol is probably the most influential committee at Wheaton, where just about everything is run by the faculty committees (Ed Pol has the President and Provost on it, which helps a lot), so I had real hope that I could accomplish a few things. First, my particular hobby horse, I wanted to create tighter links between the sciences and the humanities. Second, I wanted to make some tweaks on our "Connections" curriculum. Third, I wanted to work with the President and Provost to clarify the relationships between Wheaton's various "centers" (Filene Center for Work and Learning, Global Center, Multicultural Center, etc.) and the curriculum (ok, I'll be honest: I wanted to lay down some markers that said "Only the faculty control the curriculum. Period." But I was happy to do this under a rubric of cooperation).
Instead, I found my time and my energy highjacked by one administrator who, I have to say, was a whiny pain in the ass. We spent hours and meeting after meeting on a stupid, useless proposal. I kept finding ways to reject it, and it kept coming back and wasting more of my time.
Of my many character flaws, one of the worst is my love of saying "I told you so." As a mentor pointed out, saying "I told you so" means that you didn't do a good enough job in arguing for a position and that failure of politics or rhetoric has had negative results. But I have not learned to overcome this flaw, and so I say now "I told you so." The useless program that this administrator wasted so much of my time on has not had one single student sign up for it. So much for the lie that "students are demanding this." It was, as I noted then, a complete waste of time, predicated entirely on ego and bureaucratic empire-building. But it did managed to prevent me from accomplishing the things I wanted to accomplish as Chair of Ed Pol. Yes, I got the trains to run on time, and that's a good feeling, but the larger-scale things I thought we needed to address did not get addressed. I have a feeling I will be saying "I told you so" again not that long from now.
Last year, my first as as department Chair, similar things happened. I had a lot of plans for what I wanted to accomplish, but mostly found myself scrambling from one new crisis to another. Partly this occurred because my Chair responsibilities were dumped on me two weeks early with no transition at all. You'd think two weeks over the course of a year wouldn't matter, but it did. A lot. I am only now catching up on all the various stacked deadlines. But more than the dumping of responsibilities, the chaos of the departmental files, and a set of crises that started in June and continued pretty much uninterrupted through the year was my not knowing how to handle being department Chair. But over the year I think I learned some things, and so I pass on to you a few lessons that may be useful when you become Chair.
Not everything is crucial. This summer I decided that by June 20th, I had done enough department Chairing for that particular month. So for ten days I didn't answer emails, didn't go to meetings, etc. You know what? Nothing bad happened. When I picked up on stuff starting on July 1, everything was fine. Remarkable. This rule only applies to things without external deadlines. You may not as Chair or regular faculty member, make the staff's jobs more difficult by being late with things. That is totally unacceptable. But for reports that no one will read, make-work, and meetings that are about (*shudder*) feelings, things will wait.
It's your agenda. Within reason, of course, but if someone wants their proposal on the agenda, let them do all the other crappy department Chair work and set the agenda. I bent over backwards for people about stuff, and still they whined. Clearly, they're going to whine no matter what. So ignore the whining and set up the agenda that you think is important. (Note: anything that is below item 6 on the agenda is very unlikely to get done at that meeting. Don't put your stuff below item 6).
You don't need to take crap from people. Academics tend to be exceedingly obnoxious in their emails. I was joking about the "Friday afternoon nasty-grams" to a friend of mine who was temporarily doing administration, and he knew immediately what I was talking about. I kept track, and I got a Friday afternoon nasty-gram for seven consecutive Fridays at one point. From six different people. My solution: if any email is even the slightest bit obnoxious, it doesn't get answered, and I don't mention that I received it. Let the obnoxious person come up to you and ask "Did you get my obnoxious email?" (this has never happened).
Maintain boundaries. You were elected department Chair, not "Slave of the English Department." Don't answer email after certain hours (unless that helps you be more efficient), don't read or answer email on weekends. Protect your research time. Last year there were weeks when put in >20 hours on department Chair stuff while still maintaining my teaching and raising two young children. This was not wise. When I was Chair of Ed Pol I used to joke that we needed "Meeting Dosimeters" similar to those used for people who work with radioactive materials. When your dosimeter has gone above the safety level, you simply can't do any more work with radioactivity that month. It should be the same thing with meetings and other Chair stuff: decide how much you are going to do per week, and stick to that. To quote my friend Bryon Grigsby, who is now a Provost: "Nobody is going to die based on what happens in the English department."
I'm in an unusual situation this year with Department Chair: On midnight of July 1, 2009, I will be going on a one-year research leave. Then I will come back and be Chair for one more year. That means I'm not a lame duck this year, but there is also light at the end of the tunnel (even though The Cake is a Lie). I'm hoping that this dynamic makes for a productive and successful year. Maybe I'll even be able to follow my own rules.
Monday, August 11, 2008
Thursday, August 07, 2008
Tuesday, July 29, 2008
Anglo-Saxon Aloudis back
Sorry about the lack of recordings on Anglo-Saxon Aloud. There are a variety of reasons, none of them interesting. But I am now back on track and intend to keep posting the Paris Psalter until it is done. These postings will be in spoken (rather than sung) form. I'll begin at Psalm 69 and continue to the end, and then go back to the beginning (Psalm 50) and record those in spoken form also. I estimate, then, that the entire ASPR will be on the web by approximately the end of September.
Then I guess we start in on the prose, beginning with the Sermo Lupi.
Sorry about the lack of recordings on Anglo-Saxon Aloud. There are a variety of reasons, none of them interesting. But I am now back on track and intend to keep posting the Paris Psalter until it is done. These postings will be in spoken (rather than sung) form. I'll begin at Psalm 69 and continue to the end, and then go back to the beginning (Psalm 50) and record those in spoken form also. I estimate, then, that the entire ASPR will be on the web by approximately the end of September.
Then I guess we start in on the prose, beginning with the Sermo Lupi.
Thursday, July 17, 2008
Change to Anglo-Saxon Aloud
I've become unhappy with how the recordings of my singing the Psalms have been coming out. The fact is, I don't have the right kind of voice for singing these, they don't sound good, and it takes an enormous amount of time to edit them into the form they are in, which still isn't that good.
So I am going to change course.
I will post the rest of the Paris Psalter (Psalms 68 through 150) as spoken rather than sung recordings. Then I will go back and re-post Psalms 50-67 as spoken recordings.
That will give us the entire ASPR recorded and available on the web (I will put together a "Complete ASPR on CD," but it will be expensive, unfortunately). I'll then probably add a few poems that aren't in the ASPR, such as "The Grave" and "Instructions for Christians."
Then, I will simultaneously work to record the Psalter with one of my students who is a good singer for this type of music, and add some prose (starting with the Sermo Lupi, and maybe doing a "Daily Reading from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" project).
At the same time, I have begun work on a CD, to sell, of poems in Old English, my own translations in Modern English, and a brief talk on each poem. I hope to have this done by the Long-Expected Party event in Kentucky in September (though that may be too ambitious). Right now this is a "greatest hits of Anglo-Saxon poetry plus other poems that Drout likes" project: Dream of the Rood, Wanderer, Seafarer, Wife's Lament, Husband's Message, Fortunes of Men, Gifts of Men, Maxims, some riddles, Maldon, Brunanburh, Cædmon's Hymn ... I'll see how it works out; I'd like this one to be just one disk.
I've become unhappy with how the recordings of my singing the Psalms have been coming out. The fact is, I don't have the right kind of voice for singing these, they don't sound good, and it takes an enormous amount of time to edit them into the form they are in, which still isn't that good.
So I am going to change course.
I will post the rest of the Paris Psalter (Psalms 68 through 150) as spoken rather than sung recordings. Then I will go back and re-post Psalms 50-67 as spoken recordings.
That will give us the entire ASPR recorded and available on the web (I will put together a "Complete ASPR on CD," but it will be expensive, unfortunately). I'll then probably add a few poems that aren't in the ASPR, such as "The Grave" and "Instructions for Christians."
Then, I will simultaneously work to record the Psalter with one of my students who is a good singer for this type of music, and add some prose (starting with the Sermo Lupi, and maybe doing a "Daily Reading from the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle" project).
At the same time, I have begun work on a CD, to sell, of poems in Old English, my own translations in Modern English, and a brief talk on each poem. I hope to have this done by the Long-Expected Party event in Kentucky in September (though that may be too ambitious). Right now this is a "greatest hits of Anglo-Saxon poetry plus other poems that Drout likes" project: Dream of the Rood, Wanderer, Seafarer, Wife's Lament, Husband's Message, Fortunes of Men, Gifts of Men, Maxims, some riddles, Maldon, Brunanburh, Cædmon's Hymn ... I'll see how it works out; I'd like this one to be just one disk.
Wednesday, July 09, 2008
Grammar the Drout Way
My latest course from Recorded Books' Modern Scholars Series is my grammar book, which I recorded back in the spring. I'm very happy with the way it came out: the people at Recorded Books did a pretty amazing job both with the audio and with designing a nice course book. If you want to improve your grammar and laugh while you're doing it, you might enjoy this book. And you'll get to hear the whole "That's no panda, that's a $%$#%-ing racoon!" joke as well as my railing about the transcendent stupidity of the split infinitive convention.
(Also, the red panda for the course mascot was chosen long before Kung Foo Panda came out, and my Red Panda is better--and a direct challenge to the black-and-white pandas of Lynne Truss and David Crystal).
Lecture 1 The Red Panda and the Drout Way: A Sensible Approach to Grammar
Lecture 2 What Is Grammar?
Lecture 3 Why It Is the Way It Is: The Short History of the English Language
Lecture 4 G-H-O-T-I Spells Fish
Lecture 5 Word Classes
Lecture 6 Pronouns and the Noun System
Lecture 7 The Verb System I
Lecture 8 The Verb System II: Infinitives, Participles, Gerunds
Lecture 9 The Verb System III: Truly Irregular Verbs
Lecture 10 Subjects and Predicates and Objects, Oh, My!
Lecture 11 Transformations
Lecture 12 Phrases and Clauses, Word Choices and Pauses
Lecture 13 Punctuation: Pause and Effect
Lecture 14 Fight! Fight! Fight! For English (for English?)
My latest course from Recorded Books' Modern Scholars Series is my grammar book, which I recorded back in the spring. I'm very happy with the way it came out: the people at Recorded Books did a pretty amazing job both with the audio and with designing a nice course book. If you want to improve your grammar and laugh while you're doing it, you might enjoy this book. And you'll get to hear the whole "That's no panda, that's a $%$#%-ing racoon!" joke as well as my railing about the transcendent stupidity of the split infinitive convention.
(Also, the red panda for the course mascot was chosen long before Kung Foo Panda came out, and my Red Panda is better--and a direct challenge to the black-and-white pandas of Lynne Truss and David Crystal).
Lecture 1 The Red Panda and the Drout Way: A Sensible Approach to Grammar
Lecture 2 What Is Grammar?
Lecture 3 Why It Is the Way It Is: The Short History of the English Language
Lecture 4 G-H-O-T-I Spells Fish
Lecture 5 Word Classes
Lecture 6 Pronouns and the Noun System
Lecture 7 The Verb System I
Lecture 8 The Verb System II: Infinitives, Participles, Gerunds
Lecture 9 The Verb System III: Truly Irregular Verbs
Lecture 10 Subjects and Predicates and Objects, Oh, My!
Lecture 11 Transformations
Lecture 12 Phrases and Clauses, Word Choices and Pauses
Lecture 13 Punctuation: Pause and Effect
Lecture 14 Fight! Fight! Fight! For English (for English?)
Finally out from under the avalanche--for now
I'm not sure if I've ever had to work at such an unrelenting pace for so long. It definitely goes back to January, and I think actually it's been a whole year, since the middle of last June when I became department Chair. I have at points had the subsequent twenty-five days planned out to about the hour so I knew how much work I would have to do, and when I would get it done (I mostly kept those hellish schedules). But on July 4 I sent in the course book for the Modern Scholar course on poetry, Monday I sent in my review of Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (very short version: read this book!), and today I sent in my SASLC entry on "Maxims, Aphorisms" (short version: there aren't any that aren't also, in more places, labeled something else, so we should delete the category and just stick with "proverbs"). Today my gratis copies of the previous Modern Scholar Course (A Way with Words III: Understanding Grammar for Powerful Communication," or, as the cartoon on the cover says "Grammar the Drout Way") arrived at my door, and copies of Tolkien Studies volume 5 should be there soon.
I still have stuff to do this summer: write the two papers that have come out of our computer analysis of Old English project; draft the first chapter of the new Tolkien book for my agent; get Anglo-Saxon Aloud finished; write and record the new Old English Poetry CD I'm doing (Modern English lectures to be interspersed with the poetry); design the Logic and Language course; organize the department files, which haven't been organized in years and years; get going on the Philology textbook and the column, with Scott Kleinman, on etymology. But, for the first time since last June, I am not behind in anything. Weird feeling.
So I am going fishing.
I'm not sure if I've ever had to work at such an unrelenting pace for so long. It definitely goes back to January, and I think actually it's been a whole year, since the middle of last June when I became department Chair. I have at points had the subsequent twenty-five days planned out to about the hour so I knew how much work I would have to do, and when I would get it done (I mostly kept those hellish schedules). But on July 4 I sent in the course book for the Modern Scholar course on poetry, Monday I sent in my review of Alaric Hall's Elves in Anglo-Saxon England (very short version: read this book!), and today I sent in my SASLC entry on "Maxims, Aphorisms" (short version: there aren't any that aren't also, in more places, labeled something else, so we should delete the category and just stick with "proverbs"). Today my gratis copies of the previous Modern Scholar Course (A Way with Words III: Understanding Grammar for Powerful Communication," or, as the cartoon on the cover says "Grammar the Drout Way") arrived at my door, and copies of Tolkien Studies volume 5 should be there soon.
I still have stuff to do this summer: write the two papers that have come out of our computer analysis of Old English project; draft the first chapter of the new Tolkien book for my agent; get Anglo-Saxon Aloud finished; write and record the new Old English Poetry CD I'm doing (Modern English lectures to be interspersed with the poetry); design the Logic and Language course; organize the department files, which haven't been organized in years and years; get going on the Philology textbook and the column, with Scott Kleinman, on etymology. But, for the first time since last June, I am not behind in anything. Weird feeling.
So I am going fishing.
Metrical Apothegms in Cambridge University Library Ii.1.33, ff 224v-227v
(so no one else has to flibbert around like I just did...)
In Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, he mentions a "collection of metrical apothegms, moral and religious" (citing Kemble for this quote) in alliterative verse, arranged in about 20 paragraphs, in the manuscript Cambridge UL, Ii.1.33 (this is Ker's number 18 art. 44). These apothegms do not appear in volume V of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, as you might expect. They were edited, however, by James Rosier: 'Instructions for Christians,' Anglia 82 (1964): 4-22 ; 'Addenda to "Instructions for Christians",' Anglia 84 (1966): 74. The text is Dictionary of Old English Cameron number A44 (A44_Instr_T01950).
So now if you need this text, which begins "Syle ece god æhta †inra..." you can find it and won't waste forty-five flipping back and forth through the ASPR muttering "I just don't know how I missed this," before thinking to run the opening line in the DOE corpus.
(so no one else has to flibbert around like I just did...)
In Ker's Catalogue of Manuscripts Containing Anglo-Saxon, he mentions a "collection of metrical apothegms, moral and religious" (citing Kemble for this quote) in alliterative verse, arranged in about 20 paragraphs, in the manuscript Cambridge UL, Ii.1.33 (this is Ker's number 18 art. 44). These apothegms do not appear in volume V of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, as you might expect. They were edited, however, by James Rosier: 'Instructions for Christians,' Anglia 82 (1964): 4-22 ; 'Addenda to "Instructions for Christians",' Anglia 84 (1966): 74. The text is Dictionary of Old English Cameron number A44 (A44_Instr_T01950).
So now if you need this text, which begins "Syle ece god æhta †inra..." you can find it and won't waste forty-five flipping back and forth through the ASPR muttering "I just don't know how I missed this," before thinking to run the opening line in the DOE corpus.
Sunday, June 29, 2008
At some point the summer will start...
Ah, the lazy academic summer, when professors loll in hammocks, reading and dozing... what is that coming, exactly?
It has been a very busy month of June, but, finally, a few things are managing to get finished.
On the technical side, I was able to revise and cut down "Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection," which will serve in part as the kernel of the paper I'm giving in Bergen, Norway, in November.
And, we've had pretty exciting results on our NEH startup grant project, "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond.". Soon I will post a link to the project website. The exciting results I'll need to keep under my hat for a while, until abstracts are finished, etc. The best part about the project has been learning the system that the genomics group came up with. The way meetings and the exchange of ideas work has been really illuminating. I've set up and run research groups before, but they've never worked this well.
On the more popular side of things, I was in NY last week and recorded another college course on CD for Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series. This one is A Way with Words IV: Poetry. It was great fun to record, though also a bit of a challenge, since I haven't taught, say, Pope, or Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning since, well, never. I ended up mixing in formal aspects of the poetry with a historical approach (so I started meters with Chaucer, did heroic couplets with Pope, free verse with Whitman, etc.). Here's the historical part of the outline, in case you are interested:
1 What is poetry
2 The Roots in Oral Tradition
3 Anglo-Saxon (alliteration)
4 Middle English (meters)
5Renaissance (more meters)
6 Late Renaissance
7 Eighteenth Century
8 Early Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge)
9 Later Romantics (Byron, Shelley and Keats)
10 Victorians (Browning, Rosetti, Tennyson)
11 America – Whitman and Dickinson
12 Modernism (early and high modernism)
13 Later Modernism
14 Poetry Now
Of course I have to write the book part of the course by the end of the week (I have all the lecture notes, but it is still writing up a 100+ page book by Friday), and then the Elves review and the Maxims piece have to be done. Oh, and the abstracts for the first two papers coming out of the computer research. But there is finally a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I'll get to go fishing once before the semester starts up again.
Ah, the lazy academic summer, when professors loll in hammocks, reading and dozing... what is that coming, exactly?
It has been a very busy month of June, but, finally, a few things are managing to get finished.
On the technical side, I was able to revise and cut down "Survival of the Most Pleasing: A Meme-Based Approach to Aesthetic Selection," which will serve in part as the kernel of the paper I'm giving in Bergen, Norway, in November.
And, we've had pretty exciting results on our NEH startup grant project, "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond.". Soon I will post a link to the project website. The exciting results I'll need to keep under my hat for a while, until abstracts are finished, etc. The best part about the project has been learning the system that the genomics group came up with. The way meetings and the exchange of ideas work has been really illuminating. I've set up and run research groups before, but they've never worked this well.
On the more popular side of things, I was in NY last week and recorded another college course on CD for Recorded Books' Modern Scholar series. This one is A Way with Words IV: Poetry. It was great fun to record, though also a bit of a challenge, since I haven't taught, say, Pope, or Wallace Stevens, or Elizabeth Barrett Browning since, well, never. I ended up mixing in formal aspects of the poetry with a historical approach (so I started meters with Chaucer, did heroic couplets with Pope, free verse with Whitman, etc.). Here's the historical part of the outline, in case you are interested:
1 What is poetry
2 The Roots in Oral Tradition
3 Anglo-Saxon (alliteration)
4 Middle English (meters)
5Renaissance (more meters)
6 Late Renaissance
7 Eighteenth Century
8 Early Romantics (Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge)
9 Later Romantics (Byron, Shelley and Keats)
10 Victorians (Browning, Rosetti, Tennyson)
11 America – Whitman and Dickinson
12 Modernism (early and high modernism)
13 Later Modernism
14 Poetry Now
Of course I have to write the book part of the course by the end of the week (I have all the lecture notes, but it is still writing up a 100+ page book by Friday), and then the Elves review and the Maxims piece have to be done. Oh, and the abstracts for the first two papers coming out of the computer research. But there is finally a tiny chink of light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe I'll get to go fishing once before the semester starts up again.
Thursday, June 12, 2008
Completely Snowed Under
(Perhaps not the best metaphor on this amazing June day).
A few people have emailed me to find out if I'm alive and why I haven't posted since Kalamazoo. Anglo-Saxon Aloud has also gone on hiatus, and I haven't been too good about answering emails either. Sorry. Yes, I am alive, I think.
I've been learning what life is like for department chairs at the end of the year: it is like, not fun. The number of pages of evaluations is just stunning, as is all the other administrative work (i.e., spend down any leftover budget so that it doesn't get cut) and the number of meetings. Add to this a number of college-wide issues that need to be dealt with and are incredibly time-consuming. And we won't even mention that the stupid NBA has the Celtics playoff games running until midnight.
Simultaneously, I have been working frantically on our NEH grant for the Old English / Computer Science project. The scientists have really developed an excellent research dynamic (which I'll write about soon), and they like to work fast, so it has been a lot of reading, exchange of ideas, "journal club," etc. I hope to unveil some research tools by the end of the summer that will allow Anglo-Saxonists to do all kinds of pattern searching within the Old English corpus. You can never tell how things will finish up, of course, but right now it looks like the demo grant is on track and that we will have accomplished a bunch more than we set out to do. This is entirely due to my collaborators in Computer Science and Math and the amazing students who have been working like dogs to write software, build websites, etc.
Also, I had one major deadline on Friday, which I just barely met, for what I think is a pretty substantial essay on how to build a meme-based approach to aesthetics. Now I have to finish the last few end-of-year evaluations, write a book review, and finish my entry on Maxims, Aphorisms for SASLAC (it has been just about finished for months now).
But first, I have to write an entire college course on CD for Recorded Books in ten days. I did this over Spring Break for the grammar course, and it almost killed me, and now I'm doing it again for this poetry course.
By the first week in July I will either be finished or have dropped dead.
(Perhaps not the best metaphor on this amazing June day).
A few people have emailed me to find out if I'm alive and why I haven't posted since Kalamazoo. Anglo-Saxon Aloud has also gone on hiatus, and I haven't been too good about answering emails either. Sorry. Yes, I am alive, I think.
I've been learning what life is like for department chairs at the end of the year: it is like, not fun. The number of pages of evaluations is just stunning, as is all the other administrative work (i.e., spend down any leftover budget so that it doesn't get cut) and the number of meetings. Add to this a number of college-wide issues that need to be dealt with and are incredibly time-consuming. And we won't even mention that the stupid NBA has the Celtics playoff games running until midnight.
Simultaneously, I have been working frantically on our NEH grant for the Old English / Computer Science project. The scientists have really developed an excellent research dynamic (which I'll write about soon), and they like to work fast, so it has been a lot of reading, exchange of ideas, "journal club," etc. I hope to unveil some research tools by the end of the summer that will allow Anglo-Saxonists to do all kinds of pattern searching within the Old English corpus. You can never tell how things will finish up, of course, but right now it looks like the demo grant is on track and that we will have accomplished a bunch more than we set out to do. This is entirely due to my collaborators in Computer Science and Math and the amazing students who have been working like dogs to write software, build websites, etc.
Also, I had one major deadline on Friday, which I just barely met, for what I think is a pretty substantial essay on how to build a meme-based approach to aesthetics. Now I have to finish the last few end-of-year evaluations, write a book review, and finish my entry on Maxims, Aphorisms for SASLAC (it has been just about finished for months now).
But first, I have to write an entire college course on CD for Recorded Books in ten days. I did this over Spring Break for the grammar course, and it almost killed me, and now I'm doing it again for this poetry course.
By the first week in July I will either be finished or have dropped dead.
Friday, May 09, 2008
Kalamazoo 2008
Off to my 14th Kalamazoo (14 out of the last 15; my wife though going when we had a one-month-old baby in the house might have been a poor decision). Due to many thesis defenses (students did well) and just a honkin big pile of meetings, I am only coming out on Friday, flying to Midway, leaving Chicago around noon, and driving in to Kzoo, maybe in time to hear papers or even catch Wine Hour (look for me at Phil Kaveny's book display or in the Arizona display).
Off to my 14th Kalamazoo (14 out of the last 15; my wife though going when we had a one-month-old baby in the house might have been a poor decision). Due to many thesis defenses (students did well) and just a honkin big pile of meetings, I am only coming out on Friday, flying to Midway, leaving Chicago around noon, and driving in to Kzoo, maybe in time to hear papers or even catch Wine Hour (look for me at Phil Kaveny's book display or in the Arizona display).
Tuesday, May 06, 2008
Video at Into The West: Fantasy Festival in Salt Lake City
Two weeks ago I was honored to be invited to give a keynote address and a talk on Beowulf at Fantasy Festival, an event organized by the non-profit charity Into the West. My talk was about finding ways to judge Tolkien's and Rowling's work, coming up with fair criteria by which we might rate them in comparison with each other and with other works of literature (I believe I snuck Joyce in a lot, as well as a fair bit of Hemingway and Toni Morrison). iSCIFI.tv was there and did a quick interview about the relationship between Science Fiction and Fantasy. It was fun, and now it's on YouTube: at this link (I will work on embedding it, but piles of papers call).
There is also some commentary on the event, and pictures, by writer Paul Genesse, the author of The Golden Cord, which I am bringing with me to read on the plane to Kalamazoo when I'm not grading papers. Paul has a good blog entry on the conference here, with pictures.
I am going to be at Kalamazoo, but doing only medieval things, not Tolkien things. Then there will be trips to NYC (Recording another Recorded Books course, this time on poetry) and, in November, to Bergen, Norway, to talk about my technical meme research, but only one other Tolkien-related event, the Long Expected Party at the Shaker Village in Kentucky, which has the most beautifully done website I've ever seen (designer, would you re-do my web sites? Pretty, pretty please?).
Two weeks ago I was honored to be invited to give a keynote address and a talk on Beowulf at Fantasy Festival, an event organized by the non-profit charity Into the West. My talk was about finding ways to judge Tolkien's and Rowling's work, coming up with fair criteria by which we might rate them in comparison with each other and with other works of literature (I believe I snuck Joyce in a lot, as well as a fair bit of Hemingway and Toni Morrison). iSCIFI.tv was there and did a quick interview about the relationship between Science Fiction and Fantasy. It was fun, and now it's on YouTube: at this link (I will work on embedding it, but piles of papers call).
There is also some commentary on the event, and pictures, by writer Paul Genesse, the author of The Golden Cord, which I am bringing with me to read on the plane to Kalamazoo when I'm not grading papers. Paul has a good blog entry on the conference here, with pictures.
I am going to be at Kalamazoo, but doing only medieval things, not Tolkien things. Then there will be trips to NYC (Recording another Recorded Books course, this time on poetry) and, in November, to Bergen, Norway, to talk about my technical meme research, but only one other Tolkien-related event, the Long Expected Party at the Shaker Village in Kentucky, which has the most beautifully done website I've ever seen (designer, would you re-do my web sites? Pretty, pretty please?).
Friday, May 02, 2008
Just barely made it
I have always been the tiniest bit disappointed that, because it took me a while to realize what I wanted to do with my life, I didn't manage to get my Ph.D. by 25 (that was the age at which the Professor on Gilligan's Island got his). I know that's a silly thing, but it's true.
So, back when I realized I was going to miss the Ph.D.-by-25 cutoff by a couple of years, I set myself a new goal: Full Professor before 40.
Today the Faculty Promotions Committee voted to promote me to full Professor. So I made my goal with exactly 12 hours to spare. I turn 40 tomorrow.
I'm really grateful that my department so strongly supported my coming up a year early, and I want to thank the colleagues, external reviewers, and students who wrote letters supporting my case, and even more the senior colleagues who showed me how to be a good teacher and scholar (Bev, Paula, Sue, Sheila, Dick). Most of all I thank Sam Coale, who has been my mentor at Wheaton for ten years and was my advocate at the hearing today. I've been blessed with great mentors: Peggy Knapp in undergraduate, John Miles Foley and Martin Camargo for my second M.A., and Allen Frantzen for my Ph.D. Sam took over where Allen finished (though he and my earlier mentors really never left off), and I can't express how valuable all his teaching and support has been. Having a great mentor makes all the difference. I hope someday I will live up to Sam's example. I hope readers of this post realize how important mentoring is and continue to do the hard work of mentoring (the work is especially hard when you have to mentor a pain-in-the-butt like me).
And now let me tell a quick story about Sam. During my first semester at Wheaton, Sam was awarded his gold watch for 30 years of service (and they spelled his name wrong on it). Sam was showing me the watch, and said something like, "I can't believe it's been thirty years since I started here. 1968"
I looked at him and said, "1968 was the year I was born."
"F*** you, Mike," said Sam.
That was the moment when I really started to believe that I would be able to fit in at Wheaton.
Now I'm just waiting to be taught the secret handshake and given the keys to the special full-Professor's bathroom and the liquor cabinet...
I have always been the tiniest bit disappointed that, because it took me a while to realize what I wanted to do with my life, I didn't manage to get my Ph.D. by 25 (that was the age at which the Professor on Gilligan's Island got his). I know that's a silly thing, but it's true.
So, back when I realized I was going to miss the Ph.D.-by-25 cutoff by a couple of years, I set myself a new goal: Full Professor before 40.
Today the Faculty Promotions Committee voted to promote me to full Professor. So I made my goal with exactly 12 hours to spare. I turn 40 tomorrow.
I'm really grateful that my department so strongly supported my coming up a year early, and I want to thank the colleagues, external reviewers, and students who wrote letters supporting my case, and even more the senior colleagues who showed me how to be a good teacher and scholar (Bev, Paula, Sue, Sheila, Dick). Most of all I thank Sam Coale, who has been my mentor at Wheaton for ten years and was my advocate at the hearing today. I've been blessed with great mentors: Peggy Knapp in undergraduate, John Miles Foley and Martin Camargo for my second M.A., and Allen Frantzen for my Ph.D. Sam took over where Allen finished (though he and my earlier mentors really never left off), and I can't express how valuable all his teaching and support has been. Having a great mentor makes all the difference. I hope someday I will live up to Sam's example. I hope readers of this post realize how important mentoring is and continue to do the hard work of mentoring (the work is especially hard when you have to mentor a pain-in-the-butt like me).
And now let me tell a quick story about Sam. During my first semester at Wheaton, Sam was awarded his gold watch for 30 years of service (and they spelled his name wrong on it). Sam was showing me the watch, and said something like, "I can't believe it's been thirty years since I started here. 1968"
I looked at him and said, "1968 was the year I was born."
"F*** you, Mike," said Sam.
That was the moment when I really started to believe that I would be able to fit in at Wheaton.
Now I'm just waiting to be taught the secret handshake and given the keys to the special full-Professor's bathroom and the liquor cabinet...
Tuesday, April 29, 2008
Evaluation of Some of My Work
As I said, Tompkins is incredibly generous about the work, so I thought I would give a pointer to it so other readers can see what they think.
*Dante reference. Alexander the Great is forced to stand in boiling blood so that only his eyebrows show. Next year's teaching includes the Tolkien class, Chaucer, and the medieval lit class that includes Dante and Egil's Saga. Should be a great year. Also a new extension to the Math/Science Fiction class, Logic and Language (done as an unpaid overload: what was I thinking? But it will be fun and my co-professor and I will probably get a book out of it).
I have now reached the level of Alexander the Great*, except instead of boiling blood, it's work, with not much of an end in sight.
But I wanted to point you to an incredibly generous evaluation of some of my work by Steve Tompkins at The Cimmerian. It's on the piece that I wrote for Allan Turner's The Silmarillion: 30 Years On,
and which I thought at the time was far too personal for scholarship (it also includes my first published drawing, a linoleum block carving I made of Angband when I was nine years old). As I said, Tompkins is incredibly generous about the work, so I thought I would give a pointer to it so other readers can see what they think.
*Dante reference. Alexander the Great is forced to stand in boiling blood so that only his eyebrows show. Next year's teaching includes the Tolkien class, Chaucer, and the medieval lit class that includes Dante and Egil's Saga. Should be a great year. Also a new extension to the Math/Science Fiction class, Logic and Language (done as an unpaid overload: what was I thinking? But it will be fun and my co-professor and I will probably get a book out of it).
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
Never a dull moment
So last night I look out the window and there is a wild-haired, older man walking around our street, seeming to search along the ground. So far, no problem: we live on a small circle and people sometimes come up to ride bikes or walk dogs or just walk. But then I notice that the man was carrying something that looked like a gun. I looked again.
He was carrying a crossbow.
I got more nervous when I noticed him scratching his neck with it. It didn't appear to be loaded, but weapon safety was obviously not a big deal. I was going to go out to talk with him, but my wife vetoed that idea, saying that a man with a weapon should be spoken to by the police.
Well, I guess we used a magic word when we told them that there was a man on our street with a crossbow. Many police arrived (though by then the man was gone). I guess he was found, admitted to having the crossbow, and explained that he was shooting squirrels and that the bolt went across our fence and into our yard or onto our street. I still haven't found it. The man, who is somewhat mentally disabled, was willing to give up the crossbow to the police. No hard feelings, no charges, etc. I have no problem with anyone eliminating squirrels, either, though maybe a nice have-a-heart trap would be better than firing crossbow bolts through the fence. Never a dull moment around here.
...a flippin' crossbow...
Thursday, April 17, 2008
The Paris Psalter on Anglo-Saxon Aloud
But before the actual post, a couple of things. First, my apologies for neglecting the blog. A never-ending series of minor illnesses have swept through the family. As those of you with young children know, that's not surprising, but this year, for whatever reason, we have had the very weird situation where we've all been sick in series rather than parallel. So just as one person gets well, the next gets sick, and by the time the stupid virus has worked its way through the whole family, we're all set for a new one to start in.
But today, although I was home with a kid with a fever, my own voice finally cleared up enough to get back to Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I recorded, edited and posted the Psalm 51 from the Paris Psalter. I still haven't entirely achieved true chant style, but at least the psalm is actually sung (though those of you who listen to my singing might think it might have been better had it not been sung). There are about 100 psalms in the Paris Psalter, so I will be trying very hard to post more than one per day so that I can actually finish this project, but the medium is absolutely unforgiving, so it takes a long time to get a psalm recorded properly.
I wonder what my colleagues and students will be thinking when they walk down the hallway tomorrow morning and hear singing (and cursing, when I mess up) from behind my office door.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
Update on the 16 four-year-olds and the live goat
My son's fourth birthday party was this past Saturday. We had used two rules of thumb for planning:
1) we have had good weather every birthday of his life thus far.
2) when you invite the whole class to a party, less than half can come.
We were wrong on both counts. The weather was terrible, and every kid we invited came. That meant that we had to have the party inside, and it was going to be crowded.
Because the Barn Babies were coming.
So, come 12 noon on Saturday we had sixteen children (actually more, because some people brought siblings without telling us that they would), a pig, ten rabbits, five chickens, two cats, two puppies, a rooster, and a diapered goat were in my basement.
And it was great.
The Barn Babies people put down tarps and then playpens to contain the pig, goat and puppies. The goat was wearing a diaper (really). The kids could take turns climbing into the pens with the larger animals or holding the small animals. And the genius of Barn Babies, which they should patent, was that each animal to be held was wrapped up in a baby blanket. That meant that the rabbits, chickens, kittens, rooster (really), didn't squirm or kick. There were some great moments when I looked around to see every kid sitting and gently petting an animal.
So Mitchell had a good party. Then the next day we went to see the PawSox play. I have been at football games in January where I was less cold than we were for that baseball game, and I wore a ski mask and winter gloves. But we all got our pictures taken with the two Red Sox World Series trophies, so it was worth it.
(Medieval content will return when I get over my latest miserable illness and get the proofs for Tolkien Studies volume 5 to the printer and catch up on grading).
P.S.: Recorded a new Recorded Books course last week, on Grammar (and the producers loved it -- go figure).
Saturday, April 05, 2008
Wednesday, March 05, 2008
I Like the NEH a Lot More Today
Today I just learned that with two colleagues I am a recipient of an NEH startup grant for "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond." The project has been led by my friend and collaborator (in our linked classes "Anglo-Saxon Literature" and "Computing for Poets"), Prof. of Computer Science Mark LeBlanc, and we are working with Prof. of Mathematics Mike Kahn. Our idea is to take some techniques that have been very successful for the study of bioinformatics and apply them to the Old English corpus (I've pasted in the short description of the project below). Key idea: we don't subordinate traditional humanistic goals to science, and we don't limit the science to making tools. We respect both and get them to work together.
I now have a really fun summer ahead of me, and a new goal: I will now have done a collaborative project with four different faculty in Math/Computer Science (with one more project on tap) and now think it's not unreasonable to think that, before I retire, I could work with all of them. Mathematicians and Computer Scientists are just as much fun to hang out with as Biologists (and I have the ongoing Sheep DNA project there -- getting some minor results), and these projects give me an excuse to lurk around the science center. Fun! (and my kids will be thrilled that they get to run around there this summer).
Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond
Abstract
Entire new worlds of scholarship and research are emerging from a synergy of technology, problem solving, and statistical analysis. This interdisciplinary proposal joins researchers in Old English, statistics, and computer science to show by example how the development and application of computational stylistic tools across an entire corpus enables the large scale exploration and discovery of patterns and trends that go undetected by the unassisted eye and brain, yet generate novel sets of hypotheses for subsequent scholarship both digital (through further pattern recognition and analysis) and traditionally humanistic.
From one direction this proposal approaches texts in the same way as genomics (the analysis of DNA texts): we seek information-rich patterns in a long string of letters. From the other direction we come from literary studies, looking for meaning, influence, symbolism, reference, source material, and interpretation. We then meet in the middle, providing a way for literary scholars, computer scientists, and statisticians to work collaboratively to solve complex problems, problems that are so new and so difficult that we really need all the tools we can get. We posit this interdisciplinary tack as a significant contribution to Humanities scholarship: a myriad of new questions can be expected by embracing the tools and techniques that require computational and statistical expertise and linking these approaches with some of the traditional methods of humanistic research.
In particular, such an approach is needed to augment the large and ongoing Dictionary of Old English project (the Dictionary of Old English corpus, the DOE itself, and its new link with the OED). We aim to go beyond traditional lexicography—the painstaking method of looking, individually, at every single word in the corpus—by using statistical models based on relative word frequencies across all texts in a corpus. We can then, forexample, generate data that can shed new light on questions such as: Is there a Winchester vocabulary, in slightly different form, in other texts than those previous identified? Is there a “poetic language” statistically different from prose Old English in all poems or only some poems? Are the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, given their age and manuscript context, fundamentally different from those of the Exeter Book, Vercelli Book or Junius Manuscript? Was there a Southeastern ‘koine’ spread by Dunstan? Do writers of similar documents exhibit similar patterns on the
very small level as well as in specific vocabulary?
Today I just learned that with two colleagues I am a recipient of an NEH startup grant for "Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond." The project has been led by my friend and collaborator (in our linked classes "Anglo-Saxon Literature" and "Computing for Poets"), Prof. of Computer Science Mark LeBlanc, and we are working with Prof. of Mathematics Mike Kahn. Our idea is to take some techniques that have been very successful for the study of bioinformatics and apply them to the Old English corpus (I've pasted in the short description of the project below). Key idea: we don't subordinate traditional humanistic goals to science, and we don't limit the science to making tools. We respect both and get them to work together.
I now have a really fun summer ahead of me, and a new goal: I will now have done a collaborative project with four different faculty in Math/Computer Science (with one more project on tap) and now think it's not unreasonable to think that, before I retire, I could work with all of them. Mathematicians and Computer Scientists are just as much fun to hang out with as Biologists (and I have the ongoing Sheep DNA project there -- getting some minor results), and these projects give me an excuse to lurk around the science center. Fun! (and my kids will be thrilled that they get to run around there this summer).
Pattern Recognition through Computational Stylistics: Old English and Beyond
Abstract
Entire new worlds of scholarship and research are emerging from a synergy of technology, problem solving, and statistical analysis. This interdisciplinary proposal joins researchers in Old English, statistics, and computer science to show by example how the development and application of computational stylistic tools across an entire corpus enables the large scale exploration and discovery of patterns and trends that go undetected by the unassisted eye and brain, yet generate novel sets of hypotheses for subsequent scholarship both digital (through further pattern recognition and analysis) and traditionally humanistic.
From one direction this proposal approaches texts in the same way as genomics (the analysis of DNA texts): we seek information-rich patterns in a long string of letters. From the other direction we come from literary studies, looking for meaning, influence, symbolism, reference, source material, and interpretation. We then meet in the middle, providing a way for literary scholars, computer scientists, and statisticians to work collaboratively to solve complex problems, problems that are so new and so difficult that we really need all the tools we can get. We posit this interdisciplinary tack as a significant contribution to Humanities scholarship: a myriad of new questions can be expected by embracing the tools and techniques that require computational and statistical expertise and linking these approaches with some of the traditional methods of humanistic research.
In particular, such an approach is needed to augment the large and ongoing Dictionary of Old English project (the Dictionary of Old English corpus, the DOE itself, and its new link with the OED). We aim to go beyond traditional lexicography—the painstaking method of looking, individually, at every single word in the corpus—by using statistical models based on relative word frequencies across all texts in a corpus. We can then, forexample, generate data that can shed new light on questions such as: Is there a Winchester vocabulary, in slightly different form, in other texts than those previous identified? Is there a “poetic language” statistically different from prose Old English in all poems or only some poems? Are the poems of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, given their age and manuscript context, fundamentally different from those of the Exeter Book, Vercelli Book or Junius Manuscript? Was there a Southeastern ‘koine’ spread by Dunstan? Do writers of similar documents exhibit similar patterns on the
very small level as well as in specific vocabulary?
Anticipated outcomes include scalable, open-source software to facilitate the computation and organization of word frequencies and other patterns and empirical measures of success when using various statistical analyses on the condensed data. An additional and essential outcome from our perspective is how this research leads to and impacts the development of interdisciplinary course materials for our “connected” (interdisciplinary) undergraduate courses in English, Statistics, and Computer Science in order that computational analyses become a more inviting option for faculty and advanced research students in the Humanities.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
Crabby Post on Hating teh Internets
Anglo-Saxon Aloud is going to be hiatus for a couple of days as I rehab my voice. Yes, the dread upper respiratory infection that has been patiently marching through my family finally got me--we managed to cover 2.5 weeks with at least one person sick with this stupid germ but never two people sick. Fun. So I've got to get over my laryngitis before I get back to recording the Meters of Boethius.
And because I'm sick, I'm crabby. Also because a stupid internet-based phenomenon is in the process of ruining ANSAX-NET (the Anglo-Saxonists' listerv) for the second time (and it really hasn't recovered from the first time). People who don't participate in ANSAX-NET will have no idea of this, but there is a small and completely logorrheaic group of individuals who have what I can only describe as crackpot theories about the secret messages hidden in Beowulf and other poems through various means involving either scribal practice or numerology. No, I am not making this up, and it caused the decay of ANSAX-NET from an incredible resource in which many of the giants of the field engaged in really interesting discussions of matters Anglo-Saxon to today's relatively simple mechanism for making announcements.
Around the MLA that was held in Chicago when I was a grad student there, so probably around 1995 or 1996, I was at the Anglo-Saxonist open bar talking to several giants of the field. I mentioned ANSAX. "I decided to un-subscribe," whispered one extremely senior professor at a glamorous midwestern university. "Oh, me too," said someone from the southwestern part of the US. It turned out that half of the senior Anglo-Saxonists were no longer subscribed to ANSAX net. I was quite upset, because I had seen ANSAX as an incredibly valuable resource. Now it turned out that a lot of the people who knew most were not contributing. Why?
Letter counting for secret messages in Beowulf. Seriously. One Oxford-based scholar wrote (and I not exaggerating) hundreds and hundreds of messages purporting to demonstrate that if you counted up the words and letters in Beowulf, imposed ratios, did calculations, fixed all the errors that the scribe wrote, etc., you would find the key messages of the poem and the author's hidden name. When many of us tried the calculations and found that they would work just as well for a flight manual, the yellow pages, or a book about cabbage, simply more logorrhea about the letter- and word-counting poured forth.
Other people got into the act. There was the idea that the spacing between letters held clues to deep meaning. Others suggested that by carefully measuring the heights of all the letters, you got a sonogram that told you how to pronounce them. Every time someone pointed out a flaw in the argument, you got back page after page of explanation that never addressed the central questions of:
a) if you fish in the pond of random numbers, you will catch something
b) the argument is circular if you are trying to show these patterns but then emend due to "incompetent scribe" every time something doesn't fit your argument.
I have decided that the "counters" are the Anglo-Saxon studies equivalent of 911 "Truthers," "Thimersol causes autism" cranks, and "Ron Pauls says the Federal Reserve is ruining our lives" people. Similarities: simple questions never get simple answers but instead generate massive core dumps of material. Circular arguments are not rejected for being circular and the circularity is never addressed. Stacks of links to other websites or projects rather than citations of published material are used for support. There is some kind of "establishment" that is keeping the truth from getting out there. Serious scholars who have worked on, say, paleography, have no idea what they've been looking at. No piece of evidence, no argument will actually change these peoples' minds. And worst of all, they never stop talking and soon every sane person who is interested in other topics backs slowly away and unsubscribes.
It drives me crazy that this has happened to Anglo-Saxon once and is now in the process of happening again. Even if any of the counting theories were right (I've actually looked into them; I'm sure they are wrong), they never have anything but the most banal things to say: the central message of a poem is that "God is great" or "Christ redeemed us" or some utterly tedious and predictable Christian commonplace. Let me try to express better how I feel about this:
There are thousands of things to discuss and debate about Beowulf (I just spent a week of classes doing this and having amazing fun with it). The numbers of letters, words, spaces, heights or lines or even numbers of lines are the most boring things possible to talk about! This latest flurry started just as an interesting discussion about orality and literacy was getting going and when Adam Brooke Davis had made a really remarkable post that I thought showed exactly how meme theory could help show that the oral/literate debate can be resolved. Then boom! we're back to how many letters, words, spaces are in various lines. Argh!!!
I am not going to unsubscribe from ANSAX (yet), but I hope that we can talk about, well, interesting things (and there are so many of them) and not this stuff, yet again.
P.S.: A colleague I really respect, who knows more real philology than I'll ever learn, makes some provocative arguments about the overall number of lines in the poem and the certain things that happen at key points. I am still not at all convinced by the numerology. I think instead that what we have is a critic intuitively sensing key moments in the structure (the narratology) of the poem) and then finding a set of numbers that matches that intuition. Yvette Kisor's brilliant article in ASE, where she shows how many, many scholars, working from very different premises, have found the same structural patterns in the poem, shows how some pattern might be there (and almost certainly is), but I think that the numerology used to describe it is not convincing, because if things had been shifted by any number of lines, a smart enough critic (and the person working on this is certainly smart enough) could still get some kind of numerology to work. It's just--to use English lit jargon--an overdetermined system.
Anglo-Saxon Aloud is going to be hiatus for a couple of days as I rehab my voice. Yes, the dread upper respiratory infection that has been patiently marching through my family finally got me--we managed to cover 2.5 weeks with at least one person sick with this stupid germ but never two people sick. Fun. So I've got to get over my laryngitis before I get back to recording the Meters of Boethius.
And because I'm sick, I'm crabby. Also because a stupid internet-based phenomenon is in the process of ruining ANSAX-NET (the Anglo-Saxonists' listerv) for the second time (and it really hasn't recovered from the first time). People who don't participate in ANSAX-NET will have no idea of this, but there is a small and completely logorrheaic group of individuals who have what I can only describe as crackpot theories about the secret messages hidden in Beowulf and other poems through various means involving either scribal practice or numerology. No, I am not making this up, and it caused the decay of ANSAX-NET from an incredible resource in which many of the giants of the field engaged in really interesting discussions of matters Anglo-Saxon to today's relatively simple mechanism for making announcements.
Around the MLA that was held in Chicago when I was a grad student there, so probably around 1995 or 1996, I was at the Anglo-Saxonist open bar talking to several giants of the field. I mentioned ANSAX. "I decided to un-subscribe," whispered one extremely senior professor at a glamorous midwestern university. "Oh, me too," said someone from the southwestern part of the US. It turned out that half of the senior Anglo-Saxonists were no longer subscribed to ANSAX net. I was quite upset, because I had seen ANSAX as an incredibly valuable resource. Now it turned out that a lot of the people who knew most were not contributing. Why?
Letter counting for secret messages in Beowulf. Seriously. One Oxford-based scholar wrote (and I not exaggerating) hundreds and hundreds of messages purporting to demonstrate that if you counted up the words and letters in Beowulf, imposed ratios, did calculations, fixed all the errors that the scribe wrote, etc., you would find the key messages of the poem and the author's hidden name. When many of us tried the calculations and found that they would work just as well for a flight manual, the yellow pages, or a book about cabbage, simply more logorrhea about the letter- and word-counting poured forth.
Other people got into the act. There was the idea that the spacing between letters held clues to deep meaning. Others suggested that by carefully measuring the heights of all the letters, you got a sonogram that told you how to pronounce them. Every time someone pointed out a flaw in the argument, you got back page after page of explanation that never addressed the central questions of:
a) if you fish in the pond of random numbers, you will catch something
b) the argument is circular if you are trying to show these patterns but then emend due to "incompetent scribe" every time something doesn't fit your argument.
I have decided that the "counters" are the Anglo-Saxon studies equivalent of 911 "Truthers," "Thimersol causes autism" cranks, and "Ron Pauls says the Federal Reserve is ruining our lives" people. Similarities: simple questions never get simple answers but instead generate massive core dumps of material. Circular arguments are not rejected for being circular and the circularity is never addressed. Stacks of links to other websites or projects rather than citations of published material are used for support. There is some kind of "establishment" that is keeping the truth from getting out there. Serious scholars who have worked on, say, paleography, have no idea what they've been looking at. No piece of evidence, no argument will actually change these peoples' minds. And worst of all, they never stop talking and soon every sane person who is interested in other topics backs slowly away and unsubscribes.
It drives me crazy that this has happened to Anglo-Saxon once and is now in the process of happening again. Even if any of the counting theories were right (I've actually looked into them; I'm sure they are wrong), they never have anything but the most banal things to say: the central message of a poem is that "God is great" or "Christ redeemed us" or some utterly tedious and predictable Christian commonplace. Let me try to express better how I feel about this:
There are thousands of things to discuss and debate about Beowulf (I just spent a week of classes doing this and having amazing fun with it). The numbers of letters, words, spaces, heights or lines or even numbers of lines are the most boring things possible to talk about! This latest flurry started just as an interesting discussion about orality and literacy was getting going and when Adam Brooke Davis had made a really remarkable post that I thought showed exactly how meme theory could help show that the oral/literate debate can be resolved. Then boom! we're back to how many letters, words, spaces are in various lines. Argh!!!
I am not going to unsubscribe from ANSAX (yet), but I hope that we can talk about, well, interesting things (and there are so many of them) and not this stuff, yet again.
P.S.: A colleague I really respect, who knows more real philology than I'll ever learn, makes some provocative arguments about the overall number of lines in the poem and the certain things that happen at key points. I am still not at all convinced by the numerology. I think instead that what we have is a critic intuitively sensing key moments in the structure (the narratology) of the poem) and then finding a set of numbers that matches that intuition. Yvette Kisor's brilliant article in ASE, where she shows how many, many scholars, working from very different premises, have found the same structural patterns in the poem, shows how some pattern might be there (and almost certainly is), but I think that the numerology used to describe it is not convincing, because if things had been shifted by any number of lines, a smart enough critic (and the person working on this is certainly smart enough) could still get some kind of numerology to work. It's just--to use English lit jargon--an overdetermined system.
Friday, February 22, 2008
Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems finished at Anglo-Saxon Aloud
It seems like forever ago when I started recording volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, but that volume is now finished and every single poem, fragment, charm, etc. is now recorded, edited and posted at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I hope you enjoy them.
The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems is a somewhat misleading name, because although the volume contains much that is "minor" in the regular sense of the word ("A Prayer" or "Latin-English Proverbs," for example), some of the most "major" and well-studied poems in the corpus are in this volume, including The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh and Cædmon's Hymn. But I guess that the title Anglo-Saxon Poems that Aren't in one of the Major Poetic Codices wouldn't have fit on the spine of the book.
Now I go back to volume V of the ASPR The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius and start working through that volume. And since I'm violating chronological order anyway, I'm going to do the Boethius first, because that gives me more time to work up to trying to sing the Psalms. I think Boethius will take three weeks and the Psalter will take five (if I only do one psalm per day), so that would have Anglo-Saxon Aloud finishing up right around Kalamazoo time (which was why I was going to give a paper on it, but, oops. I will be chairing a session on something totally unrelated).
What will be next, I'm not sure. On the one hand, I've kind of gotten used to spending time recording and editing. It's good, fun, somewhat mindless work and gave me the excuse to read through the entire ASPR carefully (twice, actually: once when I recorded each poem and then again while editing). I've got more research questions to answer and new ideas about the poetry than I'll ever get to address. But it's also been tiring at times, so I don't know how much I'll continue. The prose sections of the Charms were harder to record than the poetry (less obvious breath points, for one thing), so I would hesitate to jump into a large prose project. But I'll almost certainly do the Sermo Lupi, and perhaps I'll start doing daily readings from the Chronicle.
It seems like forever ago when I started recording volume VI of the Anglo-Saxon Poetic Records, The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems, but that volume is now finished and every single poem, fragment, charm, etc. is now recorded, edited and posted at Anglo-Saxon Aloud. I hope you enjoy them.
The Anglo-Saxon Minor Poems is a somewhat misleading name, because although the volume contains much that is "minor" in the regular sense of the word ("A Prayer" or "Latin-English Proverbs," for example), some of the most "major" and well-studied poems in the corpus are in this volume, including The Battle of Maldon, The Battle of Brunanburh and Cædmon's Hymn. But I guess that the title Anglo-Saxon Poems that Aren't in one of the Major Poetic Codices wouldn't have fit on the spine of the book.
Now I go back to volume V of the ASPR The Paris Psalter and the Meters of Boethius and start working through that volume. And since I'm violating chronological order anyway, I'm going to do the Boethius first, because that gives me more time to work up to trying to sing the Psalms. I think Boethius will take three weeks and the Psalter will take five (if I only do one psalm per day), so that would have Anglo-Saxon Aloud finishing up right around Kalamazoo time (which was why I was going to give a paper on it, but, oops. I will be chairing a session on something totally unrelated).
What will be next, I'm not sure. On the one hand, I've kind of gotten used to spending time recording and editing. It's good, fun, somewhat mindless work and gave me the excuse to read through the entire ASPR carefully (twice, actually: once when I recorded each poem and then again while editing). I've got more research questions to answer and new ideas about the poetry than I'll ever get to address. But it's also been tiring at times, so I don't know how much I'll continue. The prose sections of the Charms were harder to record than the poetry (less obvious breath points, for one thing), so I would hesitate to jump into a large prose project. But I'll almost certainly do the Sermo Lupi, and perhaps I'll start doing daily readings from the Chronicle.
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