All Hail the Power of the Crazy Crawler

After school today I took my daughter fishing in the oldest artificial waterway in North America. She hooked and landed a 14-inch bass and a 12-inch pickerel within fifteen minutes of each other. And it was a big, fat bass, too. I could barely get both hands around it.

"My heart is still racing" she said when we let the bass go.

We were using the Crazy Crawler, a lure that has always worked wonders for me. You get big fish with a Crazy Crawler, and it often works when nothing else will. But the best part is that both of these fish actually leaped out of the water to attack the lure. It was very exciting.

And great to see my little girl in her pink L. L. Bean fishing vest holding a massive bass and grinning from ear to ear.

I see many fishing trips in the future...

Ave, Heddon Lures. Ave, Crazy Crawler.

Beowulf Aloud

Back at the beginning of the summer, after recording a new course, A Way With Words: Writing, Rhetoric and the Art of Persuasion for Recorded Books, I went into the studio for a marathon session and recorded all of Beowulf in Old English.

I tried to read it dramatically without go so far as to adopt multiple voices, and I even sang Finnsburg. It was fun, but also one of the hardest things I have ever done. As exhausting as recording fourteen 35-minute lectures for a course is, reading all of Beowulf aloud and keeping up the energy level was even more work.

Then Matt Cavnar, the genius recording engineer and director who has done all of my courses for Recorded Books, edited the piece, taking out all of my stumbles and making me sound much better than I actually am.

Recorded Books will be publishing the Beowulf reading later this year, bundled in a special offer for one of their programs that hasn't been completely decided yet, but I retained the rights to sell it on its own, and I'm working right now to put together some kind of inexpensive and interesting package. I did a short lecture on Beowulf as well that goes before the reading itself, and the entire thing takes up three CDs.

So, you ask, where is he going with this?

I'd like to solicit suggestions for a few things:

a). What key information would you think would be useful to have on the liner notes (remembering that I have basically two small pages to work with)?

b). Do any of my readers know about podcasts and how to go about making them? I wouldn't mind podcasting some of the reading, but I have no knowledge in this area and pointers would be nice.

c). What other things do you think would be possible and interesting to do with Beowulf Aloud? How could it be useful to you in teaching or study?

Oral Tradition Goes Online

On September 15, the journal Oral Tradition, published out of the Center for Studies in Oral Tradition at the University of Missouri-Columbia by the man who taught me Old English, John Miles Foley, went on line. OT is now twenty years old and has published some of the most interesting work in literary studies (and in anthropology of culture for that matter) in those two decades. I want to encourage you all to investigate the journal, because it publishes first-rate scholarship and it will now be freely available to all users of the web, whether you have an academic affiliation or a subscription or anything. A great democratization of information. We should, I think, support this adventure.

I also have a small ideological point to make. Here at Wheaton we are undergoing a process of "Infusion" as we seek to integrate work (academic, artistic and personal) on race, ethnicity, gender and class throughout the curriculum. I am not entirely on board with the way this project is progressing (though I was one of the people who wrote the langauge that allows the process to be directed by individual professors within disciplines, which is very, very important), but I do think that some good can come out of it if people shift their focus towards the things Oral Tradition studies.

So if you do want to bring under-studied cultures and approaches into the classroom, I can think of no better way to do it than through Oral Traditional Studies. You've got it all: a greater multiplicity of cultures than just about any discipline engages with (maybe the anthropolgists are equal, but they don't deal very much with ancient or extinct culture); the highest culture from these cultures, including masterpieces such as the Iliad, Odyssey and Kalevala as well as some of the most popular culture (and sometimes it isn't a contradiction). And you're working with both "insider" and "outsider" researchers. You're pushing new boundaries in theory and practice. You can get money to do field work, to go off to New Guinea if you want to and collect stories.

I am working up an OT course either for 2007-08 or 08-09 as the culmination of my Prentice Professorship, and I am loving doing the research. Just to give you a taste, here is the table of contents for the last issue of OT:

The How of Literature
by Ruth Finnegan

The Culture of Play: Kabuki and the Production of Texts
by Andrew Gerstle

Performance, Visuality, and Textuality: The Case of Japanese Poetry
by Haruo Shirane

From Oral Performance to Paper-Text to Cyber-Edition
by John Miles Foley

Text and Performance in Africa
by Karen Barber

On the Concept of “Definitive Text” in Somali Poetry
by Martin Orwin

My Mother Has a Television, Does Yours? Transformation and Secularization in an Ewe Funeral Drum Tradition
by James Burns

The Many Shapes of Medieval Chinese Plays: How Texts Are Transformed to Meet the Needs of Actors, Spectators, Censors, and Readers
by Wilt Idema

Textual Representations of the Sixteenth-Century Chinese Drama Yuzan ji (The Jade Hairpin)
by Andrew Lo

Now there is probably no person reading this who has the skill-set (the language skill-set alone, even) to work in all of these traditions. But OT brings this material together, and edits so stringently, as I know from experience, that the articles are readable and enlightening even if they come from outside your tradition.

So I strongly encourage all of you to check out Oral Tradition on line and read some of the many fine papers. And then next month you can check back and read a dreadful paper that somehow snuck through an otherwise totally rigorous process (maybe they felt sorry for me), my little piece "“A Meme-Based Approach to Oral Traditional Theory”; if you would download hundreds of copies and send them to your elderly realives, that would be great, too.

J. R. R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin

HarperCollins is going to be publishing Tolkien's Children of Húrin as a stand-alone volume next year. According to the press release (which I haven't been able to find on line), the text was created by Christopher Tolkien's painstaking editing together of Tolkien's many drafts. The book will include a new map by Christopher Tolkien and a jacket and color paintings by Alan Lee.
Quote from Christopher Tolkien:

It has seemed to me for a long time that there was a good case for presenting my father's long version of the legend of the Children of Húrin as an independent work, between its own covers, with a minimum of editorial presence, and above all in continuous narrative without gaps or interruptions, if this could be done without distortion or invention, despite the unfinished state in which he left some parts of it.

It is not clear from the press release (and I have absolutely no insider knowledge) that there will be anything that was previously unreleased in the book.

Various different versions of the tale of the children of Húrin have previously been published:

1977 in The Silmarillion as "Of Túrin Turambar" (prose).
1980 in Unfinished Tales as "Narn i Hîn Húrin" (prose).
1984 in The Book of Lost Tales, Part II as "Turambar and the Foalókë," and "The Nauglafring," (prose).
1985 in The Lays of Beleriand as "The Lay of the Children of Húrin" (verse in alliterative long-lines).
1994 in The War of the Jewels as "The Wanderings of Húrin" (prose).

From the press release, it seems as if these variants will be stitched into a coherent whole in the same the way that Christopher Tolkien brought together disparate texts to create the 1977 The Silmarillion

So, The Children of Húrin will not be a "new" book, but I think its release as a stand-alone volume is a very good thing for a variety of reasons.

First, the material is powerful and evocative and goes back to the very beginning of Tolkien's writings about Middle-earth, as it was originally inspired by Tolkien's reading of the Kullervo cycle in the Finnish Kalevala. The Túrin story is the element of Tolkien's legendarium that is the most "novelistic" in form, with more dialogue and detailed action than the more sweeping, historical style of the published Silmarillion. But it has been very difficult for most general readers to get a handle on the story because of the way Christopher Tolkien had to edit and publish the texts: they were part of scholarly editions, designed in large part to provide a documentary record of J.R.R. Tolkien's work. As such, they are very difficult simply to read for pleasure, the way we read The Lord of the Rings; Christopher Tolkien had to present texts, then explain variants, gaps and contradictions. So reading any of the post-Unfinished Tales pieces is a very difficult exercise for people who do not have a lot of experience with these sorts of editions (i.e., nearly anyone who is not a medievalist).

Second, by compiling everything into a whole, Christopher Tolkien is doing exactly what his father eventually envisioned for The Silmarillion (at least as best we can tell from the published record). It was not supposed to be a "novel" like The Lord of the Rings but was instead the volumes of Translations from the Elvish by B.B. created by Bilbo in Rivendell from his translations of various books of lore. Thus the Silmarillion (the legendarium, as distinct from The Silmarillion, the 1977 text), was conceived of as a tapestry woven from materials taken from various other texts, some poetry, some prose, some fragmentary, some contradictory. Although possibly frustrating to general readers who want to get to the story, the incredibly complex layering that is generated by such an approach is what gives all of Tolkien's work the impression of immense depth (the "vast backcloths" to use Tolkien's own description). Gergely Nagy, in what I think is the best article written on Tolkien in the past decade, talks about the "Great Chain of Reading" that links together various authors, compiliers, historians and translators (Heorrenda, Pengolad, Bilbo, Frodo and Sam, etc.). The Children of Húrin should give us another example of the final effects of that Great Chain.

Perhaps as a result of the enormously unfair criticism leveled at him after the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion, Christopher Tolkien went more in a scholarly direction rather than continuing to be a synthesist and compiler. All of his work in The History of Middle-earth is incredibly valuable, but it was not the only possible approach. If The Children of Húrin volume is more like The Silmarillion, then it will be a return to something that Christopher Tolkien himself does very, very well and is perfectly in keeping with the underlying conception of the legendarium.

So even though in one sense I have 'already read' the new book, I am definitely looking forward to its release in April 2007 and will certainly enjoy reading it straight through in a way I have not previously been able to do with the Túrin materials.

Advances in Herp Care
or, odd things that I happen to know

Big Arm Woman has a highly amusing post about taking her son to a reptile show. Money quote:

There are basically two kinds of people at reptile and exotic animal shows: middle-class soccer moms with little boys who love snakes and overly tattooed goth/biker types. This makes for an intriguing mixer situation.

On the nose. Back when I was the pet store manager, it was great fun to be part of a really intense discussion about salt water fish with the huge biker guy who ran a local strip club, an orthodontist who was a fanatic about live corals, and a skinny little thirteen-year-old boy who obviously spent all his allowance on fish. These were three of my best customers: they always came into the store just before closing on Wednesday nights to see what I would unpack from the new shipments of fish. They were also fast friends, though (I'm guessing) only inside the store. Love of certain kinds of animals, and fanaticism, breeds strange interactions and friendships.

I'm writing this post because BAW say that "Hublet still won't let me buy a corn snake," and I was in the same situation for a long, long with with my lovely spouse, who finally relented after two years of pleading by my daughter.

We got my daughter (who is almost exactly a year older than her son) a corn snake for her birthday this year from Kathy Love's Cornutopia. It came FedEx.

"Pipsy" is a sweet little animal and my daughter loves her. I think handling and taking care of a corn snake is great for a little kid, because the animal itself seems to generate a lot of focused attention and gentleness on the part of the kid. Corn snakes are always on the move, so the child has to keep passing the snake from hand to hand.

But another good reason to get a child a corn snake is that "herp care" is a lot easier than it was even back in the late 80s and early 90s.

For example, nobody feeds live mice anymore, so you don't have to deal with a) live mice, b) child liking the "food" more than the snake, c) the food injuring the snake (which happened a lot). Now you get "pinkies" or "fuzzies" frozen in little plastic packages at Petco. Just thaw them out in some warm water and you're set. And the snakes you buy now have never seen live food, so they eat with no problems.

Also, some smart person figured out that if you give the snake a second, "feeding cage" (a shoebox or a tupperware container) it won't get nippy when it's in its regular tank (which is what happened to OJ, my snake -- he was named long before 1994). The snake now wants to get picked up, because it might be being taken to the food, and it doesn't think your hand is the food.

So that's what I know about herp care. Maybe in a future post I will talk about the nitrogen cycle in fishtanks and why changing the water if it gets cloudy in the first few days is a very bad idea. Or I can go back to health bulletins and possibly medieval studies at some point. We'll see.

Folk Etymology: Gomer (Medical Slang)

Medpundit prints the word "Gomer," a form of medical slang, and follows many other writers on the internet as interpreting it as an acronym for "Get Out of My Emergency Room" and meaning "an unwanted emergency room patient."

Because I just finished two days in NYC recording a new Recorded Books college course on CD The English Language, I am particularly attuned to interesting linguistic phenomena, and this is one of them. So let me talk a little about Folk Etymology.

A Folk Etymology is the creation of a false, but appealing, etymology for a word. The Wikipedia entry is actually decent and give a group of good examples. In general, the acronym theory of etymology is usually wrong, particularly for words from before the twentieth century. I always have to spend a bit of time each semester disabusing students of the idea that "rule of thumb" comes from the thickness of a rod with which a man was allowed to beat his wife (Mary Wollstonecroft is partly to blame for this error), and there are many more.

However, "Gomer" is a twentieth-century word, so it could come from an acronym. But I am as close to certain as I can be that the actual etymology of "Gomer" in medical slang is not an acronym, but from the character "Gomer Pyle." And I have some print citation to help.

In the early 1970s, "Gomer" was medical slang for a stroke-patient, head-trauma victim, or someone afflicted by senile dementia. Individually wrapped, plastic emesis basins were called "Gomer bowls" (and, expensive as they were, they were regularly used to eat Chinese take-out, since plates and utensils were forbidden, for sanitation reasons, in the on-call rooms). Although I heard the word "Gomer" used very often, I never heard the "Get Out of My Emergency Room" acronym, and if it had been invented, I am sure I would have heard it: med students, interns and residents loved that kind of thing.

How do I know? My dad was an intern and a resident at New York Hospital from 1973 to 1976 and we lived in Pason House, across the street from the hospital. That was back when internship and residency was ever more hellish than it is now, with my dad getting the wonderful "every day and every other night" schedule at least once per month, and often more. I remember how great the world seemed when he was on "every third night" (think about that, complaining English professors: you worked every day and every other or every third night for a couple of years).

One of my dad's best friends was a guy named Neil Ravin. I remember Neil as someone who liked to sit and chat with me when he came over to visit, and he was very tall and thin, so his "airplane rides" (when he would swing me around in circles) were scary and fun.

Years later, in 1981, Ravin published M.D., in my opinion one of the very best "becoming a doctor" books out there, though it is of course somewhat dated now (the very first AIDS patients were beginning to show up in New York Hospital in the mid- 1970s, but no one recognized the disease yet). Supposedly some of the incidents and actions attributed to the "Iggy Bart" character were thing that my dad did or had happen to him (though the name "Iggy Bart" comes from the real name of the guy who was my pediatric allergist).

M.D. uses the word "Gomer" and "Gomer bowl" very frequently, but not once does it give the acronymic etymology for the word. And, if you read the book, you will see that this is the sort of thing that Ravin would have almost certainly used. For comparison, one of the locations in the book is based on Sloan Kettering, the hospital for cancer treatment in New York (which Ravin renames "Whipple"); Ravin tells the dark joke, "Where's the only place where the Mets always win? Answer: Whipple." ("Mets" meaning metastic cancer cells).

It is, of course, possible that "Gomer" became a piece of medical slang from the acronym and that the name, but not the acronym, travelled to New York Hospital in the early 1970s, but this is highly unlikely.

I think that it is far more likely that "Gomer" is based on the character of Gomer Pyle and was only later folk etymologized to mean "Get Out of My Emergency Room."

By the way, despite the success of M. D., several medical mysteries such as Informed Consent and Seven North and the tear-jerker Mere Mortals, Ravin never left medicine and is apparently a practicing endocrinologist specializing in thyroid disorders in Maryland. When I discovered that, I was not at all surprised: although its kind of silly to think that you get a "read" on people you know when you are eight years old, it just seemed fitting with my old impression of Neil, who was one of my dad's friend who I was always thrilled to see when he came over to visit.

[P.S.: This post is notice that I am finally no longer sick. Perhaps illness is why I was thinking of medicine. It turned out that I had pneumonia, and then my two-year-old son came down with it. Five days of 104.5 fever (and then a hives reaction to amoxicillin) was pretty scary. God bless quick chest x-rays and zithromax. We're all better now, just in time for the semester to start tomorrow].

Still (Barely) Alive

First of all, my thanks to everyone who emailed get-well wishes. I really, really appreciated it even if I was not able to reply.

As we discovered when my two-year-old son got really, scarily sick, pneumonia visited our house twice, explaing why I could not get well from what I thought was a summer cold. Add in a bad reaction to amoxicillin for my little one, and it was a very difficult and frankly frightening few weeks in the Drout household. But now, thanks to the miracles of modern antibiotics that don't cause horrible allegic reactions and hives, everyone is well, and we even managed to celebrate my daughter's birthday without major disruption (and she is thrilled about her new pet cornsnake and her fly rod--is she a dream child, or what?).

On the other hand, I am nearly three weeks behind on things going into a semester that starts next week, so life is pretty stressful. I may actually be late on one or two deadlines, but I intend to be caught up by the end of the first week in September. If you are waiting for a reply, and haven't heard from me by then, please feel free to noodge.

As Soon As I Can

To anyone who is waiting on an email from me:

I've been really, really sick, sicker than I've been in quite a while, and before that I was unplugged from the internet for a couple of days, so I don't think I've really answered any email since around August 4.

On Friday I got out of the house and dragged myself down to Wheaton. This turned out to be a mistake.

I'm hopeful I'll be better soon and will be able to catch up, but at this point, and after the setback caused by Friday, I am goign to force myself to rest until I am better.

Sorry about the delay in communications.

Science Fiction Course on CD

My college course on CD, From Here to Infinity: An Exploration of Science Fiction is now available from Recorded Books. I am very pleased with the way this course came out (and I hope you will be, too). Writing and recording it also gave me a good excuse to read a lot of SF in chronological order, something I had never done for my varous 'theme' courses in SF.

We finished recording How We Do Things With Words: Rhetoric, Writing and the Arts of Persuasion, and I'm now in the process of writing a History of the English Language course. Both of those should be available in September. My fantasy literature course, Rings, Swords and Monsters should now also be available in a Barnes and Noble near you (though they have re-titled it Of Sorcerers and Men for their Portable Professor Series).

Here's the cover for the SF course. There's also a very cool Cthulhu illustration for the section on Lovecraft.

Should I Become an English Prof?

Frank at Bourgeois Nerd had decided not to go to grad school for an English Ph.D. based on his readings of academic blogs. In this post he wonders if this was a wise decision and if academic blogs are an accurate reflection of life in grad school and afterwards. These are very good questions, and because Frank is a Jersey guy, he deserves some attempt at answers, despite my insane deadlines right now.

Frank has actually received some good comments from other Profs and grad students, so I am not going to repeat all of that (just read the comments), but I want to add a few things.

First, graduate students live for complaining, so you should always discount their miserable whining by 60% (mine also). I'm not saying that grad school doesn't often feel miserable, but that is also part of being that age and having to deal with the difficulties of having no money, no prestige, etc. In retrospect, a lot of grad school is a lot of fun, but that depends in great part on the program you are in and the students around you. Professors also like to gripe, and it seems to be bad form ever to admit in public that you are fabulously happy and fulfilled in your job and your life. There's a lot of the "I wear black on the outside because that's how I feel on the inside" Emo pose in both grad school and in the professoriate.

That said, grad school with a bad advisor or terrible colleagues or a rotten department can really suck and be a true waste of time and resources. The job market is terrible and isn't getting much better for tenure-track jobs, and there can be a lot of politics in academia, which can unfairly cause tenure denial. I think you need to be very, very cautious about additional student loans for graduate school since (experience talking here) the cost runs up very quickly while the earning power afterwards isn't so great, and if you drop out just before the Ph.D., the financial cost can be enormous.

But...

Being an English professor is a great job. You get to study what you want, read and write all the time, and, as part of your job talk about interesting, intellectual things with other people who are also interested in those things. The flexibility is very valuable, the pay isn't as bad as it could be, and the security of a tenured job can't be beat. So it's a good prize. And most importantly, you get to teach.

Which is exactly why lots of people want a professor job. Which means that getting it takes some doing.

My best friend from college is a successful Broadway actress who does concerts with Marvin Hamlish, etc. Things are going very well for her now, but when we were both getting started we used to commiserate about how hard we were working with few results to show. She passed along an actors' saying:

Aspiring Actor: I have no life.

Slightly More Established Actor: Oh! You wanted a life? I didn't realize that. I thought you wanted a career. If you wanted a life, you should have said so.

The point is that to get the prize of being a 'working actor' or a tenure-track assistant professor, a lot of sacrifice is required at the early stages. Almost all of the people who dropped out of my graduate programs were those who took graduate school as an extension of college rather than as a job that was going to require at least 40 hours per week of hard work (and usually need more than that).

As for politics, yes they are there in academia, but not demonstrably more so than in a lot of other professions. I've been lucky in that the politics at Wheaton are manageable, and if you're a good teacher, pretty much everything else is discounted, which is very helpful. But I also want to challenge the bromide that academic politics are so vicious because so little is at stake. Hogwash. Academic politics can be so vicious because it's all about status, which is the issue around which all the most vicious political battles occur in any profession. So it's not so much about being particularly political, or being a particularly good suck-up (though I've seen that work for a few people in the short run), but about producing some kind of output that can be measured and can stand up on its own (i.e., publications, syllabi, etc.) to insulate you from the more dangerous and miserable politics. There were politics at the Pet Store that I managed, and they are there in any organization that includes people, so that's not a particular reason to avoid academia.

Frank's other worry about not wanting to be a vagabond academic is more well-founded. Academia definitely rewards those who can/will hop from place to place. This is especially true at the very upper levels. If you are tied to one geographic location or to another person, academia is not very accomodating. If you want your job to be in NJ forever, you're giving yourself a much higher uphill climb for a tenure-track job (though I do know someone who desperately wanted to get a tenure-track job in North Dakota, and did, and is happy there).

So in partial conclusion, I would say that the crankiness on academic blogs shouldn't warn you away from academia, but the real problems of geography and the job market should give you pause. And most of all, I think people should not go into academia unless they really want it badly. Otherwise you will be out-competed by someone who does, even if you are intellectually superior to that person.

The academic environment is also a lot bigger than the tenured professors who have the "elite" status. Several of my former students got degrees in library science from Simmons College. Especially because they were also computer-savvy, they all had multiple job offers upon graduation in the geographic locations of their choice. And at least one of them is almost certainly making more money than I am right now, and having what seems to be a pretty great life. Library science, distance learning, academic PR and communications, development and administration are all other avenues that provide a lot of the great things that being a professor provides. They don't, however, give you a classroom and a bunch of students. To me that is the greatest benefit of being a professor, and why my job is also my calling (and thus why it is great, and I'm happy).


[UPDATE: Another Damned Medievalist in a comment below noted her rule of "don't go to grad school unless they pay you to do it." I actually had something about this in the first draft of the post but then couldn't get it to fit and so cut it. But the point is very important: I think it is very, very risky to go into debt to pay for grad school in the humanities, particularly if you are seeking a Ph.D. That debt can be crippling when you get out, particularly if you run into some bad luck and don't land a full-time position your first year (and the unfair reality of the adjunct world is that two half-time positions do not equal one full-time position). Most of the big land-grant colleges in the midwest will pay your tuition and a stipend if you can teach, and I strongly recommend having second and third thoughts about a program, no matter how prestigious, that doesn't at least cover your tuition and give you a chance to teach. The starting salary for a full-time, tenure-track job in English in the Northeast is about $50,000. That's above the median income for a family of four in the U.S., and a nice living on its own, but it would be difficult to live on in a high-cost area (like those in the Northeast) if you also had to service $50K of debt even with today's lower interest rates (and your grace period is only six months from graduation if I remember correctly).]

Science and the Humanities

My favorite magazine is American Scientist, which we get because my wife is an engineer but which I am always the first to read. Unlike Scientific American or even my beloved Natural History (which I've been reading for more than 30 years), American Scientist hasn't gone too far down the path of mere journalism and advocacy: real scientists still write a lot of the articles and the level of discourse is very high without being obscure.

So I was very interested to see an article in the past month's A S by Geoffrey Galt Harpham, a literature professor at the National Humanities Center (I didn't even know we had one!). Since my own research attempts a dialogue between scientific insights and humanistic scholarship, I was very pleased to see something from a fellow English professor in American Scientist.

[Now, before I go further, an aside: in my very first class in the Loyola Chicago Ph.D. program, we read and discussed Harpham's The Ascetic Imperative in Culture and Criticism, and I have to admit, I was not a big fan and perhaps said and wrote some things (which may be archived somewhere) that were intemperate. Some very, very good discussions came out of that seminar ("The Body in Medieval Art and Literature," taught by Allen J. Frantzen), but I found the book to embody many of the most irritating tics of late-80s/early-90s: over-citiation of the same old tedious theoriests, gimmicky uses of parentheses, overuse of antithesis ("anti-professionalism turns out to be professionalism's most typical gesture") as if the revealed "paradox" was a blinding insight, etc. And yet when Harpham was discussing the Isenheim Altarpiece in particular, he was genuinely insightful, and his linkage of ascetisim to criticism was pretty convincing.

One more point in Harpham's favor: I was able to use Harpham to at least give pause to David Halperin, who was the single most obnoxious guest speaker with whom I have ever dealt. Others have told me that Halperin is actually a nice guy, but you couldn't prove it by his behavior at Loyola, where he over did the whole "I'm angry and defensive" schtick to just exactly the wrong audience: really, you are coming to meet and talk with a bunch of graduate students in the worst job market in decades and you are whining that you don't have graduate students at a tenure-track job at MIT? We cobble together the funds to invite you to speak to us and then you act hostile and obnoxious? Also, when you've just had an hour-long discussion with 90% of the audience for your talk, you look kind of foolish when, for the actual talk, you need to put on a leather-daddy hat. Just saying. Anyway, my very pleasant moment was when I asked Halperin about the chapter, "St Foucault," in Harpham's book. Halperin went absolutely white. He hadn't read it, which was no big deal, but his own new book, which was in press, was entitled St Foucault. No big deal, actually, but it was nice to see someone squirm who had been a big jerk for the rest of the day. And lesson from this: the little people remember.]

So I didn't have particularly high hopes for Harpham's essay, and I wasn't particularly disappointed. I agree with Harpham that more connection between the sciences and the humanities is desireable, but what he actually says isn't specific enough. And the program he is running at the National Humanities Center is very laudable:

Research Triangle Park, NC. The National Humanities Center seeks scholars in the humanities, as well as those working in biological or computational science, to participate in a three-year project that will gather, synthesize, and promote new knowledge about fundamental human capacities, including such higher-order capacities as communication, imagination, judgment, and creativity. Participants in the project will pursue their own projects, but will also share responsibility for the ongoing initiative, including lectures, symposia, and, at the conclusion of the project, a Web archive of its findings. Interested scholars are encouraged to apply to the Center (see Fellowships on the Center's homepage)

.

But the problem with these kinds of calls (and they've been around for a while, including E. O. Wilson's Consilience) is twofold. First, the scientists involved tend to give the very strong impression that the humanists need to learn from them but not necessarily vice versa. I am obviously engaging in a little hubris here, but I think that an evolutionary biologist could also get some good ideas from How Tradition Works just as I got a lot of good ideas from evolutionary biology and even more from various literary and historical scholars.

Second, and perhaps more problematic, is that between the manifestos, theoretical arguments (and their tiresome refutation), funding requests, announcements, etc., the interdisciplinary work never seems to get done. This is a problem with academia in general, and of course for a lot of people, you can't do the research without the funding (one reason why the Sheep DNA project is temporarily stalled), but one big difference between the humanities and the sciences is that for many of our projects, we don't need to go through a multi-stage funding review: we just go to the library, sit down at the computer, and just do it. Let's hear about the results.

The Weather

You know, if I'm going to have to live in rainforest weather, I think I deserve the cool animals.

Where is my kinkajou? I want my kinkajou now!




(instead of the stupid groundhog destroying my garden)

We Are Supposed to be Better Than This

I just completed recording another course for Recorded Books' 'Modern Scholar' series, this time on Rhetoric and Composition, so I'm even more focused than is usual on logical fallacies. So it's no surprise that when I read two of the latest disasters to come out of academia (the Prof. Deb Frisch making sexualized comments and only slightly veiled death threats towards a two-year-old incident and the "Wisconsin hires '9/11-was-an-inside-job' conpiracy theorist to teach a course) I began noticing a blizzard of logical fallacies engulfing the blog world.

Where to begin?

First, with the Prof. Frisch situation, we have secundum quid, the fallacy of the "hasty generalization," when one data point is taken as indicating a large pattern. Read the comments on the Inside Higher Ed passage, and you'll see a significant number of people stampeding to the conclusion that Frisch represents the "unhinged" Left and that her (completely over the line) behavior shows how Leftists behave on-line and in real life. No. Frisch's behavior shows how Frisch behaved (abhominably); it does not prove anything about anyone else.

But, lest you think the "Left" was covering itself in glory here or that individuals on the "Right" were the only boneheads, I offer you the tu quoque fallacy, one of my favorites. Back in my youth in New Jersey we used a version of this fallacy when we would say: "yeah, well so's your mom" (usually punching followed). Continue with that comment thread at Inside Higher Ed and you'll see a whole slew of people saying "well, Frisch might be wrong, but look what 'Michelle Malkin, Rush Limbaugh, ?? Hannity [I don't know his first name], Karl Rove, etc. do." Nope. Doesn't matter. Frisch's behavior has to stand on its own. If what she did was blatantly wrong (and bringing a two-year-old into an insult fight, and using sexually suggestive and violent rhetoric about that two-year-old is blatantly wrong), then what someone else does, particularly someone who never engaged in a discussion with Frisch, is irrelevant.

Then there's my favority comment, which I didn't archive unfortunately, and which I can't be bothered to track down, but which said "Whatever Frisch said, it's not as bad as what Bush is doing killing thousands of Iraqi children, etc." This is a truly beautiful example of ignoratio elenchi, also called the "red herring," in which one injects an entirely new thesis into the argument in order to attempt to change the subject.

For more fallacies, let's go to the embarrassment of University of Wisconsin in Madison hiring someone who believes that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition (those gigantic planes slamming into the towers while we all watched? Just a cover up). That in itself just shows that this person is gullible and ignorant about engineering: he theoretically could teach another, unrelated class. But no, he intends to include his idiotic conspiracy theory in a class for University of Wisconsin students. But the fallacy I want to point out isn't in this crackpot theory, but in one of the commenters at Ann Althouse's blog who is defending him. Scroll down to some of the comments by "Christian Anarchist" and note the application of plurium interrogationum, or "too many questions," where a mass of questions -- most of them rhetorical and not answerable -- are piled on top of each other in order to give the impression that there are all kinds of doubts that reasonable people have about the question. You can raise as many questions as you like and then try to badger your interlocutor into a "yes/no" answer (Congressman John Dingell was an expert on doing this with scientists brought before his committee, absolutely smearing Nobel laureate David Baltimore), but you're still engaging in a logical fallacy.

Now, you may ask, why should I care? One line of argument in the comment threads is that these people are "just" adjuncts and therefore not representative of the academy. That's a pretty lousy approach to adjuncts, first of all, and does cast some light on why reasonable people might have significant doubts about how much academia values adjuncts: if you don't even care when they behave in reprehensible ways (Frisch) or promote goofball theories in the classroom, it's hard to believe that the institution really respects people in the same condition when they just do a solid job.

I'm even more concerned about the long-term damage that Ward Churchill's plagiarism and various other examples of academic bad behavior and/or loopiness are doing to a very important institution. I'm sure this will be offensive to a lot of people, but I really do believe that we in academia are supposed to be better. Seriously. We are not supposed to use logical fallacies, we are not supposed to engage in name-calling in place of debate, and we are supposed to uphold high standards in our professional lives. It is fine for talk-show hosts, politicians, political authors, etc. to engage in non-intellectual, boorish and stupid behavior. I could not possibly care less what Rush Limbaugh or Michelle Malkin or Al Franken have to say about various issues. They are entertainers. They aren't professors. They therefore do not have a special responsibilty to attempt to live up to the highest standards of intellectual debate (by the way, readers may think, from that list above, that I'm being too critical toward the "right," but the leaders of various "politically correct" causes at Carnegie Mellon in the 1980s were just as dishonest and intellectually flacid as those rightists I've mentioned above; their pet projects were leftist, and I criticize them, in print, with great frequency).

So I don't care about talk show hosts. But I do care very much about the ways that people like Churchill, Frisch and the guy at Wisconsin are damaging the institution of academia. A lot of my colleagues are very leftist in their politics, but none of them engage in this kind of behavior (plagiarizing, making sick sexual comments about children, teaching false theories in which they have no actual expertise --i.e., Wisconsin guy isn't an engineer). The politics that drives people to defend this stuff is mindless sports-fan ('my team, right or wrong') rooting: rather than defending 'our own' we academics should be the strongest and most intellectually rigorous critics of those who trade on the good names of universities, painstakingly built over many years, for their own selfish purposes. They are eating our seed corn, and we will not find it easy to replace the stores thus depleted.

My Nightmare Journey
or, how an utterly terrible trip ended with a great conference

I had meant to blog about this long, long ago, but many things intervened, including the Encyclopedia proofing (which is now done) and writing and recording my Rhetoric/Composition course for Recorded Books (which is done), and recording all of Beowulf in OE (which is done), and finishing revising my paper from the conference I'm going to discuss (which is now done).

In April I had the worst travelling experience of a life that has included its fair share of awful travelling experiences (including the 8-hour plane ride that came on a day when the two-year-old developed the worst case of diaper rash in history and concluded with an additional hour wait in the parking lot of the airport as the rental car people tried to find the rental car that had been lost in said parking lot).

But my trip to Udine was particularly special.

Usually, I book with American Airlines, because we have a lot of frequent flier miles leftover from when my wife was travelling all the time. In the past I've upgraded to business class with miles. But this year, American has come up with this brilliant idea that they will charge you $250 for each leg of the trip just to use your own miles. The genius who came up with that idea should be pleased to know that we'll be using up all of our American miles and then dumping them. Morons. But I digress.

Because American Airlines now sucks even more than they used to, I decided to try the fabled SwissAir (which now has a new name). The ticket was actually the cheapest I could find, and I thought that as a courtesy to my hosts, I should take it. After all, SwissAir has a good reputation, and I'd get to fly through the Zurich airport, which is nicer than Gatwick.

So, I book a ride to the airport for 4 p.m., giving me plenty of time to get home from teaching classes, finish packing, etc. Unfortunately, at 4 a.m. the phone rings. It's the driver of the car, who is sitting outside my house wondering why there are no lights on. This call wakes up the child, scares the bejesus out of me, etc. I calmly explain the error. There is much apologizing.

Next day, bleary through all the classes, I come home to find a message on my answering machine that the flight has been delayed from 7 p.m. to 1:30 a.m. "That can't be right," I think, and call SwissAir. 45 minutes later, I finally speak to someone who says that yes, the flight has been delayed that long. But everything is rebooked and fine for when I get to Zurich. Ok, so I get dinner with my family and get to put the kids to bed.

Go to the airport. Flight is further delayed. Finally arrives at 2 and takes off at nearly 3. Get a whole row of seats to myself (obviously everyone with sense got away from this cursed flight) and would have been fine except for the old man who got confused in the dim light and sat on my feet. That wasn't so bad. Anybody could make a mistake. Except that he stayed there. For a while. I finally woke up enough to ask him what he was doing, and when I spoke to him, he nearly jumped out of his skin. I really don't understand what was going on: I mean, airplane seats are uncomfortable, but he was sitting on my feet and didn't notice.

Get to Zurich. Rushing to get to next plane. Stand in line for 40 minutes as stupid American college student tourists try to figure out what to do after losing boarding pass. Then they find it. SwissAir desk clerk informs me that Boston never re-booked me off of the 8:30 a.m. flight. "But I didn't arrive, on your plane until 1 p.m." I say. "That flight left hours ago." But I do see that there's another flight from Zurich to Venice at 5:30. "Can't put you on that one," says clerk. "It is now full." "Why didn't they put me on that one back in Boston?" "I don't know."

Now we have a problem. There is much to-ing and fro-ing. Finally, they come up with the brilliant solution of putting me on an Alitalia flight from Zurich to Rome and then another from Rome to Venice. I have a 1-hour connection at Fiumicino (and I have to go through immigration and customs). The flight to Venice gets there one hour before the last train of the night leaves for Udine. My stupid US cellphone doesn't work, so I find an internet kiosk and email my worried hosts at Udine and rush off.

Flight is, of course, late. Get to Fiumicino and get stuck behind a Japanese tour group at immigration. Sprint across airport because even though I've come in on Alitalia, I had to go through immigration at one end of the airport and the gate for Venice is at the other.

Completely drenched in sweat (and having been travelling for sixteen or seventeen hours at this point), I get to the gate, only to be told that the thing I have isn't a valid ticket. Get sent to a counter. Wait while clerks chat with each other. Woman closes window just as I get there, and, for one of the only times in my life, I raise my voice and pitch a small fit in a public place. Get on the plane as door is closing.

Get to Venice. Find bus to train station. Bus is 20 minutes late. Run through train station. All windows closed. Find automatic machine. Go through process of ordering ticket three times. Each time machine quits just before I can insert credit card or money. Sprint to train and get on anyway. Fall asleep. Get woken up by train inspector. Get lectured in Italian for not having a ticket. Get fined 25 Euro. Get to Udine. Have not eaten since 7 p.m., East Coast US time day before. Wander through town and find hotel. Get to room. Conference gift bag included gigantic cake/muffin thing with almonds in it. Eat entire cake. Don't feel so good.

But the conference itself was amazing. Entitled Leornungcraeft, the conference examined two seemingly disparate fields of knowledge in Old English studies: the study of medicine and the study of education (and it was linked up with manuscript study and a database also). At first glance these two areas did not have much to do with each other, and the organizers didn't necessarily think that they would. But what happened, maybe fortuitously, was that each paper seemed to build on the previous one and connect up the knowledge in really interesting ways. The best part, for me, was that I discovered, thanks to the work of Prof. F. E. Glaze, that medical aphorisms were transmitted unchanged for enormous periods of time and that they developed a detailed commentary tradition because they were not able to carry their exact meanings with them. It is a perfect test case for my meme theory and, from what I have been able to gather so far, it supports the theory very, very well.

Although I have recently published an article on Anglo-Saxon medicine (co-written with my friend, Prof. of Biology Barbara Brennessel), I would never have thought to look in the Latin aphorism tradition (A-S medical studies are focused elsewhere) for replication of memes and the interpretive problems created by that replication. It was really remarkable.

The rest of the conference, and the excursion to Aquilea (and having the Prof. Maila D'Aronco help me pick out a beautiful shirt-tie combination) and the hospitality and the intellectual excitement were all wonderful. Anglo-Saxon studies in Italy is (to me at least) the perfect combination of the philological and the literary and the historical, so I get along very well with the Italian Anglo-Saxonists and very much enjoy their company.

(The trip home was also, hellish, especially the brilliant tactic of rounding up very single person going to America in the Zurich international terminal and re-checking their passports and asking them where in the US they were staying. Although this was done by Swiss police, I am certain that the Department of Hopeless Stupidity [motto: Protecting Our Featherbed Jobs by Unnecessarily Inconveniencing You since 2001] must have been involved.)

But it was definitely a worthwhile trip, not only because I learned so much (and received valuable feedback on my paper) and got a great idea, and saw good friends and bought a really cool shirt and tie, but also because I now have this story, which, really, I am not making up.

Recording

There have been no posts of late because I have been desperately trying to finish three projects as well as starting a fourth.

A. Proofing the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, all 800 pages, double columns of it. Everything is now done except for V, W, Y (which combined are only about 40 pages) and the massive L (which is something like 75). Oh, and then proofing the whole thing again, probably.

B. Writing and recording a new college course on CD, working title "The Art of Rhetoric" (though I am hopeful that they'll change the title to "How To Do Things With Words" -- because you can't copyright titles). This is a weird hybrid of a writing course and an analytical course on rhetoric. I have two entire lectures on grammar (!), as well as two on figures of speech, one on logic, one of fallacies, and one analyzing rhetorical train wrecks and triumphs. The Recorded Books people said this was my best course yet because it was funny (really. They said that. About grammar!). Recording finished Friday in NYC, at the Association for the Blind (I got to touch Helen Keller's desk!). Will be writing and recording a History of the English Language course in October.

C. Revising the lecture I gave in Udine, Italy in April into a book chapter entitled "Possible Instructional Uses of the Exeter Book Wisdom Poems." This is due Friday, which is a big problem because

D. On Friday I am heading off to speak at The Gathering of the Fellowship in Toronto. That means I have to finish my preparations for the "Tolkien's Art: Tolkien's Scholarship" talk.

But what may come across as more fun is what else I did while with Recorded Books in NY.

I have now recorded the entirely of Beowulf in Old English and, after my friend the sound engineer has finished editing the four hours of digital media down into a clean recording, I will be figuring out how to distribute the material, perhaps as podcasts, perhaps as a CD -- I just don't know yet. It was surprisingly hard to do the Beowulf recording -- I hadn't realized how exhausting it would be, even compared to speaking ex tempore for fourteen hours over two days doing the rhetoric course. But it was really fun. I did it as a dramatic reading, and (yes, this is scary), I sung Finnsburg. Certainly I am no Benjamin Bagby (and I don't have my harp yet, anyway), but at least the recording engineer didn't fall asleep or start laughing out loud, except at one moment, where immediately after finishing a very dramatic Grendel passage, I sneezed uncontrollably.

So watch this space for more info about the Beowulf recording. Other upcoming topics: What's wrong with Jerry A. Coyne's review of the 30th anniversary edition of Richard Dawkins' The Selfish Gene; How a certain Canadian press is the utmost in sleaze and how I am going to respond to their behavior by giving away my King Alfred's Grammar for free (in pdf form this time) so as to ruin the market for one of their books; Info about the other Tolkien convention where I'm speaking this summer (and if I get to meet Elijah Wood or not).

Why No Recent Posts



"O" is now done, but P, R, S, and T are very long and L still hasn't arrived (thankfully).

How Tradition Works

My ten-year labor of hell love is finally available. Some of you saw the book at Kalamazoo, but at that point you couldn't get it. Now you can here, via Amazon.

I tried to write How Tradition Works in such a way that it would be understandable by intelligent laypeople while at the same time making a technical contribution to both Anglo-Saxon scholarship and theories of memetics. This was much harder than it sounds, and I'm pretty sure I didn't succeed at every level, but I can give you the testimonials of an English Ph.D. student, a mathematician and a biologist who all claim to have enjoyed it (or to be in the process of enjoying it).

HTW is an attempt to take an interdisciplinary look at how traditions are created, transmitted and modified. I try to develop a general theory of tradition and then test it against traditions from the tenth century. Texts examined include the Rule of St Benedict and the Regularis Concordia, the Old English wills, the Old English translation of the Enlarged Rule of Chrodegang (and if that doesn't make you want to run out and buy it, you have a heart of stone, you do), and the "wisdom poems" of the Exeter Book. There is a historical argument (about the tenth-century Benedictine Reform), a theoretical argument (about how to use "memes" to explain traditions), and a literary argument (about the meanings of various tenth-century texts). Most importantly, the book has a really cool cover illustration, done by my student, the artist Jennifer Schuman, with secret symbolic messages in it. See:



Of course I wish the price ($47) were lower, but the publisher does need to make back their investment to pay my amazing editor. I will also try my best to get gratis copies for any publication that wants to be review the book, and, if you really are so inclined, I will happily sell you an inscribed copy. I am particularly interested in the opinions of scientists, mathematicians and theorists in addition to medievalists, and I will post links to all reviews (or complete reviews if you'll allow me) at the How Tradition Works website. There will also be an errata page (which I desperately hope will be very short)

I tried my best in the years spent writing this book to get a handle on a lot of ideas from biology and math as well as from literature. One very kind anonymous reviewer called it "genuinely interdisciplinary." I'm really interested in entering into a discussion with people who are approaching problems of tradition from different angles. And since I'm just starting in on a new book (From Tradition to Culture: The Exeter Book and the Tenth Century), I'd like to get as much feedback and criticism as possible.

And if nothing else, I'm sure HTW could work as an effective sleep aid--and I guarantee that it won't make you drive around semi-comatose or eat entire packages of hamburger buns while you slumber.

Who is Really a Scholar

I've been futzing around with this post for a couple of days, trying to tie together this really interesting narrative of writing for the Tolkien Encyclopedia and the latest on That Moron Ward Churchill. It's not really working, but at this point another group of Encyclopedia entries just dropped on me and if I don't post this now, I never will. So here you go, mess and all.

In his post , Squire talks about the ups and downs of contributing to a scholarly project, the encyclopedia that has been swallowing my life for the past few years. It is very, very odd to be a character in someone else's narrative, and I can't really describe what it felt like to read: "Now it was sink or swim for poor squire, in the same meme pool as Michael Drout, Verlyn Flieger, and Tom Shippey" and even more

In a way, the entire project is Phase III of Drout’s Master Plan. Phase I was his 2000 essay/bibliography, The Current State of Tolkien Studies. Phase II was the new academic journal, Tolkien Studies, entirely dedicated to peer-reviewed, guaranteed-academic-quality, articles about Tolkien. Now he was going public: this Encyclopedia was meant for every town and gown library in the land, for researchers from high school to graduate school.

It's weird, because I don't really think of myself in the same meme pool as Tom and Verlyn (they are my friends, but way ahead of me). Even weirder, because it's a pretty good "Master Plan," but I never thought of it that way (which, now that I think of it, is pretty stupid, a better way of expressing same would be that I never articulated it as well as Squire). And it's just plain odd to have people to whom I don't give a grade at the end of the semester expressing concern about what my opinion would be about something.

But most of all there was a huge disconnect between the way Squire was describing the project and the material that I had read. Because I was just proofreading the E-entries of the encyclopedia (and can you think of anything more fun than to proofread entries in alaphabetical order?), I had just read Squire's entry on "The East." And you know what? I hadn't made one correction. Not one. Whereas I have so reddened the pages of entries done by "big names" (not, I might add, Tom and Verlyn) and well-known scholars that some of them bounced back from the publisher because too many corrections had made the page illegible.

The point is that in editing 800 pages of Tolkien Encyclopedia, I have found that I really can't distinguish the quality of the work based on the credentials of the author. I have some crap from "names" and I have some genius from people no one has heard of before. And I have a lot of very good stuff distributed among lots of other people. There is definitely a distinction that can be made between people who have a wide and a narrow view. My colleague Claire Buck, for instance, wrote an amazing entry on Tolkien and War because she really, really knows the much wider literary context and so could situate Tolkien in a matrix of other ideas, authors and books. But that's not an element of being a major "Tolkien scholar" but is instead the fruit of being widely read in a whole lot of literature. It's that latest of literary theoretical approaches, "erudition." And a lot of people have it who don't necessarily have initials after their names.

And here's the awkward Ward Churchill seque: That Moron Ward Churchill shows that having a job at a prestigious institution (though less prestigious now, thanks to him!) or having a Ph.D. doesn't stop you from being a fraud and an idiot. We in academia should be really, really conscious of this problem (and That Moron Ward Churchilll should be fired, and the people who hired him, promoted him and otherwise supported him should be punished): there are plenty of people out there who are just as smart or smarter than we are. If we're not willing to have our disciplines be disciplined, there's really no distinction: it's the collective wisdom provided by the disciplines and institutions that give academia its privileged position. We need to maintain that discipline ourselves, or others will do it for us. And if you think we are indispensible, you should note that "amateurs" can create a pretty effective peer review process and produce work that is indistinguishable from that of many "experts."

So the main point, arrived at rather precipitously due to my having to pick up children from school: Ward Churchill is not a scholar. Squire and his TheOneRing.net compatriots are. Maybe they are scholars with day jobs, but they are scholars nonetheless. And it is important that we in academia continually remind ourselves that it is the work not the credential or the institution that really matters.

Post-Kzoo Post Follow-Up

So many interesting comments and commentary on Kalamazoo this year. A couple of follow-up answers/comments from me:

"Wormtalk and Slugspeak" is most definitely not a Tolkien reference (I'm not entirely one-dimensional and fixated, you know). It is a reference to The Far Side and an inside joke shared with Prof. Beth Manolescu (who as an undergraduate was known as "Fripp."): We were talking about one of Carnegie Mellon's idiotically titled English core courses ("idiotic" because the titles--"Discourse and Historical Change," "Rhetoric and Social Interaction," gave no information about what was actually in the course), and I said that I wrote a final paper whose title was something like "Thematizing Signifiers of Lack in Six Modern Novelists: Slippage in the Hegemonic Discourse". Fripp paused, took a sip of her beer, and said "I did mine on The Far Side." Another pause. "I got an A." There was a Far Side that made reference to "Wormtalk and Slugspeak: My Life Among the Invertebrates" by some professor, and because I was always working on one novel or another during undergrad, I started to say that I was writing "Wormtalk and Slugspeak."

Tom Shippey's paper was about the search for a Plattsdeutsch epic and Karl Mullenhoff's idea that Beowulf or Kudrun might very well be that epic. As is characteristic, Tom made the history of Beowulf scholarship funny, fascinating and important. He made the Schlesweig/Holstein conflict as understandable as it can be, and was, of course, hugely entertaining.

I wish I'd been at the blogger meet-up, but I didn't arrive in Kalamazoo until nearly 9 p.m. I felt that it was important not to impose on my long-suffering spouse too much, so I took a flight that allowed me to get the kids up and off to school before I had to leave for the airport.

That's great news about Paul Acker and PMLA. I'm sure it will be an excellent article. His Revising Oral Theory is truly excellent (it was incredibly useful to me in understanding where Oral Traditional Theory is right now).

"History Geek," I would never 'out' you (and given our conversation at the airport, it's probably a very good idea for you to be pseudonymous at this stage). I really enjoyed our conversation as well. As I said, for the first time ever at Kalamazoo, there wasn't a single person that I talked to whom I didn't enjoy talking to.

And just to follow up on what I meant by those misanthropic reflections: at previous Kalamazoo's I'd always made an effort to go say hello to, say, former committee member or person who was at my defense or seminar teacher from way back. These people don't like me. I don't like them. Yet we would pretend to be pleased to run into each other and then make a few minutes of small talk. This year I didn't bother. It was great. But, I also recognize that what I'm complaining about is basic human interaction and that by avoiding it and only talking to people I like, I'm one step closer to living in the heavily fortified cabin in the Montana wilderness that is at the bottom of at least one slipperly slope...

Kalamazoo 2006

At this year's International Medieval Congress I gathered further evidence that I am a true malcontent. And not because I had a bad time. On the contrary: it was one of my very best Kalamazoos yet, and I have been at the Congress twelve of the last thirteen.

But I had a good time because immediately upon arrival at the airport I met a good friend, Prof. Christina Heckman of Augusta State Univ. in Georgia. I used to be Christina's boss at the Writing Center at Loyola, and we've been friends for a decade. So the whole way from the airport we chatted. Then, in preparing to go out to get something to eat, I ran into one of my former students who is now ABD at UConn. A bunch of UConn graduate students plus Christina and I went out, ate, drank, and talked into the wee hours. It was great.

And it also prevented any vestigal schmoozing instinct I still might have had from ever kicking in. This turned out to be great. Because this Kalamazoo, I don't think I spoke to a single person I didn't like. Important people walked by and I ignored them--and it wasn't even an effort. I noticed, say, people from the past whom I didn't like then and don't like now, and I just kept walking. Therefore every conversation I had was enjoyable. No one bothers to schmooze me (because, really, what could I do for anyone -- although I did get a job here at Wheaton for one of the graduate students I met), so I assumed all interactions were genuine.

I therefore went only to papers in which I had a genuine interest. No "important" papers. And you know what? I enjoyed them all. Tom Shippey's was, of course, the best (I listened to it with my ear pressed against the door, because I had come to the session too late. People kept walking by me in the hall, staring. But I heard the whole paper). But besides Shippey, the graduate-student papers were by far the most interesting. "Behold a Pale Horse" showed why she won her graduate paper award [n.b.: the whole anonymity discussion has now made me leery of linking to someone without authorization] with a first-rate paper on the Wife of Bath's use of authorities and its links to medieval marriage law -- my original Chaucer professor, the brilliant Peggy Knapp of Carnegie Mellon, would have loved that paper. In the same session Merrall Llewelyn Price convinced me that the Prioress' Tale is obsessed with excrement (and setting aside the Freud, she mostly convinced me why as well). A group of papers by Loyola Chicago graduate students showed that the program there is once again very strong. And some interesting papers on Anglo-Saxon law and penitentials reminded me why I spent so much time with that stuff.

In general, graduate-student papers are better at Kalamazoo than papers by more advanced scholars. I'm sorry to say, but some of the advanced scholars are just mailing things in, while graduate students are doing their best work. But if I could convince my graduate student readers of just one thing, it is this: Stop wasting your time quoting people. Look, for the purpose of a seminar paper, it is very important to show that you've got all your theoretical and critical ducks in a row. But for a twenty-minute paper, your audience (except for your director in the audience) does not really care. It's fine to point out that you are integrated into the critical dialogue. But really, the likelihood of your quoting anything of particular interest to the audience from a secondary source asymptotically approaches zero very quickly. What we want is more you. And if you can squeeze the paper to eighteen minutes by deleting every Judith Butler, Elaine Scary and Homi Bhaba quote, all the better. As one of my teachers once said, 'there's a spare beauty to the very short paraphrase of the ungainly quote.'

On internal, personnel grounds (i.e., who is coming through the system) the future of medieval studies is in good shape. The problems will come not from the new people who, in particular in the case of the Torontoids, seem to be exquisitely trained, but from the profession's failure to engage with the wider culture (and I don't mean the 'wider culture' of 'maybe if we kiss their butts enough, Critical Inquiry will let some medievalists publish or PMLA will once again grudgingly publish a piece on Old English).

This brings me to one of the subjects of the Blogger's Roundtable. It certainly felt weird to be up there, knowing that in the audience were people like Ancrene Wiseass, Another Damned Medievalist, Heo Cwæth, New Kid on the Hallway, Tiruncula and other people whom a.) I read; b.) are better bloggers than I am; c.) have some pretty strong opinions about matters in which I might not entirely agree with them.

Well, it turned into a pretty interesting discussion, moderated wonderfully by Shana Worthen who advanced the agenda but let the panel do most of the talking.

I am right now falling asleep and losing focus [uncorrected typos had proliferated so that I went back and edited this morning], so I won't try to summarize the whole panel, but the big things I drew out of it were:

a. nobody recognizes the allusion in my blog title.
b. although we're all nervous about creepy internet obsessives, none of us has yet had a significant blog-based or blog-caused problem.
c. the greatest personal value of the blogs is that they create communities (and ones that are harder to hijack than usenet was), and that the insights and techniques developed in these communities (while rewarding in and of themselves) might be harnessed for the improvement of our lot and status: just the reduction of isolation and fragmentation could lead to improved conditions brought about by political change.
d. the greatest professional value for the blogs is that they promulgate your work to a wider audience. You never know who may be interested. It's actually part of that "long tail" phenomenon much discussed in management fads. A blog reaches out into that long tail and is read by an unusual group of individuals. Your name and ideas will be distributed among those (very smart) people. The results should very much be good.

After the panel came a really lovely dinner at the fancy-schmantzy restaurant at the Radisson (delicious food, and an unbelievably strong straight-up manhattan that introduced quite a few moments of Korsakov's syndrome for the next hour or so).

Then, the Dance. A few years ago I was one of the BOMPs (Boring Old Married People) who sat around the tables and made little mental blackmail notes. This time I eschewed the easy pleaure of mocking one's older, coordination-challenged colleagues (as I am likely to become one all too soon). Mostly because I very rapidly was dragged into dancing.

I didn't wound anyone as far as I know.

[this in response to discussion of lechery at the Dance and elsewhere]: I am, of course, by acclamation, the most clueless man on the face of the earth, so I might have missed something, but I did not see any attempted pick-ups at the Dance, and not a single person hit on me. They never do. So I didn't observe the general air of lecherousness that others describe. I do wonder, though, why anyone would want to potentially damage his own marriage or reputation at a conference, and, honestly, anyone who can't do better than "Do you know, What Happens at Kalamzoo, Stays at Kalamazoo" really shouldn't trying to be picking people up in the first place.

But the dance was a lot of fun this year. Not too hot, not too cold, and no one vomited near my shoes, so it's all good.


So, my strategies for a successful conference:

Don't bother with anyone you don't like.
More papers, less schmoozing.
Aim for graduate-student or new assistant-professor papers
Go to the dance and dance with your friends, then attempt to dragoon in other people who might like to dance.


See all you next year.

Post-Kzoo Post Tomorrow

But today I have news!. I returned from Kalamazoo to learn that I've been awarded a Millicent C. McIntosh Fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson Foundation.
W00T!
I really wasn't expecting to get this, but I guess Woodrow (being a Jersey guy like myself) was smiling down on me.

And this came after I had the pleasure of being the outside reader for a really great Philosophy thesis defense (attempting to apply Kant to animal rights issues), in which we spent an hour and forty-five minutes in spirited argument (the candidate, three philosophy profs, one physicis prof, one German prof, four other students and I). I heart out Philosophy department at Wheaton, which has three profs who are all brilliant and just love to argue and seems to be filled with brilliant, argumentative students as well. Boy was it fun! And then I went and picked up my mail!

And it was a particularly great day, because for me, it's always "Post Kzoo, anima est triste." Not today.

(that might be the nerdiest thing I've ever written on this blog; and it would be even nerdier if I took time to decide how to decline "Kzoo").

So I'm going to buzz around the house like a hummingbird on espresso for a while. Post-Kzoo Post will be tomorrow if son and grading cooperate.

Kalamazoo

Off to the International Medieval Congress at Kalamazoo. I will be on the blogging medievalists panel on Saturday, and my own paper is Friday morning. Unfortunately, I'll miss the medieval bloggers' meeting tonight, as I'm on the last flight in.

This is my twelfth (out of the past thirteen years) Kalamazoo. It comes at the worst possible time of the year in my schedule, but I love it anyway.

Former Student Melissa S (now P)

I read your comment in the post below and wrote you an email, and then realized I don't have an address. Please email me at mdrout at wheaton college dot e d u .

The Evolution of my Syllabi

Sorry so little posting of late. I was in Italy giving a paper at the Leornungcraeft conference in Udine (and maybe someday I will write an epic about my journey and how incredibly much Swiss Air sucks -- sixteen hours late to the conference, none of it my fault). Then I came back to my daughter having two weeks of school vacation, my son's birthday party, Easter, and hundreds and hundreds of emails. Have now finished my Kalamazoo paper: "Albert S. Cook, The Invention of Cynewulf, and the Evolution of Anglo-Saxon Studies in America" and am moving on to proofreading A-D of the J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia. I spent nearly three hours today and didn't finish A. Do you realize that there are 26 letters that will have to be done? Argh. Why can't people follow simple formatting conventions? Why?

But that's not what I want to write about.

Instead, I want to talk about how my syllabi have evolved over time (could anything be more exciting?). A while back (could be weeks, could be months; I don't have time to check) Scott Nokes was part of a conversation about which writers and writings belong on a medieval lit syllabus.

Then, a couple of weeks ago, I learned that I'll be mentoring a graduate student teaching medieval literature here at Wheaton. I helped said student (very minimally) with the syllabus, and it took me back to my own early, graduate school and immediate post-graduate syllabi: so complex, so ambitious, so throughouly planned out. I used to be that way.

But as time as gone on, my syllabi have evolved back into something that would be quite recognizeable to all the old farts I dissed when I was coming out of grad school: "Oh, a 'greatest hits' syllabus," I would sneer at the work of some geezerish faculty member if I noticed students using a traditional syllabus.

For myself, I tried it all: Reverse chronological order? Check. No chronology at all but rather thematic contrasts? Check. Mixture of medieval and modern? Check. Appropriations of the Medieval and their Sources? Check. Theme Course with much Medieval Material? Check.

And then there was the content of the syllabi. Non-literary texts? Check. Non-canonical literature? Check. Mix of works by women, heretics, outsiders? Check.

But that's all changed. I don't recall making a conscious decision, but very steadily my syllabi have evolved into "Greatest Hits" syllabi. And as I have done this, my courses have gotten better by just about every metric: my average grades are down, my enrollments are up, my evaluations are up, the number of students going to grad school is up, the number of students who take follow-up classes is up. I enjoy teaching my classes more.

Of course the most likely possibility is that I made an immediate switch from Young Turk to Old Fart the moment I got tenure. This may be the simplest explanation, since I don't feel like an Old Fart, which is the first sign.

But I think the evolution of my syllabi can be explained by a few simple principles:

1. It's a zero-sum game. Everything I put in the syllabus bumps something else.
2. This may be the only chance the students get to experience this material.

1 and 2 combine to make me really leery of bumping, say, Pearl, for mysticism (which I find tedious and can't abide, anyway). I think a student who studies mysticism will get a very interesting look into the culture of the Middle Ages. I think a student who studies Pearl will get a pretty good glimpse of medieval culture and will also have encountered (and possibly fallen in love with ) a textual artifact that he or she might remember some time in the future. And there are likely to be a lot more of the second type of student.

3. It's a lot easier to get students enthusiastic over battles, romances, dragons and intrigue than it is to get them excited about the Peasants' Revolt or the penitentials. I can channel that student excitement and use it to push them into additional hard work. If they don't have that excitement, I am the only out out in the rain pushing the bus, and we don't go nearly as far.

This is not to say that I don't do things that I think are innovative (I'll post my Chaucer syllabus and let you see for yourself how you can make assignments that build on one another in such a way as to give students mastery not only of the language, but of the research tools and the academic culture in which they encounter Chaucer). But my innovation comes, I think, mainly in the realm of class-to-class improvisations, moment-to-moment readings of the student engagement and the ability to talk when necessary and, at other times, shut up and let them roll with their ideas.

So far, so good. In my favorite class this year, Beowulf, my syllabus consisted of line numbers to be translated and discussed by a given day. That was it (though students did presentations on sub-topics of Beowulf studies. We are now on target to finish the poem on time, and my students completely kick ass at Old English right. In this case, less syllabus was more class.

"Critical Thinking": What a Piece of Cant

Every once in a while I read or hear something that makes me realize that I've been unconsciously spewing cant about something for a long, long time. I get kind of a sick feeling when I realize this, because one thing I try to do, in keeping with my research in memetics, is to harden myself against the sorts of things that everyone is saying. My misanthropic gut instinct usually tells me that if everyone is saying it, it's probably wrong.

(I think this is why I tend to be very comfortable hanging out with scientists. One of my best friends at Wheaton is a scientist and the kind of person who immediately attempts to find alternate explanations for phenomena that are presented to her as facts. This can be difficult, I think, for the kind of people who like to say "studies show X" and have people believe them. Betsey won't let that nonsense go on for two minutes).

On Friday a friend from graduate school asked me to look over the introduction he's written for an essay collection. Among other very interesting things that he had to say, he took on the shibboleth (and called it that) of "critical thinking."

If you are currently in academia, or have been anywhere near it for the past twenty years, you've probably heard a lot about "critical thinking." Everyone agrees that it is the most important thing that we teach. Why, if students learn "critical thinking," then they don't actually have to learn any specific material: as long as they can think critically about it, well, our job is done. Administrators love "critical thinking," as do other professors, potential donors, parents and even students.

So of course we are probably long overdue for someone to throw some cold water on the whole idea.

"Critical thinking" appears to have all the qualities of a piece of cant. I'm not sure we do teach our students to think critically, and furthermore, I'm not so sure that we think criticallly, and I'm not even sure that if we did, it would make the slightest bit of difference.

Furthermore, saying that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than about teaching your subject matter is an example of pre-emptive rhetorical surrender and is the kind of thing that the humanities have been doing, to their great detriment, throughout my lifetime. If you are only concerned that your subject teaches "critical thinking," then there's really no reason for your subject to exist--if another subject came along that taught "critical thinking" just as well or better than yours, then why keep, say, a medievalist around when you can replace that person?

I think this is exactly why so many important, traditional disciplines have hemmorhaged students, tenure-lines and respect for the past thirty years. Because if you can get "critical thinking" from just about any subject (and believe me, every subject claims to teach "critical thinking"), then what's the payoff for studying a difficult subject like medieval literature? Trying to make the argument that difficult subjects teach more critical thinking is fighting on unfavorable ground: how can you be sure? You, in medieval lit, have to spend hours of class time on history, languages, paleography, theology, metrics, etc. In this other class, which doesn't have all that stuff, we can "think critically" just about the entire time.

Thinking about it more, and realizing that the phrase "critical thinking" is a piece of cant, I'm not sure that I ever learned how to think critically in a single class. And I'm not sure I've ever taught a student to think critically, either. I think at one stage in my teaching life I tried to teach them to be more skeptical (or, as one of my friends in the English department always says, "to be suspicious"), but even here I'm not particularly sure, and I'm not sure such teaching would really be worth their time or mine.

What I do think I got from my classes, and what I think I give to my students, is a more complete picture of the world, a more sophisticated model inside their heads, a more detailed map (though that map can never be as detailed as the territory). To speak of memes: the memetic ecosystem inside their minds is more complex and richer than it would be if they hadn't take the class, had the discussions, learned the material. And therefore that memetic ecosystem has a better chance of generating interesting, valuable, previously unknown combinations and permutations of memes.

So if you, like me, say or have said that you are more concerned about teaching "critical thinking" than the actual subject material, you, like me, are guilty of transmitting cant. And the transmission of cant shows that you're not practicing "critical thinking."

Why an Education at a Place Like Wheaton is Worth the Exhorbitant Price

I noticed this posting by Margaret Soletan at University Diaries about the Colleges that Change Lives book by Loren Pope. Wheaton is one of those forty colleges, and that's one of the reasons (that we change lives, not that we're in the book) I've been very happy to stay here even when other opportunities at other 'prestige levels' have presented themselves.

An example: Friday a colleague copied me on an email she wrote to a student who is graduating this year. Now of course I don't have favorites, but if I did, this student would be one of them. Intense about everything he/she does; really devoted to intellectual life without being arrogant about it; well read from a genuine sense of interest; just great fun to have in class because he/she knows how to argue and have a good time doing it.

But this student is not very worldly at all and is about to graduate into a world that puts a high premium on being worldly. I know that this student is going to be hugely successful one day, but I'm guessing that the first year or so is going to be a challenge, and the student knows this and is, as is every about-to-graduate senior, very worried.

Well, my colleague wrote a three-page email to the student discussing strategies for getting through the next year, and not one word was boiler-plate or cliche. Everthing was exactly tailored to the student, based on much discussion and much thought. My colleague discussed the specific worries the student has, the specific strengths and talents the student has, and my colleague came up with really solid, practical advice for the student. This email must have taken a good solid hour to write, not to mention the many conversations that must have led up to it. The thought behind it has obviously been developing for the years that we have both been advising this student.

I think if the student takes this advice, he/she will have much less of a struggle in the next couple of years and will much more easily move towards the great success he or she is destined for. For this student in particular, but for most students, really, a bunch of platitudes wasn't going to cut it.

But although my colleague's work is (like everything this colleague does) exceptionally good, it is the norm rather than the exception. Although I'm obviously not as thoughtful or talented as my colleague, I've had the great opportunity to see students' lives change on my watch, and occasionally I've been able to give them a little bit of help. It is one of the best things about teaching at Wheaton.

That's why you pay 40K a year to send your kid to college.

Benjamin Bagby's Beowulf:
The Power of Performance

[Sorry to have taken so long to post anything. I was in NY, recording a complete course of Science Fiction lectures for Recorded Books. The recording went really, really well, but it is physically exhausting to do fourteen 35-minute lectures in two days. In related news, I just learned that Barnes and Noble is going to be carrying the course I recorded in December, Rings, Swords and Monsters: Exploring Fantasy Literature, which is exciting. If you're interested, look for their "Portable Professor" section in stores. Hopefully they'll pick up the Chaucer and Science Fiction courses (and more things are in the works: with any luck, two more courses next year for Recorded Books and a Beowulf podcast on my own)]

And now to my main topic (which is avoiding grading more papers and writing my paper that I'm giving in Italy):

I had seen Benjamin Bagby's performance of Beowulf several times previously, which was why I arranged to have him come to Wheaton and perform last week. Ben will be premiering a new, extended version at Lincoln Center this summer, so you have a chance to see him there and, I assume, other places afterwards. It is a remarkable performance and it gets better each time I hear it. (Even though this time I was running the supertitles and thus couldn't just relax into the performance, close my eyes, and listen to the language).

I was also immensely proud of the Wheaton community: we filled the 300+ seat Weber Theatre on the Thursday night before Spring Break (and the performance was only mandatory for my ten Beowulf students). Bagby got a standing ovation at the end of the performance, and afterwards people were lurking around the corridors of Watson Fine Arts talking about the performance. Ben really makes Beowulf (from the beginning through Grendel's death) into a riveting performance, and he shows, I think, that all of the various "digressions" in the first 852 lines of the poem contribute to the suspense and excitement of the piece. Honestly, after you hear Ben's performance you absolutely believe that Beowulf was performed for an audience, not just written in a silent scriptorium.

Finally, I had the great fun of being allowed to play Ben's harp (lyre, if you want to be technical, but the same instrument was called a harp in Anglo-Saxon England). Even with no harp training, I was able to play a few little runs and accompany myself singing the first eleven lines of the poem (for the purpose of sound check only, and Ben was too polite to tell me if I sounded awful when I was singing the OE). I think I may get myself a lyre this summer as a "teaching tool," (and thus eligible for my Prentise Professorship stipend), and I may include some lyre-playing on the Beowulf cd/podcasts I am developing.

Ben's longer performance will soon be released on DVD, and I encourage you to buy it (and will post a link when it's up). But even more I encourage you to see him perform live. You won't forget the experience.

Thær wæs hearpan sweg, swutol sang scopes.

A Better Man Than I Am

My co-professor in the Connection we're teaching ("The Edge of Reason") held the midterm for his half of the class today. Because we take turns teaching the class, which only meets twice per week, we are each limited to about 13 meetings over the course of the semester. So my co-professor decided that he would not use classroom time for the review session but would, on his own, uncompenstated time (which also costs babysitter money, I might add) offer a supplementary review.

One student went berserk, and I mean that in just about the technical sense of the term. All that was missing was an axe and a beheaded cow and you'd have Egil Skallagrimmson. The student accused my partner of being "irresponsible," "arrogant" and, in a later email, "a pompous ass." We wrote that if my co-professor was laying bleeding on the sidewalk, he'd walk by. His most damning criticism: "you are just too smart to be teaching."

Now my first reaction was "We need to slap the nonsense out out of this little wretch, and right fast." But my co-professor kept corresponding, drawing out more abuse. At first I thought this might be a case for the Honor Board, which handles civility issues, but then my co-professor provoked a core-dump that showed that this student has really serious problems of some sort going on. He was then able to get the counselling center involved, and maybe this student can get the help he needs now (and some training in minor social skills such as not giving authority figures gratuitous insults).

In all of this my co-professor showed why he is a better teacher than I am. I would have terminated the interaction after the first really obnoxious email. That would have been the end. But by going back and forth, we discovered that there was a problem and it might be important to address it.

And to be fair, some of the whining was actually funny (undercutting the student's whole argument): It boiled down to:' you are the meanest, meanest, meanest big meany ever.' Fortunately, both of us have children. We're immune. We've heard whining that college sudents can only begin to imagine.

Students inclined to whine: I scoff at your tiny, pathetic attempts at whining. Until I see you lying face-down in the hallway, banging your heads against the floor due to Bob the Builder not being on television, you just won't impress me. I advise getting out of the whining business. You're not even in the league, you amateurs.