A Duet

Put two boys with guitars together and you've got a potent combination for a lot of noise. My old friend Matt came by over the long Thanksgiving weekend (and brought his cool baby Taylor along) and we began each day just jamming in the kitchen. We've been playing guitar together for a long long time. If I remember correctly, one of the first things I captured on tape was an acoustic version of "Knockin' on Heaven's Door" with the two of us playing and singing our hearts out (this must have been at least 15 years ago ...) Anyway, here's something that we recorded (in the kitchen) ...

Duet in Blues

A Flood Narrative

I'm working on an Old English paper that examines the Flood Narrative (Noah's Ark ...) in an Old English poem. One of the things that I've been looking at is how the Ark was portrayed by Anglo-Saxon artists. The interesting thing about the Ark's portrayal is how it "uses" the cultural reality of Anglo-Saxon seafaring to imagine the Ark. Take this image, for example, which comes from an illustrated Old English Old testament. What immediately struck me was the way the Ark is shown as having a "beast" / creaturehead prow. It kinda reminds one of Viking ships, I think. The Anglo-Saxons were aware of the more "traditional" ways of portraying the Ark but they chose to do something different with it.

As sort of the main contrasting image of the Ark from Anglo-Saxon England, here is another image. This time it's from the "Junius" manuscript, which is one of the four extant manuscripts of Old English poetry. I've been playing with a superb CD "edition" of this manuscript and it's just wonderful, the kinds of things that can be done when you're "up close" to textual material like this. I think that the encounter with "old manuscripts" is a very powerful experience and if I were to teach a Lit class (at any level), I would definitely try to incorporate some looking at manuscripts.

Although the "beast/dragon" head of this portrayal seems to make it very similar to the first image, some art historians have pointed out that the nature of the lines (sharper and angular in this one) means that this image is less likely to have been influenced by Scandinavian art (ie the Vikings). But I see more similarity than difference and in either case, the Anglo-Saxons were ship builders too. What I'm more interested in is the way the second image portrays the Ark with buildings, without showing you what's inside. One art historian's argued that this second image of the Ark makes the it look like an Anglo-Saxon Church, and that this is in conversation with the common medieval typological association of the Ark as the Church. I think that the image also makes one think about city walls, and that the image may be invoking the Anglo-Saxon "burhs", which were pretty extensive towns and played a role in defending the population from Viking raids.

A final image of the Ark. This time, it's from the Junius manuscript again. However, it figures the Ark very differently as Noah and his family are about the disembark. Instead of a ship-like image, we have something more "abstract":


This portrayal of the Ark has been described as "lemon" shaped (my amusement with the vocabulary of art criticism has never ceased ....) A clever critic posits that it's the artist's experiments with perspective, where there's a simultaneous depiction of the Ark from a overhead aerial view and a side view of the disembarkation. Someone else has pointed out that the "aerial view of the Ark" theory makes sense also because Anglo-Saxon burial mounds have shown graves laid out in the shape of a ship. And this of course, ties in nicely with the idea of the Ark=sarcophagus=dying to be born again. Anyway, it's all pretty intriguing to me!

those proliferating blogs

Of course, I've started yet another blog -- in a vain attempt to try to pretend you can life several existences (not just several selves) at once. Anyway, it's right here:

http://gettingmedieval.wordpress.com/

The blog's meant to keep track of the intellectual process, engagements and dead-ends with the material that I'm working into a dissertation. I guess it's a way to announce and convince myself that ... yeeep ... it's time to get cracking with something specific and (hopefully) consequential.

I've also been reading the wife's dissertation, which has ended up running into 280 plus pages. I've actually read most of it during the past two years, as she worked on portions of it. I'm primarily the "grammar" reader to catch the slips and formatting oddities (like in APA, does one use square brackets for insertions that are used to regularize quotes ... [no], or
does the punctuation mark come before or after you close the quote if there are no citations -- ie when you quote what your 'subjects' say in class [they come before] ...) But it's also a powerful piece, all assembled about what teachers and students can do to make the classroom a more engaging place. And no, it doesn't involve any inspiring teaching: just lots of daily interventions.

The Same Ol' Blues

It's been a terrible day. I've had to deal with irresponsible colleagues and naughty (you wouldn't believe it) students. Plus, we're facing immigration woes on a very "standard" procedure that has become a nightmarish labyrinth of phone-calls to faceless recorded messages and unhelpful information people.

But, beyond all that, there's always music and the blues. So here's a recording of a blues tune that I've been working on. I've been intrigued by the blues for a long time (after I watched, in the late 80s, a film called Crossroads -- with bad acting by Ralph Macchio but a superb and evocative blues soundtrack by Ry Cooder). And I've just got myself a new guitar (though this recording was done on the old one. The story behind the tune? Well, I've been practicing it a lot and the wife has heard it just one too many times. Anyway, she's been saying -- "Again?! Why don't you play something else ... thus ... the Same Ol' Blues ...

Same Ol' Blues

Play it again

Zotero

Ok -- so I'm actually going to recommend that anyone that has to write papers or is involved in academic work that requires you to compile bibliographies and references check out this Firefox plug-in that I was just recently linked to. It's called Zotero and it's one of the best free plug-ins that's available.

So far, I've played with it a little and it already does more than I probably need in terms of bibliographic information. What the plug-in does is that it scans webpages with bibliographic information (pages like a library catalog, a journal database and yes, even Amazon.com) and translates that info from the webpage into bibliographic information. So no more messy figuring out how to format according to MLA or APA (or god forbid, Chicago) styles. It's easier to use than a program like Endnote (though I think Endnote is more comprehensive in terms of the kinds of categories and fullness of biblio information). One drawback that I've encountered is that Zotero doesn't automatically differentiate between books and edited books (and indeed between authors and translators). There's an option, however, to provide this information and, yup, I just figured out how to do it two seconds ago.

Anyway, it's pretty amazing that this is an open source Firefox (yes, only Firefox) plug-in and that it makes the oft irritating elements of research much easier. I remember having to run down to NUS in my first year because I forgot to copy bibliographic info for a paper I was working on (it was on the Great Gatsby). Then, there was primitive dial-up (before web-browsers were popular ... or at least before they could be used properly on my ancient computer ...) where one could access text only bibliographic info in lines of black and green. Of course, I haven't constructed a bibliography "manually" for a long time because of such great software like Endnote. But this Zotero plug-in just makes it that much easier for everyone. I'm going to show my students this!