Conference Time

It's that time of the year where I desperately send out paper proposals for medieval conference presentations. Here are two of my latest offerings that I've submitted. Hopefully they'll be accepted!

A paper proposal for a panel on Kings and Kingship in the Middle Ages. I hope this one gets accepted so that I get to go to Boston.

All the King's Bodies: Embodying Authority in Havelok the Dane and King Horn

The Middle English romances Havelok the Dane and King Horn both feature protagonists whose right to rule is stolen early on in the romance. In this paper, I suggest that both protagonists learn that the manipulation of their own bodies is key to regaining royal authority. Even though the thrones of Denmark and Suddene are theirs by birth, Havelok and Horn must allow their bodies to mature and be transformed in order to regain what is theirs. Havelok's exceptional physical appetites and strength becomes subordinated to a more symbolic and rhetorical conception of his body. From being trapped by a body that only experiences the immediacy of hunger and cold, Havelok re-conceptualizes his body as a symbol of the nation before the marks of kingship on his body can be publicly identified and rallied around. Similarly, Horn's unmatched physical attractiveness is disguised both literally and through his careful speech en route to the throne. Instead of thinking of the protagonist as the solitary hero who proves himself worthy of the throne, locating their right to rule in the body considers the various forces of association and nurture that come into play. Specifically, Havelok's and Horn's bodies are shaped by their contact with a host of surrogate fathers who take the place of their dead fathers. These older male figures protect and guide the protagonists on their quests and enable the protagonists to adopt conceptions of the body that are more readily used for political ends than the abstract ideals of kingship represented by their dead fathers. I end the paper by suggesting how these romances connect with Ernst Kantorowicz's work on the genesis and development of the notion of the "King's Two Bodies" and argue that the presentation of the malleable body in both romances respond to the challenges to the king's position in the body politic that occurred in thirteenth-century England.

... and here's another one. I'm trying something slightly different from my 'usual' work. It's for a panel on Animals and Ethics at Kalamazoo! (I owe the title to a memory of Al Pacino 'dying' in "Looking for Richard")

"A Horse, a Horse, my Kingdom for a Horse!": Valuing Arondel in Bevis of Hampton

The Middle English Bevis of Hampton does not conclude with Bevis ruling England or Armenia, the principal kingdoms of the romance. Curiously, Bevis ends up ruling over Mombraunt, a kingdom with a relatively minor role in the narrative. To explain this state of affairs, I turn to Bevis's relationship with his horse, Arondel. In this paper, I attempt to describe Bevis's special relationship with Arondel, arguing that this relationship cannot really be equated to anthropocentric concepts such as "friendship" or "loyalty". Inspired by Donna Haraway's exploration of the dense networks of biocapital and commodification that connect people and animals "in the naturecultures of lively capital," the paper traces how the narrative struggles and fails to find a fixed value for Arondel. Like the dogs that Donna Haraway writes about, Arondel is variously treated as a commodity, labor, as well as a consumer through his connections with Bevis and other humans. At the same time, the people that come into contact with Arondel have their identities as stable human subjects challenged and the multi-faceted nature of these bonds make it impossible to reduce the description of Arondel to that of the 'loyal beast'. Unlike other animal companions of romance, whose only reward for loyalty is human companionship, Arondel receives much more: fame, a castle, Bevis's willingness to go into exile, and prayers said on his behalf. In a romance in which the protagonist's own worth is challenged by his biological and surrogate human families, in which he needs to prove himself by battling non-human creatures, Bevis responds to something in Arondel that lies outside the rubric of social estimations of animal worth: Perhaps Bevis does give up kingdoms in exchange for an existence with a horse.


"A horse, a horse ..."

Too Many Errors

I managed to cause this screen to pop up yesterday on the latest chapter of my dissertation. It's the first time that I've seen this error message. It came up on page 76 at the 21 659 word mark. I guess this chapter DOES have lots of strangely spelled early Middle English words!

On Reading

Given that I spend much of the day reading, this recent article on reading in the NYT caught my eye. It's rather long but well worth the time. Of course, I was also rather interested in it because it deals with whether or not the Internet has had a negative impact on the ability of children and adults to think. Reading, of course, is the site of contention in all this. The tussle is over whether interacting with non-traditional texts via the Internet is compromising our ability to store and analyze information. I guess that a high level of competence in traditional literacies has always been a gold-standard of sorts when it comes with academic and intellectual success, and whether being literate in the new media of the Internet promotes a similar form of intellectual growth, retards our ability to think, or complements a more traditional view of literacy and intelligence, is really an interesting debate. Of course, it smacks of the "Is TV Bad For You?" debate, but just as the cloning controversy is a more interesting variation of the abortion debate, the Internet offers more complicated options than TV.

From a personal perspective, I could easily see myself as a proponent of either camp. Given that I've plowed through my fair share of heavy going novels, it would serve my sense of moral indignation to condemn YouTube, Facebook, and yes, blogs. And I think a certain amount of this is clear from the article. Those who speak in defense of more traditional literacies seem motivated to hold off what they see as a decay civilization, as they've defined it of course. I suppose there's a bit of a conservative streak in me that suggests that everyone should avail themselves to the same modes of suffering (as well as pleasure) that I've associated with reading. I get the sense that it's more than "academic outcomes" or "intellectual achievement" that's at stake: It's also about how we define our cultural technologies and who manages to dictate how subjectivities are formed (and controlled) vis a vis these.

I also do my fair share of "new media" perusing. I haven't read a traditional newspaper in years, love YouTube, and when the mood strikes me, could be up there with the most fanatical of users of chat programs (Ok, the last claim is probably untrue, and unlike a real savvy Internet multi-tasker, I really can't do much else except chat when I chat). I often think about how I'd probably wouldn't have done well in the O- and A- Levels or University exams if I had had the Internet access which we all now take for granted. Even now, I get endlessly interrupted (ok, distracted) with all the measureless and meandering paths to procrastination that the Internet has to offer. Surely the time and pleasure one spends surfing has to count for some expansion of one's intellectual powers? So I get it when the hordes of academics cited by the NYT article put up a doughty defense for the new literacies that are so different from traditional reading that new measures and definitions of literacy are called for. At the same time, I wonder if a lot of this has to do with make a big ballyhoo out of very little. I'm really cynical about endless academic claims in support of Internet literacies because they really does come off as cultivating niche areas of research that don't really tell us anything profound about how we think or process information. (I should be honest about this and state that I did write a Masters thesis on how Electronic Message Boards promote critical literacy and empower students .... Hah!) Still, if an academic wins acclaim (and tenure, promotion, and the good life) by defending web-surfing habits, more power to him (and her).

In one sense, the conflict over reading literacy and Internet literacy recalls medieval debates over the growth of writing. With the growth of writing as a technology of the mind, medieval thinkers were afraid that people would lose the arts of memory, and eventually lose both knowledge and the ability to reason because they'd become to dependent on marks on a page. The way that the Internet is becoming everybody's prosthetic memory (and perhaps brain) parallels this medieval anxiety about the loss of knowledge. This article that is in the Atlantic (which the NYT article refers to) discusses the issue quite nicely. I've never really had a good memory (and no, just because I'm a Lit student does not mean I can quote from the Western canon at will, though if I could it would be really cool ...), so I can't really tell if the Internet has made me dumber. I will, however, say that accumulating information does give one the sense that one has processed and thought about the stuff. So, clicking through links and quickly browsing Wikipedia does often cause me to think that I'm learning stuff that I'm probably not. But this isn't new. I remember how we (while in JC and Uni) would photocopy reams of articles from journals and books and feel as if we'd done a whole lot of studying. It's a good thing that photocopying is so expensive here, it forces me to sit in the library and take notes by hand, and I think I tend to process the information more diligently than if I were to mindlessly underline sections and merely make marginal comments.

I return to this post after a bit of a break.

A book that I finished about a week ago, and had begun when I first started out this post, deals with the relationship between knowing stuff and being smart, and the relevance of factoids in life, involving issues, I guess, that are tangentially touched upon by the articles I refer to above. It's by A.J. Jacobs, who is quite a character (in a preppy, nerdy, "everyone-graduated-from-Harvard-or-Yale, I-only-went-to-Brown" kind of way), and it's called "The Know It All". It's really quite an intriguing feat that he undertakes. Jacobs decides to read the entire Encycleopedia Britannica. Yup, from A to Z. It's pretty amazing that he manages to do it, all 44 million words within a year, WHILE keeping his day job as an editor at Esquire. It's an easy and entertaining read (Jacobs's book, I mean) but his chatty writing style doesn't obscure the greatness of his achievement or the his enthusiasm for knowledge. Another more recently published book by Ammon Shea, recounts his experience reading the entire OED.

So what do these epic reading enterprises, undertaken in an age of media proliferation tell us about how knowledge is valued in a world where technology appears to be muscling out traditional literacies? I guess reading has become, from a certain perspective, a vast undertaking. There is now a certain novelty attached to reading, and reading what appears to be dry as dust material for pleasure is an oddity of sorts. I also think that the participatory effect of reading, which is still valued at a really young age, is somehow pushed aside by the richness of the new media. No one reads out loud nowadays, at least it takes a conscious effort to do so; and, people don't read that much to each other anymore. The private experience of reading has been made an even more exclusive and exclusionary practice, since the ease with which one can respond through writing or performing on new media texts makes the performance of the traditional text laborious and time-consuming.

I know all this sounds nostalgic for a past where we spent a little more time feeling the rustle of pages between our fingers, and spending entire days with books rather than blogs, and it is, in part. But I'm just not exactly ready to trumpet the wholesale triumph of the new media over my books, if only because books still look great all lined up on the shelf.

Blurbs From a Blogger

It occurred to me this morning, as I was walking Sourdough, that I have every right to call myself a "Blogger". It came as a bit of a surprise, as most revelations of the obvious do, and it caused me to see myself quite differently. Now, I realize that "real" Bloggers, whether full-time or not, celebrated or reviled, actually get more than 3 page views a day (I think that's my average, if I count my own visits to the blog ...), write about important matters (like "Obama needs a New Hairdo and so do You"), generate lots of publicity, and contribute to the general course of human affairs, from behind (or is it in front of ... ?) the near-anonymity of a computer terminal.

But, as you, dear Reader, have no doubt noticed, there IS a new look to this blog. And moving away from the classic blog platform (goodbye outmoded javascript slideshow ...) to Blogger's WordPress-Wannabe Widget Filled Universe has prompted me to cast a retrospective glance at my early output. I'm in the process of cleaning up the interface as well as re-visiting some of my earlier posts. Reading some of the stuff that I wrote way back – especially from 2001-4 – for instance, I'm struck by how prolific I was in those days. Of course, prolific doesn't mean the writing is good or even thoughtful. But there was just a lot of stuff. In "those" heady days, I used a really cheesy platform called "Free Open Diary". Then it was just words – no pictures, no music, no video – just words, a lot of them. And it was great fun then, as there was a relative large and vibrant community of Open Diarists in the school where I taught. There were inevitable attempts by the more daring or cheeky of my students to make overt references to each diary entry whenever I stepped into class, but I managed to keep those worlds somewhat separate, though inextricably bound as my entries were often commentaries on what was going on in school and in the classroom. In retrospect, I think writing on the thing shaped the kind of teacher (and possibly person) I became in those years and created all sorts of opportunities for interaction with students that my official school persona may not have afforded. I'm sure that blogging is now taken for granted by teachers as a means of communicating certain "unmentionables" to students, but I'm glad I was involved in it at a time when not that many people (at least people I knew) wrote on blogs.

So, patiently, with much perseverance, I'm going back to these old entries and straightening them out, correcting grammar and spelling where I find errors, and putting them onto their proper blog page. (In switching platforms, I plonked whole months into a single entry and haven't really sieved through them properly). In the meantime, I've created a "Blast From the Past" link on my new blog interface (using the nice link widget) where I'll put entries that strike a chord with me in this re-vamping exercise. And of course, I'll continue to feel happy about calling myself a Blogger.

Now back to the Dissertation.

Strange Culture

Sometime in 2005, I attended a talk by Steve Kurtz, an Art professor, who was in the midst of being persecuted by post-Sep 11 paranoia. Just a few days ago, browsing the shelves of the public library, I came across this cool documentary, Strange Culture, that was made in 2006/7, which was about his case. It not only traces the tragedy with enormous sympathy and precision, it also employs a clever blend of dramatization (Tilda Swinton plays his wife, whose tragic death was the genesis of the entire bizarre affair). Even more remarkable is that fact that at the time that they were making the doc, Kurtz's case was still unresolved, and he was still facing the prospect of many years in jail. The film is not only a sensitive rendering of the entire affair, but also fleshes out the broader implications of the case for basic human and academic freedom.

In brief, here's what happened. Kurtz was, and still is, a critical artist. So his stuff is radical art that questions the relationship between art and science. In the talk I attended, he said that his mission has always been to try to use art to put science in the hands of the people, because the general population has been alienated from science by big corporate interests. Anyway, he was working on a project that involved the critique of bio-warfare when his wife died of a heart attack in her sleep. He called 911, and when responders came, they noticed that he had a lot of science equipment at home. And so, the FBI and the bioterrorism task force was notified, and he was eventually taken away (illegally) on the suspicion that he was a bioterrorist. Despite repeated attempts by him and his colleagues to explain to the FBI that "this is what he does, and has been doing all along ...", the government was set on charging him with something. In the end, because there was no way that the bioterrorism charges could be filed (all the stuff he had was legal, harmless, and could be bought over the Internet), they decided to charge him with "wire fraud" and "mail fraud".* In essence, the government, riding on post Sep 11 paranoia, was using its expanded powers to silence voices of dissent by concocting scenarios that are best described as Kafkaesque.

The good news is that he was cleared of everything in April this year, and I found this interview from June where he recounts the entire ordeal, being able to speak openly about the facts of the case for the first time. His interview with Amy Goodman begins at 35:35.



* As I understand it, the prosecution's attempt to charge Kurtz with mail and wire fraud stood on the fact that he'd gotten his research collaborator to buy the reagents that he needed for his work from a supplier who does not sell to individuals, but only to institutional accounts that are registered with them. It's as if I bought a second hand book from Amazon.com on behalf of someone in Singapore because Amazon.com second hand book sellers won't ship internationally. Because I bought the books with the intent of circumventing this system, I (as well as the person receiving the books) am guilty of mail fraud along the lines of the crime that the govt was trying to charge Kurtz with.

Pecan Pie

Pecan pie happens to be one of my favorite deserts - after carrot cake, of course. I made my first one yesterday. Lots of recipes call for corn syrup, which apart from being really bad for you, is also the poster child for everything wrong with the food industry, so I made one with honey instead!

Chomksy At Google

Here's a good Chomsky talk. Interesting because it's wide-ranging and pitched at a broad audience rather than the endless (and damning) slew of facts and figures that Chomksy usually broadsides American policy with.

Berry Good Pie

Two pies! Above - the raspberry-strawberry-rhubarb pie that I made last week. It was runny and I had to resort to desperate measures that involved performing extensive drainage operations. But, I'm pleased to say that this is the first pie where I'm happy with the crust. The key to good crust (for me): vodka. (What I lack in skill I make up for in exotic ingredients but there's a nice scientific explanation for using vodka - it evaporates quickly!) Having rhubarb in a pie was something I had to do having read about rhubarb and heard about it all my life. Turned out to be a nicely tart combination. Below - I made this 'largely blueberry pie' today with the berries we had left in the fridge and freezer. To circumvent the runny insides, I used a corn-starch filler recipe, and for double insurance, made a crumb top so that the juices could evaporate.

You, Who Hear My Singing

I've been working on putting together (yet another) new blog, one that documents my attempts to make music. It started with an interest in figuring out how to put one of those audio players on a blog page and then took a life its own. Anyway, if you're interested in hearing me sing badly, play the guitar (and banjo) in a variety of styles, see what I've been up to musically, and perhaps even sing along ... it's here:

http://youwhohearmysinging.blogspot.com/

Great Nader Lecture

Given the terrible and widespread public misperception that Ralph Nader "cost" Al Gore the election in 2000, I doubt that many people are interested in hearing what the man has to say. Even so, here's Nader in his own words. He's fantastic and if I were pressed to say who I supported in this U.S. election, I'd pick Nader. What is great about this lecture is the fact that he very fondly includes anecdotes about how his time at Princeton shaped his desire to change things. I've put all parts in a play list and playing them one after another should be quite intuitive!