tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-49030770339012987602024-03-12T19:52:01.922-07:00FumblrAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03819557816474024203noreply@blogger.comBlogger23125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-20244865516802437852013-12-10T12:36:00.000-08:002013-12-10T12:36:05.317-08:00Artists -- FAIL!As we all head into end-of-term grading, a lovely post about <i>encouraging</i> our students to fail:<br />
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<a href="http://drawitwithyoureyesclosed.com/post/66811910754/mira-schor-fail">http://drawitwithyoureyesclosed.com/post/66811910754/mira-schor-fail</a><br />
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Happy failures to you all!Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-49406950165547532922013-10-02T14:35:00.001-07:002013-10-02T14:36:56.925-07:00Fumblr in print!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M0zb_XaVVk8/UkyR7Fcz3VI/AAAAAAAARcU/Vt9QkFQzVlQ/s1600/FAULT_Cover.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-M0zb_XaVVk8/UkyR7Fcz3VI/AAAAAAAARcU/Vt9QkFQzVlQ/s200/FAULT_Cover.png" width="155" /></a></div>
If you haven't yet heard (and, indeed, if you have), Asa Mittman and Shyama Rajendran have a short essay celebrating Fumblr and inviting future contributions in <a href="http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/journal/v4/n3/index.html">the latest issue of <i>postmedieval</i></a>. For a lovely write-up of the issue, <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2013/09/just-published-fault-postmedieval.html">see here.</a> Share liberally!<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-59539189741288769812013-07-28T15:20:00.001-07:002013-07-28T15:20:18.501-07:00Kzoo CFP: Failure<div class="p1">
<span class="s1"><b>This seems of interest to FUMBLR readers (who should send in some new FAILS, by the way!):</b></span></div>
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<b>Mistakes, Mishaps, and Medieval Moments of Failure</b></div>
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Session for the 49th International Congress on Medieval Studies (Kalamazoo, May 2014) sponsored by the Medieval Studies Workshop at the University of Chicago <a href="http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/medievalstudies/"><span class="s2">http://cas.uchicago.edu/workshops/medievalstudies/</span></a> </div>
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We often say that history is written by the victors. But what of the losers, the mistakes, the campaigns lost, the scribes who erred, the catastrophic or minor moments of failure in medieval art, history, and literature? Many such failures result in the loss of lands or reputation, misunderstandings, and even now-comical images (e.g. the horned Moses). Other modes of failure have been recognized as more obviously productive, including the purported failure of art or language to adequately describe the divine in much of medieval Christian theology. Scholars ranging widely from Judith (Jack) Halberstram to Denys Turner have rightly advocated for alternative ways of knowing that do not just privilege narratives of hegemonic success. However, it appears that the place of failure still occupies a particularly fraught position in medieval history. Failure is at once recognized as central to techniques of confession, self-improvement, and personal humility while also dismissed as the unrecoverable and unimportant flotsam of history, demonstrated by the dearth of studies on mistakes and errors of persons, texts, and images. We hope in this panel to implicitly question our own methodological approaches through studies of failure in the Middle Ages and to consider the multiform and even contradictory ways that failure was construed by medieval audiences. We welcome papers from all disciplines that investigate or theorize failure in the medieval world. </div>
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Please submit paper proposals and participant information form <a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF"><span class="s3">http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/submissions/index.html#PIF</span></a><span class="s4"> </span>to Medieval Studies Workshop co-coordinators Jenna Timmons and Nancy Thebaut at <a href="mailto:nancy.thebaut@gmail.com"><span class="s2">mailto:nancy.thebaut@gmail.com</span></a> no later than <b>September 15, 2013</b>. </div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-34486494342867698882013-05-28T12:00:00.000-07:002013-05-28T12:13:27.282-07:00Blunder (A Roundtable Post)<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: left;">
[Updated 5/28/2-13]</div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EUUc0SJlX5w/UZ1cWTamCWI/AAAAAAAAQ7I/1VQwGYuscIg/s1600/BlunderSession.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="321" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-EUUc0SJlX5w/UZ1cWTamCWI/AAAAAAAAQ7I/1VQwGYuscIg/s640/BlunderSession.jpg" width="640" /></a></div>
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This post began as a session at the <a href="http://www.wmich.edu/medieval/congress/">48th International Congress on Medieval Studies</a>, in Kalamazoo, MI, known to all far and wide as KZoo or, simply, the Zoo. The session was called "Blunder," and was organized by the inimitable Eileen Joy, for the BABEL Working Group. The call went out as follows:</div>
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<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>Then, with chaos and blunders encircling my head, / Let me ponder. </i><br />
<i> ~ Oliver Goldsmith, “Retaliation 21″ </i></blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
This session features short presentations that explore medieval texts and other artifacts, and/or any aspect of scholarship on the Middle Ages, that engage, practically and theoretically, consciously or unconsciously, in blunder and blundering — defined as confusion, bewilderment, trouble, disturbance, clamour, discomfiture, turmoil, mistakes, stupidity, carelessness, bumbling, errancy, confounding, foolishness, foiling, stumbling, perturbing, mayhem, fracas, and noise. It is hoped that presentations will trace some of the ways in which “blunder” has served as an historical actant, “making things happen” (for good or ill) that could not be anticipated in advance and which (somewhat and somehow) escapes full human control.</blockquote>
Shyama and I thought this sounded mighty FUMBLR-ish, so we threw our (dented) hats into the ring. The session was filled with enjoyable failures and foibles (my damned <strike>Powerpower</strike> Powerpoint was out of order, which I <i>never </i>do). After, we asked the speakers if they'd be game for a group-post at Fumblr, and they generously agreed! Fumblr therefore presents its first group-fumble, which will be presented as a series of separate posts, all linked through this post. Thanks to all the contributors!<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/blundering-toward-end-in-beowulf-mary.html">Blundering at the End in <i>Beowulf</i></a>," by Mary Kate Hurley [<strike>Coming soon!</strike> <b>Here now!</b>]<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/the-fruit-of-failure-m-w-bychowski.html">The Fruit of Failure</a>," by M. W. Bychowski [<strike>Coming soon?!</strike> <b>Here now!</b>]<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/speculations-and-rejections-nancy-m.html">Speculations and Rejections</a>," by Nancy M. Thompson and Maggie Williams<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/scribal-blunders-poetic-wonders.html">Scribal Blunders, Poetic Wonders: Reports from a Modern-Day Scribe</a>," by David Hadbawnik<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/slices-and-splices-marian-bleeke-and.html">Slices and Splices</a>," by Marian Bleeke and Anne Harris<br />
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"<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/05/failblogfumblr-asa-simon-mittman-and.html">Failblog/Fumblr</a>," by Asa Simon Mittman and Shyama Rajendran<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-41612078255888386252013-05-28T11:30:00.000-07:002013-05-28T16:28:30.370-07:00"Blundering Toward the End in Beowulf," Mary Kate Hurley<!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
Before I begin, I’d
like to make a couple of surprising assertions.<span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><b><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;"><a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn1" name="_ftnref1" title="">[1]</a></span></b></span></span></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iFVfUuPIR3k/UaUAgQvXXwI/AAAAAAAARDk/sF3DY_jDksk/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="301" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-iFVfUuPIR3k/UaUAgQvXXwI/AAAAAAAARDk/sF3DY_jDksk/s400/Beowulf+Slide+1.PNG" width="400" /></a></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Critics who study <i>Beowulf </i>as a career (and I see several
of my fellow Anglo-Saxonists in the audience today) don’t agree on much. This might come as a shock, but there it
is. Who wrote <i>Beowulf? </i>Where? When?
Do we care? (the answer to that
last is – of course, but for wildly different reasons). We do all agree on one thing, however. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p> </o:p>The end of <i>Beowulf, </i>suggest a century’s worth of
critics, is sad. </div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Again: It comes as a
bit of a shock, perhaps, but there it is.
This poem does not end happily.
Very few of its characters live through the last battle, and those that
do are destined to destruction as the result of a feud they did not begin and
will not live to finish. If there were a
moral to the poem, it might be, simply,<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
“everybody dies.”<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
Blunder might just
be the best word for it, and appropriately, blunder seems to imply something catastrophic. Think, for example, of Mr. Ramsay in Virginia
Woolf’s <i>To the Lighthouse. </i>Ever intent on the linearity of his
thinking (so that P would lead inevitably to Q), his inability to penetrate the
secrets of his scholarly world leads Ramsay to repeatedly cite that most
catastrophic of blunders, <i>The Charge of
the Light Brigade. </i>“Into the jaws of
death, into the mouth of hell, rode the six hundred.” With Ramsay, then: someone, indeed, had blundered. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And yet, a gentle stroll through the OED and
MED suggests a slightly less harsh origin for the term. Indeed, in the pre- and early modern periods,
blunder had somewhat less emphasis on the familiar “to move, act, or perform stupidly
or blindly.” Rather, its earliest
meanings – mostly obsolete now – have to do with confusion, but not in the
sense merely of something not-as-it-should-be.
The definitions include ideas of mixing and mingling, of “stirring up.”
It is in this sense that I wish to consider blunder today: as an act that
operates in a non-linear logic. I would
suggest that in the blundering plunder of the thief who steals a cup we might
also identify a wayward act of connection through which we can reimagine <i>Beowulf.
</i>No longer <i>only </i>a sad poem,
then (although it is that), <i>Beowulf </i>becomes
a meditation on interconnections – of past and present, of thieves and gold and
earth, and even -- yes – of humans and dragons.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so, we blunder toward the end of <i>Beowulf. </i> <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The central events
of the final third of the poem revolve around the various uses of treasure –
for men, for monsters, even for the ground that holds it. But before we’ve even seen the treasure,
heard its story, or seen it interred in that most elegiac of laments – the Lay
of the Last Survivor – we see it put to use, and not just by a man. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The hoard is buried,
and the path to find it is not, we presume, well marked: <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PbEgpbeFKU0/UaUAgYGKgDI/AAAAAAAARDo/Hxg1oBW42OM/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+2.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-PbEgpbeFKU0/UaUAgYGKgDI/AAAAAAAARDo/Hxg1oBW42OM/s320/Beowulf+Slide+2.PNG" width="320" /></a><o:p> </o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
stig under
læg</div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
eldum uncuð. Þær on innan giong <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
nið[ð]a nathwyl(c, se ðe n)eh<i> </i>g(eþ[r]on)g<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hæðnum horde; hond (eðe gefeng)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(searo) since fah. (lines 2213b-2217a)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
(<i>the path below lay unknown to men. Some sort
of man went inside there, found his way to the heathen hoard — his hand [...]
inlaid with jewels.</i>)<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn3" name="_ftnref3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: TimesNewRomanPSMT; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1J9fFIWJ8I0/UaUAgchBpnI/AAAAAAAARDs/-2UHHQEpCRI/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+3.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-1J9fFIWJ8I0/UaUAgchBpnI/AAAAAAAARDs/-2UHHQEpCRI/s320/Beowulf+Slide+3.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The state of the manuscript here is pretty
clear from the divergences between the two edited versions of the Old English
text.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn4" name="_ftnref4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: EN-US;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Initially, at least, the specifics of what the thief stole, and why, are
difficult to apprehend. What <i>is </i>clear, however, is that this is not
an easy hoard to find – when this thief – or servant – or some sort of <i>man </i>(niðða nathwylc) – stumbles into the
hoard, the path below lay “eldum uncuð” – unknown to men. It’s important here that we note the location
of this contruction as part of the alliterative line – the primary stresses
fall on <i>eldum</i>, <i>uncuð</i>,
and <i>innan</i> – and the primary
positioning, of course, is on <i>eldum</i> –
the dative form of the noun. The path is unknown <i>to or for men. </i> Keep that in
mind: <i>to or for men. </i>Like everything
else in <i>Beowulf, </i>it comes back later,
perhaps catastrophically.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
And so the thief blunders into the hoard, but
what he does there is simultaneously carefully calculated and a terrifying
mistake. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WSuKesc2_tw/UaUAhGVE5zI/AAAAAAAARD8/-Wv8BneI-PA/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+4.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-WSuKesc2_tw/UaUAhGVE5zI/AAAAAAAARD8/-Wv8BneI-PA/s320/Beowulf+Slide+4.PNG" width="320" /></a>Nealles (met ge)wealdum wyrmhord a[b]ræc <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
sylfes willum, se ðe him sare gesceod, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ac for þreanedlan þe(o) nathwylces <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
hæleða bearna heteswengeas fle(a)h, <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
ærnes þearf(a), on ðær inne (f)eal(h)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
secg syn(by)sig (…) (lines 2221-2226a)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<i>(Not for his own sake did he who sorely
harmed him (the dragon) break into that worm-hoard, or by his own will, but in
sad desperation some sort of slave of a warrior’s son fled the savage lash, the
servitude of a house, and slipped in there, a man beset by sins.) </i></div>
<br />
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-YYh6gb4bvhc/UaUAhtdezSI/AAAAAAAAREE/CLjfa0kI71k/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+5.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"></a><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JshmMrYz7D0/UaU9kIEyN0I/AAAAAAAAREc/FVXdgHIkWbc/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+5-1.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="239" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JshmMrYz7D0/UaU9kIEyN0I/AAAAAAAAREc/FVXdgHIkWbc/s320/Beowulf+Slide+5-1.PNG" width="320" /></a>As Klaeber
articulates, “the slave of an unknown person attached to the Geatish court (<i>þe(o)
nathwylces</i>), driven by sore affliction (<i>for þreanedlan</i>), steals a
costly vessel from the dragon’s hoard, presenting it to his master to obtain
his pardon” (Fulk et al, p. 237). <b>(to the left, note how many of the major words
in the section are extremely hard to read; below, note how the word “þe(o)” is almost impossible to read.) </b>When the
thief steals the cup from the dragon, he does so with a clear purpose. He brings it to his lord, in order be granted
a favor (<i>bene getiðiad</i>, 2284). The
cup is used as a price for entrance into human community; however, the cup
bears other associations with it that are not centered in or on humans,
including one with the hoard, and the dragon that guards it. <b><o:p></o:p></b></div>
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-liHBsNYG7AM/UaUAhWRi50I/AAAAAAAAREA/cHO_6uQUkvY/s1600/Beowulf+Slide+6.PNG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-liHBsNYG7AM/UaUAhWRi50I/AAAAAAAAREA/cHO_6uQUkvY/s320/Beowulf+Slide+6.PNG" width="320" /></a></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The
dragon, who begins burning the countryside as a result of this theft, is
simultaneously imagined as a threat to humans and a natural – or at least
naturalized – creature. The logic of the
poem itself allows for this reading: a
shift in tone accompanies the dragon’s arrival in the hoard, and the fantastic
creature is treated with a stunning familiarity. In lines reminiscent of the
gnomic verse of such texts as <i>Maxims</i>
I and II, or even the strange likenesses proffered by the riddles, the lines
neutralize – or at the very least least, naturalize – the dragon’s actions: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 1.5in;">
He gesecean sceall <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
(hea)r(h on) hrusan, þær he hæðen gold<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
warað wintrum frod; ne byð him wihte ðy sel. (2275b-2277)<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<i>It is his nature to find a hoard in the earth, where, ancient and
proud, he guards heathen gold, though it does him no good.<o:p></o:p></i></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
The final line – which
can be more directly translated as “he is not a whit the better for it” – at
first seems a damning interpretation of the dragon’s ill use of treasure. The judgment passed on the dragon is, however,
very clearly situated anthropocentrically—and
a human frame is not the only view-point from which such action can be
perceived in <i>Beowulf, </i>a poem where
monsters live alongside the humans who shun them. The dragon’s non-human uses
for hoard treasure, then, and the consequences for humans who act in ignorance
of its possession, serves as a powerful reminder that for all the actions of
human heroes, the erstwhile backdrop for such action is far from inert. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">The narrative
juxtaposition of the thief’s action with the dragon’s rage highlights the
insufficiency of a purely human vision of community.<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn5" name="_ftnref5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
The disparate events by which the hoard, the dragon, the thief, and the Geats
are linked bring to light a larger network of associations, which includes
humans and human communities but is not limited to them. The poem articulates
this network most explicitly, perhaps, in its final lines. As Wiglaf and the Geats bury Beowulf:
“forleton eorla gestreon eorðan healdan, / golde on greote, þær his nu get lifað
/ eldum swa unnyt, swa hit æror wæs” ((they) let the earth hold the treasures
of earls, gold in the ground, where it yet remains, just as useless to men as
it was before, 3166-68). The most
important part of this statement is the final line: “eldum swa unnyt, swa hit
æror was,” as useless to men as it was before.
In this line, both the alliteration and the primary positioning
emphasize <i>eldum – </i>the dative construction (again) meaning “to men” or “for
men.” The suggestion, then, is not that
the treasure is not useful—rather, it is only not useful to men. As we have seen, men are not the only, and in
some cases not even the primary, entities that matter in <i>Beowulf.<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText" style="text-indent: .5in;">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<span style="font-size: 12.0pt;">Blunder might thus be
imagined as an organizational principle:
the blundering plunder of a thief in a hoard leads not only to the
destruction of the Geats, but also to the revelation – for <i>Beowulf’s</i> audience and more tragically its characters, that humans
cannot escape the world that surrounds them. It can be a motivator for rethinking <i>Beowulf’s </i>world, but also our own: an
ethical injunction to acknowledge, live with – and sometimes, die with – life’s
most basic fact: we are not alone. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div>
<!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><br clear="all" />
<hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" />
<!--[endif]-->
<br />
<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[1]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This paper is culled from a couple of sources:
A. my job talk, which is on “<i>Beowulf’s</i>
Collectivities” (probably better as “Beowulfian Ecologies,” but I hadn’t gotten
there yet when I wrote it, and B. the massive hole in my dissertation chapter
on <i>Beowulf</i>, in which I managed to
talk about everybody but the thief and everything but the manuscript. I may have made a very lame joke about the
session title when explaining this in the panel. Thankfully such ephemera are not preserved.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[2]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
insert Dr. Who “Everybody Lives” reference.<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn3">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref3" name="_ftn3" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[3]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
Text is from <i>Klaeber’s</i> <i>Beowulf, </i>4<sup>th</sup> ed. Translations are from Roy Liuzza’s <i>Beowulf, </i>2<sup>nd</sup> ed. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn4">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref4" name="_ftn4" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[4]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a>
This was a fun blunder of my own: I’d gotten the MS page in question, but not
saved my powerpoint. Some very quick
searching on my computer (and Roy Liuzza’s fantastic 2<sup>nd</sup> edition of
his translation of <i>Beowulf</i>) saved me.
<o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn5">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref5" name="_ftn5" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><!--[if !supportFootnotes]--><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 10.0pt; mso-ansi-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA; mso-fareast-font-family: Calibri; mso-fareast-language: AR-SA;">[5]</span></span><!--[endif]--></span></a> In
the longer version of this argument, I also examine the Lay of the Last
Survivor in a sustained reading of the ecologies implied by the poem’s
sustained examination of the hoard and its environs. <o:p></o:p></div>
</div>
</div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-13710457665312454142013-05-24T12:36:00.002-07:002013-05-24T13:10:24.962-07:00"The Fruit of Failure," M. W. Bychowski <!--[if gte mso 9]><xml>
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<br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zeRkxPFqF2k/UZ_Io8iIMSI/AAAAAAAARC8/vUvrhPxvCns/s1600/abstract_glass_fruit_wds.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-zeRkxPFqF2k/UZ_Io8iIMSI/AAAAAAAARC8/vUvrhPxvCns/s320/abstract_glass_fruit_wds.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Can
we fail yet? Where and when does failure direct us? To answer this I ask yet
another </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">question: What fruit is this?</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Experience
provides me with information, sensations, instances of fruit that are like it,
fruits that I have handled and tasted, but those fruits are not this fruit.
Those fruits provide formal and sensual representations which may serve as a
kind of utopic ideal of this fruit, but the particular reality of this fruit,
let’s say its taste, resists incorporation and conflation with these
expectations. These expectations are bound to fail, to be replaced by the
assertion of the unexpected particulars I experience when biting into it. That
is what reveals that these other fruits are utopic, because they are not
topical here and now. The real presence replaces the ideal present. In this
way, realism through contradicting the ideal, through failure, disturbs our sense
of the potential towards material possibilities. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JmtWft_2S8k/UZ_Io2y928I/AAAAAAAARDA/bl9Wpab7jqg/s1600/jameslewicki_eveofperelandra_100+-+Copy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-JmtWft_2S8k/UZ_Io2y928I/AAAAAAAARDA/bl9Wpab7jqg/s320/jameslewicki_eveofperelandra_100+-+Copy.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Failure
rhetoric as of late has tended to be utopic, in Jose Munoz’s line of thought,
revealing what is missing or failing in present realities and thus opens us up
to change. This does not go far enough. I argue that the experience of surprise
and failure in the topical reveals the reality that is missing in the imagined
present --- directing us towards changes which have already occurred and
towards a greater investment in the possibilities of the present, rather than
the potentials of the future. Put another way, failure is an object-ion to a
form of phantasmal subjectivity. Revolution is already underway, but it may be
enacted and directed by the fruits of the object-laden universe.</span><br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">An
imagined theoretical proof of this I draw from the speculative medievalist work
of CS Lewis from the 1940s, drawing on scenes from the <i>Great Divorce</i> where the narrator is brought to paradise through a
dream vision and from <i>Peralandra</i>
where the protagonist is brought to paradise through angelic intervention. In
both cases, Lewis’s paradises bring the reader from a present day world into an
aesthetic suggesting the medieval aesthetic suggesting an unreachable elsewhere
time and place in existence. Drawing from medieval accounts of paradise, Lewis
furnishes both with signature ecological pieces, giving particular attention,
not surprisingly, to trees and fruit which uniquely disturb time and space. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lVl9uthnWpw/UZ_IpCAOUiI/AAAAAAAARDI/kyeXt05VTJM/s1600/jameslewicki_eveofperelandra_100.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-lVl9uthnWpw/UZ_IpCAOUiI/AAAAAAAARDI/kyeXt05VTJM/s320/jameslewicki_eveofperelandra_100.jpg" width="319" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
the <i>Great Divorce</i>, fruits disappoint
a consumer attempt to collect, sell and make them into </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">capital gains by
asserting a distinctive space. In </span><i style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">Peralandra</i><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">,
fruits disappoint a sensualist’s attempt to continually repeat a pleasure by
asserting of distinctive time. In these ways, he provides object lessons on
transformation through experiences of fruits and failure, on how the critique
of failure that Munoz claims makes the now into a not now, may be instead
imagined through speculative realism as failures which find the Utopic in the
here and now, where we may better attend to and work with real material
possibilities.</span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Lewis’s
speculative work, what he called his “supposal” literature, were aimed he
claims to alter our experience of the now by imagining our own reality shifted
in time, space or quality. <i>The Great
Divorce</i> follows in the tradition of the medieval dream-vision, offering a
sleeper who travels to paradise in real time and encounters
things-in-themselves, a world where the essential being of things have
flourished to such a point as to make blades of grass, leaves on trees, and
fruits on the ground to definite that they resist hardily change, even in
location, through a kind of ontological persistence. In the preface to <i>the Great Divorce</i>, Lewis writes, “[A
thing] does not move towards unity but away from it and the creatures grow
further apart as they increase in perfection. Good, as it ripens, becomes
continually more different… from other good” (Lewis, GD 465). This “ripening” thus defines difference and
distinctiveness of matter. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Taking
the case of such essential ripening to actual fruit, the dreamer in the tale
encounters a scene where another stranger to the land discovers a tree which
has just dropped a pile of these hard as diamond apples in front of him.
Working towards the scheme he shared with the dreamer earlier, he attempts to
pick up as many as he can to bring back home and sell as a whole new category
of product to sell. Failing to lift the pile, he attempts to just pick up one
and carries it a little way until he gives up and traveler and fruit fall to
the ground. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Suddenly,
the water-fall beside the tree begins to speak to the traveler, saying
"Fool… put it down. You cannot take it back. There is not room for it
[somewhere else]. Stay here and learn to eat such apples. The very leaves and
the blades of grass in the wood will delight to teach you" (Lewis, GD,
492). The dreamer then turns away from the scene as Duns Scotus, the 13<sup>th</sup>
century theologian literally appears to give a lesson on haecceities and how
the “this-ness” of a thing can serve an impetus for more pragmatic ontological
and ethical relations to the world. Lewis, revealed as the dreamer, admits his
love for Scotus before an orgasmic vision of the manifold coincidence of time
and space in the moment of the real shatters his vision and awakens him.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">The
majority of Lewis’s other supposal literature take the form of a there and back
again narrative, where persons from the nominally real here and now travels to
another world, usually imagined overtly or covertly, expect for those familiar
with his sources, as a kind of medieval-ish other time and place. The most
familiar instance of this occurs across all the Chronicles of Narnia, but are
also present, much earlier, in his Space Trilogy, of which <i>Peralandra</i> forms the second installment. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">In
this tale, Ransom is carried away from his English cottage by an angel, where
CS Lewis literally watches him disappear into the heavens. From there he is
carried to Venus, which he discovers has recently awakened into life as a new
Paradise. It shares critical similarities to medieval visions of Eden,
including one man, one woman, a tempter, and a plethora of fruiting trees and
non-violent animals. Lewis however introduces key differences into this
Paradise which distinguish it both from traditional visions of paradise and
from the one imagined in the <i>Great
Divorce</i>. <i>Peralandra</i>, rather than
embodying the essential, persisting being of things, instead emphasizes the
sensual, transforming becoming of things. It is an entirely aquatic planet
where the only lands are floating islands <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">with hills and valleys,
but hills and valleys which changed places every minute so that only a
cinematograph could make a contour map of it… A photograph, omitting the colors
and the perpetual variation of shape, would make them look deceptively like
landscapes in our own world, but the reality is very different; for they, are
dry and fruitful like land but their only shape is the inconstant shape of the
water beneath them… furnished what would have been a dozen landscapes on
Earth-now level wood with trees as vertical as towers, now a deep bottom where
it was surprising not to find a stream, now a wood growing on a hillside, and
now again, a hilltop. (Lewis, P., 36-37).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
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<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">This
instance on the “now,” always different than any other “now” is an ethical, as
well as ontological, imperative for change, with Peralandra’s one and only rule
that no one may live on the planet’s one fixed land-mass. <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;"> This ontology of perpetual change
meets ethics for the protagonist after he discovers an orchard of trees on one
of these floating islands, where he tastes his first fruit, “so different from
every other taste…a totally new genus of pleasures,: something unheard of among
men” which he could only ever describe as “not like that.” Such an object is a
refusal of what Graham Harman calls the “undermining” and “over-mining” impulse
(Harman 8-11) to view it as an instrumental part of some-thing else, a topical
failure in the utopic dreams of the present’s relation to potential futures:<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">[As he was] about to
pluck a second one…for whatever cause, it appeared to him better not to taste
again. Perhaps the experience had been so complete that repetition would be a
vulgarity—like asking to hear the same symphony twice in a day… he stood...wondering
how often in his life on Earth he had reiterated pleasures not through desire,
but in the teeth of desire...as if life
were a film that could be unrolled twice
or even made to work backwards… of arresting the unrolling of the film.
(Lewis, P., 43).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">What Lewis
did with the spatial particularity and hardness in the Great Divorce, he here
does with temporal particularity and inconstancy in Peralandra, demonstrating
that each thing in each moment is so real that trying to subsume it into a kind
of ideal type which can be exchanged across the world or sustained throughout
time. Having experienced this scene, Ransom turns and meets “the Green Lady”
who explicates this principle: <o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin: 0in 0in 0.0001pt 0.5in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">One goes into the forest
to pick food and already the thought of one fruit rather than another has grown
up in one’s mind. Then, it may be, one
finds a different fruit... One joy was
expected and another is given… at the very moment of the finding there is. a
kind of…a setting aside. The picture of the fruit you have not found is still,
for a moment, before you. And if you wished/you could keep it there… after the good you
had expected, instead of turning it to the good you had got. You could refuse the real good; you could
make the real fruit taste insipid by thinking of the other. (Lewis, P. 53).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VqXpoSRSXdw/UZ_Ioa_QWdI/AAAAAAAARC4/Mt2CXrHdxeo/s1600/599317_10200448599596007_1114321680_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-VqXpoSRSXdw/UZ_Ioa_QWdI/AAAAAAAARC4/Mt2CXrHdxeo/s320/599317_10200448599596007_1114321680_n.jpg" width="320" /></a><span style="font-family: "Times New Roman"; font-size: 12.0pt;">Failing to
hold fruits across time and space reveals a disjuncture between the ideal &
failed now. Things </span><span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman'; font-size: 12pt;">we encounter are ever changing, never what we knew or
expected; failures disturb us from a utopian present to dwell-in-the-world here
and now; to taste its strangeness; All attest we don’t know what fruit this is,
but we can learn from it. Rather than look for potentials on the utopic horizon,
let us attend to the possibilities in the failure of the here and now, for
utopias that are not also topical will do the work of building for as Lewis writes, “Other things, other
blessings, other glories...But never that. Never in all worlds, that"
(Lewis, P., 65).</span></div>
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<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-bottom: 0in;">
<span style="font-family: "Times New Roman";">Harman, Graham. <i>The Quadruple Object</i>. Washington: Zero
Books, 2011.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lewis, C.S. “The Great Divorce.” <i>The Complete Works of CS Lewis</i>. New York: Harper Collins
Publishers, 1946<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-bottom: 0.0001pt;">
<span class="apple-style-span"><span style="background: white; font-family: "Times New Roman";">Lewis, C.S. <i>Peralandra</i>.
New York: Scribner Inc., 1943.<o:p></o:p></span></span></div>
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<!--EndFragment-->Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-81892919473677436352013-05-23T18:01:00.000-07:002013-05-23T18:04:52.307-07:00“Speculations and Rejections,” Nancy M. Thompson and Maggie M. Williams<div class="tr_bq">
</div>
As the session organizers stated in the call for papers, Blunder was a session that could explore “any aspect of scholarship on the Middle Ages” with the goal of tracing “...some of the ways in which ‘blunder’ has served as an historical actant, ‘making things happen’ (for good or ill) that could not be anticipated in advance and which (somewhat and somehow) escapes full human control.” Nancy and I chose to consider the ways in which our scholarly rejections might be productive (or not). We decided to highlight some of our concerns with the standard practice of anonymous peer review through a short performance piece. We hoped (and were delighted to find) that our dramatization would open up a discussion on the positive and negative aspects of the peer review process in the humanities. If our blunders can serve to inspire a revision of current practices, then we may be able to make something happen after all.<br />
<br />
This blog post provides the text of our handout and the script of our performance. Unfortunately, we do not have a video of the performance, but we included a few still photos to capture the mood. PLEASE comment on what you read and keep the conversation going!<br />
<br />
<b>HANDOUT:</b><br />
What you will hear today is a dramatization. Except for the opening salutation, the text of this presentation is a collage of actual quotations from letters we--and our colleagues in other areas--have received in response to articles submitted to peer-reviewed publications in the field of art history. Often, the critiques that appear in those letters are unnecessarily cruel, not constructive or helpful, and motivated more by politics than true collegiality. For many specialized areas, there is also the problem of content versus method, in which reviewers are experts on a given topic but potentially prejudiced against an alternative approach to that material. In many cases, the anonymity of peer reviewing is virtually impossible given the small pool of experts in a given field. Today, we hope to draw attention to these issues by highlighting some of the withering critiques that have heretofore remained hidden away in the shameful dark corners of our file cabinets.<br />
<br />
Here is a partial list of some blogs and websites that are bringing similar letters to light:<br />
<br />
<ul>
<li><a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/">http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://iheartrejectionletters.com/">http://iheartrejectionletters.com</a></li>
<li><a href="http://literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com/">http://literaryrejectionsondisplay.blogspot.com/</a></li>
</ul>
<br />
<b>SCRIPT:</b><br />
<br />
NANCY:<br />
<br />
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mhLjhsJsu3k/UZ6oO0qligI/AAAAAAAARCA/A1iRN9XK55I/s1600/NancyPutUpon.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="213" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-mhLjhsJsu3k/UZ6oO0qligI/AAAAAAAARCA/A1iRN9XK55I/s320/NancyPutUpon.jpg" width="320" /></a></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
(types on a laptop)<br />
Aaaand, send!<br />
(pushes back from computer, sighs)<br />
Ooh, I can’t wait to see what my peers think of my work!</blockquote>
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
<br />
MAGGIE:<br />
<blockquote>
(haughtily reading over her glasses, marks a paper feverishly while groaning in disdain. She then puts the paper down on the desk and picks up another sheet of paper, from which she reads) </blockquote>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gEfP7MkUyRI/UZ6oO0OL0SI/AAAAAAAARCE/756iMvvKHrw/s1600/MaggieFierce.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-gEfP7MkUyRI/UZ6oO0OL0SI/AAAAAAAARCE/756iMvvKHrw/s320/MaggieFierce.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
<blockquote>
Dear Professor Thompson,<br />
<br />
Thank you for submitting your essay “A Postcolonial/Feminist/Ecocritical/Vital Materialist/Phenomenological Reading of Some Medieval Works of Art” to the esteemed Journal of Medieval Studies. Although none of our reviewers are familiar with the “theories” that you have explored, many of them have spent decades immersing themselves in the minutiae of the period when the works were produced. They have weighed your paper, and, unfortunately, found it to be lacking.<br />
As you are no doubt aware, letters like this one are often comprised of a basic template, with some specific criticisms interspersed. In order to expedite the process, we have compiled a synopsis of critical comments which we hope you will find helpful:<br />
(<i>Actual quotes begin here:</i>) </blockquote>
<blockquote>
<ul>
<li>On the one hand, the basic premise of the essay is both interesting and worthy of exploration, and the author brings some useful insights. On the other hand, the article as a whole is rather unsatisfying. In addition to needing the usual careful editing for grammar and typos … I find the rhetoric an odd combination of hyperbole (at the beginning) and overreliance on secondary sources (throughout) used in unsophisticated ways....I find the references to/juxtapositions with modern thought here and there annoying, but that is perhaps more a reflection of my own stylistic predilections. More seriously, the introduction of the figure of Moses is poorly done, and besides, “Medieval Codex 312” (a manuscript I know something about!) has the earliest horned Moses, not “Medieval Codex 313”, which undercuts some of the force of the essay’s rhetoric (and reliability). I may as well point out too that while perhaps Babel was associated with Nimrod as a giant, that is not what is in the picture as far as I can tell. Finally, the essay doesn’t really bring the conclusion home in any satisfying way. ....</li>
<li>I'm unconvinced…</li>
<li>The author's most original contributions are the speculations about the multiple meanings of [the objects]... These speculations, however, are not based on any contemporary literary sources and derive entirely from the author's imagination. I question whether this is a sufficient source for a published article.</li>
<li>I believe this sort of approach has little value. It would be far better if a chronological and comprehensive review of the medieval interpretation of [the objects] was attempted. A compilation of literary sources is necessary first.</li>
<li>So the argument is really a set of assertions, with 'might haves' and 'could haves' instead of evidence.</li>
<li>Violation [of the manuscript] begets a certain type of empathy? But this should not be confused with scholarship.</li>
<li>The author needs to consider the possibility that visual similarities might reveal workshop links, (or, alternatively, common doctrinal/theological preoccupations) </li>
<li>Professor Thompson needs to read the most important dissertation in this area, a recent work by.... Nancy M. Thompson.</li>
<li>the work lacks the necessary scholarly apparatus</li>
<li>the essay is methodologically unsophisticated</li>
<li>You seem to cherish a sentimental attachment to your object of study that is distracting at best and, taken at its worst, conveys a lack of the critical distance necessary for a serious academic study</li>
<li>the author comes across as overly earnest</li>
<li>Most problematic, however, is the author's assumption that all her readers are Christians -- or even all Protestants since she dumps on Catholics, too. This is deeply offensive to all her academic readers. ... Finally, the topic, although a woman writer [sic], does not cover issues of gender or women's place.</li>
<li>...perhaps, but I remain unconvinced.</li>
</ul>
<br />
In conclusion, one of our editors would like to add that she is very sorry, not least because she’s devoted a tremendous amount of her own time and effort to get your paper to where it is, and she hopes this won't discourage you from submitting other work.<br />
I’m sorry to say that we have decided not to publish the paper, although we did enjoy reading it. </blockquote>
<blockquote>
Sincerely,<br />
The Editors</blockquote>
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-14964399399662503852013-05-23T18:00:00.000-07:002013-05-23T18:04:35.808-07:00"Scribal Blunders, Poetic Wonders: Reports from a Modern-Day Scribe," David Hadbawnik<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nRCDjr4mDNU/UZ5b9U7OTwI/AAAAAAAAQ7Y/1EgBv4va49I/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="156" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-nRCDjr4mDNU/UZ5b9U7OTwI/AAAAAAAAQ7Y/1EgBv4va49I/s200/1.jpg" width="200" /></a><br />
Three common types of mistakes in scribal practice—homoioteleuton (eyeskip of words, phrases, or lines); dittography (accidental repetition of words or letters); and haplography (the opposite of dittography: accidental omission caused by adjacent similar words or letters)—are familiar to those who study medieval manuscripts. Like textual instances of anamorphosis, these skips, stutters, and omissions fix us in place as readers, connecting us in a moment of pause with the all-too-human ghost that hovers behind the text. Carelessness, one imagines, bred of exhaustion, explains many of these scribal blunders. We picture the scribe, harried and hurried, toiling in a dim room at a desk surrounded by the tools of his trade: parchment, ink, books.<br />
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Then there are the “new” scribal errors
wrought by technology.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I4e3-lKebvc/UZ5b_gR-DhI/AAAAAAAAQ8g/k1JRMBbCrsc/s1600/2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="282" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-I4e3-lKebvc/UZ5b_gR-DhI/AAAAAAAAQ8g/k1JRMBbCrsc/s320/2.jpg" width="320" /></a>Print, digital publication, and auto-correct have proven every bit as error-prone as the human hand, leading to embarrassing and amusing blunders in their own right. In the pictured example, we see an online community of medievalists, friends, and scholars engaging in a game of one-upmanship in punning on the humorous mistake produced by auto-correct. The more serious question this encounter raises is whether we have outsourced the ability to make such blunders at all—is the evocative error that connects us with the medieval scribe severed and sealed off behind the digital scan, the pdf, the touch-screen? (And, coming soon, of course, the thought-screen.)<br />
<br />
<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QskSg66dlYY/UZ5cAKuoFLI/AAAAAAAAQ8w/5LNrvmWGkho/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; display: inline !important; float: right; line-height: 200%; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="280" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-QskSg66dlYY/UZ5cAKuoFLI/AAAAAAAAQ8w/5LNrvmWGkho/s320/3.jpg" width="320" /></a>My interest in scribal transmission is driven by my work as an editor and publisher—I simply want to see what happens when a text is copied out by hand rather than produced via print or digital technologies. Bruce Andrews—a leading member of the first generation of “Language writers” to emerge during the 1970s—calls for a means of overturning perceived hierarchies in language and poetry. “The key,” he writes, “to see how best to involve or implicate the Reader” (capital R). He characterizes this opening of the text as “a move toward participatory democracy—away from the Author’s sovereign authority,” with the goal of “empowering” the Reader. “But”—he asks—“what kind of Reader could be empowered? And what kind of textual experience is best equipped to deliver or make possible this Reader?” While attending to the nuances and complexities of rethinking scribal practice—the de-romanticizing of the hand as a technology undertaken by Jonathan Goldberg, the confused and confusing gendering of scribal vs. print transmission explored by Wendy Wall, and the concepts of chirographic presence <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn1">[1]</a> and scribal communities that Harold Love and Arthur Marotti attempt to explain—scribal practice, and its attendant errors, seems a productive place to look.<br />
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</div>
For this purpose, I chose an unpublished manuscript by the late poet kari edwards, the “Joan of Arc” project, housed in the poetry archive at University at Buffalo.<br />
<table cellpadding="0" cellspacing="0" class="tr-caption-container" style="float: right; text-align: right;"><tbody>
<tr><td style="text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bv-4eOgmx2w/UZ5cAXb-thI/AAAAAAAAQ88/C45aRbBlN2w/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: auto; margin-right: auto; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-Bv-4eOgmx2w/UZ5cAXb-thI/AAAAAAAAQ88/C45aRbBlN2w/s320/5.jpg" width="203" /></a></td></tr>
<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><br /></td></tr>
</tbody></table>
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7b9C3ZgDaoU/UZ5cADkYd5I/AAAAAAAAQ8s/GuoiDnhx8Tw/s1600/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-7b9C3ZgDaoU/UZ5cADkYd5I/AAAAAAAAQ8s/GuoiDnhx8Tw/s200/4.jpg" width="170" /></a>kari edwards <a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftn2" name="_ftnref2" style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 16px;" title="">[2]</a>, prolific and vocal as a transgender activist as well as a poet and artist, died of heart failure in 2006 at age 52. The Joan of Arc project—given the deliberately “unspeakable” title <b><i>dôNrm’-lä-püsl</i></b>—is described by edwards in a book proposal as “a reexamination of jehenne d’arc (la pucelle) … the story of la pucelle becomes only the framework for a language out of bounds, a narrative that is on the edge of consciousness.”<br />
<br />
“Language on the edge” seemed a productive angle for the scribal project, especially given the added element of edwards’ difficult handwriting. Her book proposal includes a plea for funds to hire an editor, explaining that she is “severely dyslexic.” Written out in somewhat chaotic fashion in a numbered set of composition notebooks, the text provides a number of scribal challenges.<br />
<br />
I set up a scriptorium at my table during the Buffalo Small Press Bookfair, an annual event that draws vendors and authors from around the country.<br />
<br />
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This fortuitously replicated at least the challenging atmosphere of a crowded, busy scriptorium. We know little about such spaces, but some 17th century witnesses describe “many scores of clerks” working to produce subscription newsletters (Love 125). As one can see from the images, volunteer scribes have limited workspace, and are surrounded by people talking and walking around them. They are both part of and removed from that public space: performative in the act of writing, but closed off in concentration. Scribes were given their choice of notebook pages to copy, as well as their method—they could attempt to render edwards’ text as accurately as possible, reproducing obvious misspellings, cross-outs, and arrangement, or they could edit and rearrange the text as they saw fit. Essentially, I wanted to give the scribes a choice between mimicking the amanuensis who first copied Beowulf, ignorant of Old English and accurate to a fault, or Grimur Jonsson Thorkelin, who knew just enough to make some emendations (<i>Klaeber’s Beowulf</i> xxvi).<br />
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With these pages in hand, I sought an
opportunity to produce second- and third-generation copies of edwards’ text, to
test the concept of chirographic presence and measure which mistakes might be
carried over, and which corrected in the process. In the meantime, I discovered
that some poet-acquaintances—Susana Gardner and Pattie McCarthy, of the dusie
kollektiv and Dusie Press—had pursued a scribal project of their own.<br />
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<o:p></o:p></div>
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<o:p> <b>Susana Gardner:</b></o:p></div>
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<o:p style="line-height: 200%;"> </o:p><span style="line-height: 200%;"> </span><b><span style="line-height: 32px;">Pattie McCarthy</span><span style="line-height: 200%;">:</span></b></div>
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McCarthy engages in a hand-written process for reasons that dovetail with some of my own concerns regarding technology and community. “I wanted to handwrite those poems specifically in a sort of penitential way,” she reports, “like writing ‘I will not chew gum in class’ 100 times on the blackboard.” This calls to mind Goldberg’s characterization of handwriting as a “disciplinary submission,” a rote activity best rendered with as little variation as possible—one that also echoes strongly with the punitive tone of Chaucers <i>Wordes Unto Adam</i>—interestingly, in this case, a self-inflicted punishment. McCarthy adds that the poems were originally drafted as text messages to her husband and friends, as she sat in a waiting room while her son received occupational therapy for Asperger’s syndrome. Thus, “those poems are really fraught for me with questions about my son’s privacy … handwriting them made me think about every word I was putting out there.” Here, we might think of Love’s “scribal community,” with its dual functions of disseminating “privileged information” and “bonding groups of like-minded individuals” (177). The hand becomes a means of reversing the pull of technology—a retreat from the too-easy spreading of information, a return to restricted intimacy augmented by the difficulty of making out McCarthy’s script.<br />
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For the second scribal session, I chose the occasion of a friend’s end-of-semester backyard barbecue. Less chaotic, this atmosphere still offered a social setting in which scribes transitioned from a conversational circle to one of quiet concentration as they selected pages and copied them out. The aim was to produce a manuscript tree similar to the one mapped out by Ralph Hanna, based on Manly and Rickert’s scheme.<br />
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<tr><td class="tr-caption" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: xx-small; line-height: 32px; text-align: start;">Ralph Hanna’s diagram of Manly-Rickert Chaucer manuscript scheme</span></td></tr>
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He writes, “Here O is Chaucer’s holograph, a text that likely resembled Shakespearean ‘foul papers’; O1 is the archetype of all surviving copies” (137). In place of O1 , of course, is my photocopy of edwards’ original. Given enough time, scribes, and scribal branches, one could generate enough variations that a reader could work backwards, reverse-engineering the copies in an attempt to arrive at an original, authoritative text.<br />
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<b>Results<o:p></o:p></b></div>
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The scribe is immediately confronted with a number of cruxes: edwards’ handwriting, uneven indents and margins, seeming neologisms, uncertainty over spelling and word choice, crossed-out words. Scribe 1 has attempted to remain faithful to page layout, yet chooses to interpret at several points, and finally reverses the order of text at the bottom of the page, perhaps from having run out of room.<br />
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Scribe 2 adheres even more closely to edwards’ text, maintaining even pen-stroke similarity, cross-outs, and a misspelling likely caused by dyslexia or haste.<br />
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Scribe 3 makes interpretive gestures, but also indicates uncertainty with question marks, deferring editorial decisions.<br />
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Up to now, what we might call the chirographic presence of the author’s hand, even in photocopy, has kept first-generation scribes from straying far from the original. <br />
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This second-generation scribe takes more liberties, employing the negative space of the page (perhaps suggested by edwards’ frequent use of ellipses), recasting cruxes as visual elements, poetically stretching the language and reconstituting words in ways that evoke edwards’ stated aim of making a “language out of bounds.” Moreover, for the first time, we must consider the materiality of the writing—here tiny, all-caps; and ink—a thicker felt tip or ballpoint—to the scribal process. The process resembles in miniature the transmission of John Donne’s poetry described by Moratti. It begins with the relative control of circulation among an “authorized coterie” (148), but moves outwards, away from authorial control (149), towards the “creative freedom that collectors and imitators in the system of manuscript transmission felt free to exercise” (153). <br />
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But the process is unpredictable. Scribe 3a feels free to reorganize Scribe 3’s line breaks, which followed edwards, into more syntactically logical units. Yet 3a retains 3’s uncertainty about some words, and creates a jaggedness on the left margin not found in the original.<br />
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Working from a different page of the text, Scribe 4 introduces an “eyeskip” type of error, missing a line midway down the page. Also, in an attempt to accurately render edwards’ own illegibility, the scribe creates interpretive difficulties that haunt future copies. <br />
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For the final page, Scribe 5 rearranges
edwards’ slanted text, exacerbates some of the handwriting issues, and
introduces new errors, shortening “message” to “mess” and inserting
“hardboiled,” perhaps inspired by edwards’ writing of “bequeathed,” though that
word is also copied. <o:p></o:p><br />
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Scribe 5a reproduces some of 5’s errors, but cleans up the presentation, and recovers “message” from “mess.” <br />
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Again, the neat cursive writing and letter-format introduced by Scribe 5a, while markedly different from the original, suggests a likely way that this page might be laid out for print.<br />
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<b style="line-height: 200%;">Conclusions</b></div>
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When Chaucer admonishes Adam Scriven, he not
only establishes a top-down relationship between “making” and “writing” that persists
through English literary history, he also expresses an anxiety: that the error might lie with the original, might
be written into the original in ways that no scribe can ever correct. Chaucer,
himself a professional bureaucrat subject to punishment for slips of the pen,
responsible for keeping records in his own hand (Carlson 11), worries that
anyone can change something at any point in the line of transmission. Errors
level the playing field between author and reader in productive ways, ways that
Bruce Andrews and other avant-garde practitioners often call for. Copying a
difficult text such as edwards’ <i>joan of
arc</i>, the scribe is thrust into a collaborative environment, making
decisions that would all have been elided in a print edition. While worrisome
and opaque, errors—their inherent presence in an original, and multiplication
by the scribe’s hand—tend toward a kind of fellowship, individuation, and
freedom, which I look forward to further exploring.<o:p></o:p></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VdoVxLxQqso/UZ5eUxPAo1I/AAAAAAAAQ_Y/mSI2vPxjqvQ/s1600/36.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; line-height: normal; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center; text-indent: 0px;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-VdoVxLxQqso/UZ5eUxPAo1I/AAAAAAAAQ_Y/mSI2vPxjqvQ/s1600/36.jpg" /></a><br />
<br />
For that, <a href="mailto:dh37@buffalo.edu">I need your help</a>. Pattie McCarthy has
agreed to provide a chapbook length set of poems for scribal copying later this
summer, to be published by eth press, a venture under the umbrella of punctum
books I’ve undertaken with co-editors Dan Remein and Chris Piuma. I envision
enlisting a number of scribes, with the aim of producing 50-100 handwritten
copies of the book. If each scribe
copies out three books, he or she can keep one—or trade it with another
scribe—and provide two for the scribal publication run. Together, we can
produce new errors—new poems—and find out what happens.</div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><br /></span></div>
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<span style="font-size: x-small; line-height: 200%; text-indent: 0.5in;"><b>Works Cited</b></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-align: left; text-indent: 0.5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Andrews, Bruce. “Hearing Ends in Darkness” (course packet, University at
Buffalo, Buffalo,<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">NY, Fall 2008).<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Carlson, David. <i>Chaucer’s Jobs</i>.
New York: Palgrave, 2004.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Gardner, Susana. <i>Oceanids [dream
pomes]</i>. New York: Dusie Kollectiv, 2013.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Hanna, Ralph III. <i>Pursuing History:
Middle English Manuscripts and Their Texts</i>. Stanford: Stanford U P, 1996.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">kari edwards papers. <i>dôNrm’-lä-püsl</i>.
Poetry Archive, University at Buffalo Library.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><i>Klaeber’s Beowulf</i>. Edited by R.D. Fulk, Robert E. Bjork, and
John D. Niles. Buffalo: U of Toronto P, 2009.</span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%; text-indent: .5in;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;"><o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Love, Harold. <i>Scribal Publication
in 17<sup>th</sup> Century England</i>. New York: Clarendon, 1993.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">Marotti, Arthur F. <i>Manuscript,
Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric</i>. Ithaca: Cornell U P, 1995.<o:p></o:p></span></div>
<div class="MsoNormal" style="line-height: 200%;">
<span style="font-size: x-small;">McCarthy, Pattie. <i>Domestic
Cryptography Survey II</i>. New York: Dusie Kollectiv, 2013.</span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div>
<br />
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<div id="ftn1">
<div class="MsoFootnoteText">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref1" name="_ftn1" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">[1]</span></span></span></a> “Chirographical transmission represents an intermediate stage between oral and typographical transmission in which the values of orality—and the fact of presence—are still strongly felt. The written word is therefore more likely than the printed word to promote a vocal or sub-vocal experience of the text, and a sense of validation through voice…Derrida rejects both this priority assumed for speech and the ‘reality’ of presence” (Love 142). “The notion of ‘presence,’ whether or not regarded as philosophically sustainable, provides us with a method of discriminating between modes of signification as being more or less distanced from a presumed source of self-validating meaning” (Love 144).<o:p></o:p><br />
<br /></div>
</div>
<div id="ftn2">
<div class="MsoNormal">
<a href="http://www.blogger.com/blogger.g?blogID=4903077033901298760#_ftnref2" name="_ftn2" title=""><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span class="MsoFootnoteReference"><span style="font-family: Garamond; font-size: 12pt;">[2]</span></span></span></a> Images of kari edwards' manuscript reproduced with permission of the edwards literary estate, as well as the Poetry Archive at University at Buffalo. Images of Pattie McCarthy and Susana Gardner's books reproduced with permission of the authors, respectively.</div>
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<!--EndFragment--><br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-20453753089017214102013-05-23T17:30:00.000-07:002013-05-23T18:11:49.756-07:00"Slices and Splices," Marian Bleeke and Anne Harris <br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FNBl0wVxRXg/UZ6mL-jZ_CI/AAAAAAAARBY/RHiP9I-Kweg/s1600/photo-5.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-FNBl0wVxRXg/UZ6mL-jZ_CI/AAAAAAAARBY/RHiP9I-Kweg/s320/photo-5.JPG" width="238" /></a>In advance of this year’s International Congress on Medieval Studies, we (Marian Bleeke and Anne Harris) posted the following CFP on the Material Collective’s Facebook page:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Medievalists, ever want to cut your Kalamazoo paper up into little pieces? Let us do that for you - and turn it into something else. Poetry.<br />
Anne Harris and I are going to be presenting found word poetry based on papers from the conference as "Slices and Splices" in the Blunder panel sponsored by the Babel Working Group on Saturday afternoon. And we need raw materials.<br />
If you would like to see your work transformed, you can either send it one of us in advance (m.bleeke@csuohio.edu or aharris@depauw.edu) or give one of us your hard copy after you present.<br />
We will keep our sources anonymous.</blockquote>
<i>This was the result:</i><br />
<br />
When it was still a word of body, blunder meant to stumble around blindly, to grope about, to lurch and sway numbly. It’s from the Old Norse blundra – “to shut one’s eyes.” It embodies the consequence of the loss of perception, of perspective –especially when the choice not to see is yours, especially when you close your eyes to the bigger picture. Blunder as self-sabotage, blunder as willing yourself to rail against the tempest (or some other enormous thing you can’t control) with your eyes closed. Now, it can be a word of mind, of language action, of event. Now, we can soften the idea with French, a faux pas, more elegant than a blunder, side stepping the issue. Now, right now, with cutting and seeking and groping blindly through words and purposefully shutting our eyes to the big picture in favor of the little words, we can think of blunder as the writer before the thing fumbling for words. Looking at image, text, object, idea and willing the words to come. They do as they please. This is a few minutes in the blunder of language, those few minutes pulled from hours of writing in which the words pull you along, sentences separate from paragraphs, and words jostle the coherence of the page away. This is the fantasy, built on the mistrust of language and the yearning for words of cutting and pasting. I think I love words more than I love language: five, dogma, crenelated, vignette, Coptic, ruminating, contact, gruesome, fostered, perpetrators… I could do this all day. And those aren’t even my words, and yet I love them. I take them from someone else’s paper and savor them. In our blundering, we asked blindly for papers we might cut up. Never mind about meaning, we can blunder through that later. What we asked for, really, was trust. Blunder takes trust. It leans on trust to blunder through the blindness, the misstep, the ridicule, and the realization. To get to the other side of blundering – to open your eyes to see the big picture again. Quick! Close them, back to blunder. Back to the few minutes of every paper in which we trust ourselves to play with a word, take it out of context and let it be, let it become. Is this the prosaic brushing up against the poetic? We can blunder through that later. This is the fun of blunder, the blind man’s bluff, the lunging and the catching of a word, a phrase, a sentence. The delight in calling it poetry.<br />
<br />
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<span style="background-color: white; background-position: initial initial; background-repeat: initial initial; line-height: 150%;"><i>And so I have read and been taken by and wanted and
took words and this is what happened:<o:p></o:p></i></span></div>
<!--EndFragment--><br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GypTUljDtgQ/UZ6kgQ3WFMI/AAAAAAAARAM/DNvlUKEHHw0/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><br /></a>
<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I entreat the audience for help<br />
In my quest for comparable imagery<br />
[for] our much-heralded “return” to the object<br />
objects par excellence<br />
the phenomena that are at work<br />
works [that] call attention to their own facture<br />
unrolled and read aloud<br />
they “speak” of their own significance<br />
girding [their] rhetorical force<br />
by the disruptive presence of that which is supposed to be absent.<br />
Artists turned pigment into glass<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>medieval efflorescence<br />
copying, replication, and remediation<br />
For his tomb announced that he was dead, dead, dead, except that he was still alive!<br />
dozens of copycat tales,<br />
mimetic performativity<br />
Alice thus taunts images<br />
[seeking] some measure of understanding<br />
in this tangle of concerns<br />
just adjacent to the missing segment.</blockquote>
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GypTUljDtgQ/UZ6kgQ3WFMI/AAAAAAAARAM/DNvlUKEHHw0/s1600/1.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-GypTUljDtgQ/UZ6kgQ3WFMI/AAAAAAAARAM/DNvlUKEHHw0/s320/1.jpg" width="278" /></a><b>Rupture!</b></div>
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Rather abruptly</div>
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the Raising of Lazarus could almost be happening.</div>
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Fantastically imagined on a vivid blue ground</div>
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built solely on style.</div>
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Instead of imagining</div>
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the world outside of the window itself.</div>
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The web of leading is cut to compose</div>
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a break in the path</div>
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to the border and to the stars</div>
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Illumination was active,</div>
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you see here and here. </div>
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Until the swath of green </div>
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glowing and deeply colored</div>
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stops the illusion.</div>
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To populate the lights</div>
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a foreigner, a Frenchman, threw a rock.</div>
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And dramatically shifted the opaque decoration,</div>
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the darkest creases that dark light so desired,</div>
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and the especially problematic painted indications</div>
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of shining colors now-destroyed.</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7VKBVFcYgGA/UZ6kgc9qLhI/AAAAAAAARAI/8IVtKSce25s/s1600/2.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-7VKBVFcYgGA/UZ6kgc9qLhI/AAAAAAAARAI/8IVtKSce25s/s320/2.jpg" width="239" /></a><b>Something Native</b></div>
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The deposed king inhabited the island</div>
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and fabricated memorializing self-identifications;</div>
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time consuming indigenous traditions,</div>
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reticulated headdresses with elaborate ornamentation,</div>
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adroitly dynamic sword handling,</div>
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and the active veneration of horizontal continuity</div>
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Our lengthy and intimate allegiance to</div>
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this thriving concern deliberately kept us</div>
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assimilated and assumed a sense of the singular</div>
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theoretically allowing our previously prized</div>
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ongoing explorations </div>
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to receded into oblivion.</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2iiDEN7obC0/UZ6kgVl2QVI/AAAAAAAARAU/ds1ykhb6VhY/s1600/3.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-2iiDEN7obC0/UZ6kgVl2QVI/AAAAAAAARAU/ds1ykhb6VhY/s320/3.jpg" width="240" /></a></div>
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<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ha0J792U8-M/UZ6kgs_cugI/AAAAAAAARAQ/5cRssk4tWMo/s1600/4.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-Ha0J792U8-M/UZ6kgs_cugI/AAAAAAAARAQ/5cRssk4tWMo/s320/4.jpg" width="240" /></a><b>Surviving Ensembles</b></div>
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Surviving ensembles </div>
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That descended from above</div>
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Promoted brief but spectacular</div>
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Astronomical associations</div>
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<br /></div>
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The Golden Wood commanded</div>
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Create</div>
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Continuity</div>
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Long – standing</div>
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Further,</div>
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More</div>
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u3GlAFh3GxE/UZ6kgpTdIGI/AAAAAAAARAo/3ZXZmxp0PBE/s1600/5.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u3GlAFh3GxE/UZ6kgpTdIGI/AAAAAAAARAo/3ZXZmxp0PBE/s320/5.jpg" width="240" /></a><b>Fierce Prejudice</b></div>
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Illumination is delicate</div>
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Like giants towering beside their tower</div>
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All scraggly-haired and bulbous-nosed</div>
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Ruminating on interconnections that are</div>
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Most curious</div>
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And utterly spurious</div>
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<br /></div>
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Our lingering fears are rendered again and again like</div>
<div>
Apocalyptic hordes only purportedly imprisoned</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
How estranged we are – yet</div>
<div>
Are all interrelated</div>
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In harboring a love that was</div>
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Already lost at the time</div>
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wPB0YyxCZKw/UZ6kg239zfI/AAAAAAAARAY/YxD1tFw4Bq0/s1600/6.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-wPB0YyxCZKw/UZ6kg239zfI/AAAAAAAARAY/YxD1tFw4Bq0/s1600/6.jpg" /></a><b>Purposes of Procreation</b></div>
<div>
I had analytical approaches</div>
<div>
Sumptuous objects</div>
<div>
Pairs of peacocks and leonine quadrupeds</div>
<div>
And some real work to do</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Now, turned inside out, and, indeed, halved</div>
<div>
I have penned a monograph</div>
<div>
Turned pigment into glass</div>
<div>
And now rival creation itself in my </div>
<div>
Mimetic performativity</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
It is a luxurious document</div>
<div>
Girding its rhetorical force with indigo sections</div>
<div>
Full-fulio swaths of small gold dots</div>
<div>
And a sumptuous silken pastdown</div>
<div>
Beautifully bejeweled beneath the golden script</div>
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<br /></div>
<div>
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--IUoJ26XraU/UZ6khDCgHzI/AAAAAAAARAc/xZ6TqtgrQNE/s1600/7.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/--IUoJ26XraU/UZ6khDCgHzI/AAAAAAAARAc/xZ6TqtgrQNE/s320/7.jpg" width="240" /></a>Even its more mundane-looking representational strategies</div>
<div>
Are painted to look like precious Byzantine silk</div>
<div>
It is a site of replication and re-presentation</div>
<div>
A reflection of its partner</div>
<div>
And a copy without an origin<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
</div>
<div>
</div>
<div>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YzcRGTchHR4/UZ6khlsX7vI/AAAAAAAARAg/QlrgBo3T9nc/s1600/8.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-YzcRGTchHR4/UZ6khlsX7vI/AAAAAAAARAg/QlrgBo3T9nc/s1600/8.jpg" /></a><b>The Effort of Cutting</b></div>
<div>
The thing after the cutting</div>
<div>
Wants to stand and hold fast</div>
<div>
Simultaneously bearing witness</div>
<div>
To its easily destroyed manufacture</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Trees and stones</div>
<div>
Are always forever moving towards</div>
<div>
Illusions of the analogous, an invented humanity</div>
<div>
As statue oscillates after stone</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
The dice tumbling</div>
<div>
Escalate quickly upwards as an immortal god</div>
<div>
<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VHqcIZMk910/UZ6khxRQHOI/AAAAAAAARAk/nYYia5GFP-Q/s1600/9.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em; text-align: center;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-VHqcIZMk910/UZ6khxRQHOI/AAAAAAAARAk/nYYia5GFP-Q/s320/9.jpg" width="240" /></a>Obsolete in language if not in practice</div>
<div>
Of prayer and poem in their pristine state</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
What had been whole, an impossible object</div>
<div>
Is now molten and messy, everywhere and inexplicable</div>
<div>
A reliable source of ignition, of volatile shattering that</div>
<div>
Simultaneously explodes and disintegrates into powder</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
A knife cutting</div>
<div>
Forever cut off</div>
<div>
As human presence</div>
<div>
What a lovely, creepy idea</div>
</div>
<div>
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<br /></div>
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-33393295777697911262013-05-23T16:49:00.003-07:002013-05-23T18:05:16.988-07:00Failblog/Fumblr, Asa Simon Mittman and Shyama Rajendran<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>I fell into a weird syntactical trap and just couldn’t get out. Thank goodness that it’s in print forever. I blame scholasticism. </i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>–from Karl Steel’s post, “<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2012/10/killing-is-ok-or-not-or-both-or-neither.html">Killing is OK. Or not. Or both. Or neither</a>.”</i></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
<span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Sometimes ideas don’t work. Failure is an inevitable fact of life, and we have all experienced it—that moment where students look completely confused, that paper with a logical hole the size of the (former) Soviet Union, that presentation that just did not fly. In the humanities, however, we do not often discuss our failures. So how can we understand the utility of being wrong? In the sciences, when an experiment fails, the results are often published so that the community can benefit from the errors. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i><span class="Apple-tab-span" style="white-space: pre;"> </span>Let me assure you that I very much know that WISCONSIN IS NOT MICHIGAN.</i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i>–from Jonathan Hsy’s post, “<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/wisconsin-is-not-michigan-wheres-troy.html">Wisconsin is not Michigan (Where's Troy?)</a>”</i></div>
</blockquote>
<div>
In the humanities, we’re not often demonstrably “wrong,” since much of what we offer is interpretive. You might disagree with Asa’s reading of the Wonders of the East, but would be hard-pressed to conclusively invalidate it. Still, many of us are still in a 19th-century paradigm of the lonely scholar, toiling in solitude, with a glass of absinthe at the elbow, so our failures are solitary. When I head down a wrong-headed path, I (hopefully) learn something. But you don’t.</div>
<div>
I have since seen all three manuscripts, and it turns out that I was not only flatly wrong, but that the actual situation is much weirder … The error is there, in perpetuity, when the bizarre truth is much more interesting.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
This is why we started “Fumblr: The Academic Failblog” a place for any of us to post our scholarly missteps for all and sundry to read and learn (and laugh) from. </div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>In the long run, as I worked through the many consequences of my ‘failure to understand,’ I followed more investigations, worked through anxiety, thought deeply and—at last—reached an acceptance of the fact that I investigate a historical period that will always offer up such instances of profound discomfort. To wish it were otherwise would be to wish away that aspect of the problem that continues to inspire me, as much as it remains a challenge.</i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i><i>–from Emily Gephart’s post, “<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2012/11/the-failures-of-symbolism.html">The Failures of Symbolism</a>”</i></i></div>
<i>
</i></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: left;">
We no longer aspire to be solitary figures, toiling in isolation. We want to embrace collaboration, to facilitate community through the work that we produce. This shift is in part attributable to the ways in which scholars have embraced social media—we blog, Tweet, and have lively Facebook conversations. However, the veneer of optimism that we bear about the community created by these spaces masks a truth that we do not often acknowledge publicly: what we do is hard. We make mistakes when we teach, we constantly revise what we write, and we frequently falter, and then learn, and keep going. The brilliant conference papers and amazing publications are not achieved with ease, and we must remember the battles as much as we cheer the victories, and might stop for a minute to mourn each other’s losses.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
We bandied about a few titles:</div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
[Grandiloquent]:“Before the Phoenix Rises: Swimming in the Ashes of the Humanities.”<br />
[Goofy]: “Faceplanting: Tripping Over the Scholarly Cracks.”<br />
[Self-Abusing]: “Head, Meet Desk”<br />
[Colloquial]: “Scholarly Facepalms.”<br />
And our final [for now] decision: “Fumblr.”</blockquote>
<div>
All are probably wrong, but perhaps one or more is productively so.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
“Fumblr” is an attempt to create a space where these failures and struggles can be shared. The idea for the blog was, aptly, germinated in a fumble—a throwaway joke in response to the question of how one encourages undergraduate students to take risks when they are afraid to fail. We might attribute our hesitance to wear our failures as openly as our successes to the fact that our products are valued highly in the university, while our processes are invisible ghosts. However, it is the dynamic, transformative nature of process that allows us to reach what we consider a product. Further, the silence surrounding the conversation about the processes inherent in scholarship and in learning to teach does a disservice to graduate students and early career scholars, prioritizing product over discovery. If we are serious about experimental approaches and risk taking, we have to be prepared to fail, at least on occasion. </div>
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
<i>The whole conference, while fantastic, was filled with these little failures. Fortunately, there were some truly wonderful people whose kindnesses helped prevent these failures from ruining my experience.</i><br />
<div style="text-align: right;">
<i><i>–from an anonymous post about “<a href="http://academicfailblog.blogspot.com/2013/01/literally-falling-down-flight-of-stairs.html">Literally falling down a flight of stairs</a>”</i></i></div>
<i>
</i></blockquote>
<div style="text-align: right;">
<br /></div>
<div>
We are transformed not only by our successes but by our difficulties, and by the responses of our friends and colleagues to them. “Fumblr” is designed to encourage a collaborative space, with contributors (rather than authors) who share their stories, with posts related to research, teaching, writing, job searches, and so on. Further, we hope to foster a sense of community in which we can struggle together just as easily as we succeed together.</div>
<div>
<br /></div>
<div>
Join us in faltering, in tripping over the cracks in our own arguments, in falling down the solipsistic rabbit holes of our personal-professional preoccupations. <i>Fumble with us, so we can all take a step forward, together.</i></div>
<div>
<br /></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-53804053982861420032013-05-15T08:36:00.001-07:002013-05-15T08:36:27.023-07:00Reading ListWhen someone asked me, after [Asa and Shyama's] presentation at the Babel session at the Zoo, what I was going to submit to the blog, my first response was to blush deeply, for there are many and many screw-ups I might own up to and I am not entirely sure I want them out there in the blogosphere, given some painful recent experiences that have made me more than ordinarily self-doubting. However, this one is a classic, and since I repeat it on a regular basis, I feel it is my signature fumble; admitting to not having read something everyone else has read (or claims to have read).<br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CjtS3mE7498/UZOrMcjCyyI/AAAAAAAAQ4I/WhtWHh9fKrI/s1600/image-299602-panoV9free-cbka.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="191" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-CjtS3mE7498/UZOrMcjCyyI/AAAAAAAAQ4I/WhtWHh9fKrI/s400/image-299602-panoV9free-cbka.jpg" width="400" /></a></div>
So, it’s 1994 or thereabouts. I am in graduate school. I live in a bungalow with two other grad students, one in history, one a fellow art historian. We throw awe-inspiring parties where Comp Lit grad students end up overcoming their disciplinary aversions and sleeping with Political Science grad students, and the shrubbery is full of underpants, wine bottles, and other such items in the morning. It is my housemates’ fabulousness (and trust funds) that make this all possible. I view these parties as a form of penitential suffering; I really hate it when other people use my bedroom for their dangerous liaisons.</div>
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Also, some of the other grad students are Horrible People. I am standing in the garden, holding a beer and having one of those screamed conversations you have at loud parties. The funny, handsome, and arrogant N says, “I hate it when people in grad seminar pretend to have read something they obviously haven’t read.” I nod and agree. He says, “I make it a policy just to announce that I haven’t read it. If they have a problem with that, they’re posers and snobs.” I nod and agree some more, and then I shout, “Exactly. I think we should all go around and admit what we haven’t read, and just get it over with.” G, who is in Rhetoric, raises her beer, as if this is a toast, and announces, “I haven’t read Of Grammatology.” This sounds radical and daring – remember that G is in Rhetoric and it’s the early nineties at Berkeley. N the good looking and already-published in <i>Representations</i> says, “I haven’t read anything by Norman Mailer.” Well, I have and I am tempted to flaunt it by saying, “Don’t bother.” Instead, fool that I am, I chime in, “I haven’t read Kant.”<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sFGTcYf-bMc/UZOrMUth3QI/AAAAAAAAQ4M/Y4Rs1bp-ddM/s1600/5-immanuel-kant.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="240" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-sFGTcYf-bMc/UZOrMUth3QI/AAAAAAAAQ4M/Y4Rs1bp-ddM/s320/5-immanuel-kant.jpg" width="320" /></a> </div>
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The conversation stops. The entire party stops. Silence absorbs my confession.</div>
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N, smiling, looks at me pityingly. “I wouldn’t announce that, if I were you.”</div>
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G, miming utter shock, not smiling. “But you’re an art historian, right?”</div>
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I always make my students read (some) of <i>Critique of Judgment</i> now in my MFA proseminar, thus inoculating them against this particular form of the fumble, but it’s inevitable. As Hugh of St.-Victor observed, “There are those who wish to read everything. Do not try to do this. Let it alone. The number of books is infinite, and you cannot follow infinity.”</div>
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Alexa Sand, Utah State University</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-42160203869084967982013-01-06T10:38:00.000-08:002013-01-06T10:40:10.190-08:00Literally falling down a flight of stairs<br />
<i>A grad student fumbles right down a flight of stairs:</i><br />
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<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jGHbeaWQSfY/UOnE6r8v3OI/AAAAAAAAQAE/bRpwA6gwxUo/s1600/Nude+Descending+a+Staircase+No.+2,+1912,+Marcel+Duchamp.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="400" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-jGHbeaWQSfY/UOnE6r8v3OI/AAAAAAAAQAE/bRpwA6gwxUo/s400/Nude+Descending+a+Staircase+No.+2,+1912,+Marcel+Duchamp.jpg" width="241" /></a></div>
I was really excited about having been accepted as a participant in the graduate workshop that preceded the International Society of Anglo-Saxonists conference in Madison, Wisconsin. However, a few weeks before the conference I tripped going down a flight of stairs, and as a result I dislocated my ankle, fractured my fibula, and tore one of the ligaments. A week before the workshop began, I had surgery to install a plate on my fibula and repair the rest of the damage. My surgeon said that I would be fine to go to the workshop, which I didn't want to miss as we were going to be creating our own reproductions of pages from manuscripts (I had chosen a page from an illustrated Prudentius manuscript).<br />
<br />
For most of the week in between the surgery and the workshop I was knocked out on some pretty heavy duty painkillers, but the day before I left I switched over to extra strength Tylenol, because there would be no point in going if I was loopy and half asleep for the entire conference. I took a practice drive around Fargo, as I would be driving solo from my parents' house to Madison, and went out to see the new Harry Potter movie to make sure that I could sit upright for a couple hours without being in a recliner or my bed. This was the first time in weeks that I had left the house for anything but doctor visits. The outing was a success, and so I breathed a little easier as I prepared for the car trip.<br />
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The next day I drove nearly non-stop to Madison, with only one gas stop along the way. When I arrived, I was invited out for dinner with some of the other workshop participants, at which point I realized that I had neglected to think about one fact: that the conference was entirely a pedestrian affair in the late summer heat, and I had not walked more than the distance to a car in several weeks. Fortunately, dinner that first night was only a couple blocks away, but I was already exhausted by the time I got there. This manifested in forgetting basic facts, like the name of the senior scholar I had been on a panel with at Kalamazoo a few months prior, and I only managed to figure it out after about ten minutes of racking my brain, by which point the conversation had entirely escaped from me. The whole conference, while fantastic, was filled with these little failures. Fortunately, there were some truly wonderful people whose kindnesses helped prevent these failures from ruining my experience of the conference. At the very least, I was saved from any greater embarrassments, like someone walking in on me as I attempted to get dressed after a shower in the communal bathroom in the middle of the night.<br />
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While dozens of people present at the conference will be able to identify this fumblr, it is anonymous to prevent the accidental discovery by job search committees in the near future...</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-89598971216787671412012-12-01T07:41:00.001-08:002012-12-01T09:20:00.890-08:00Longing for Vifgage<div class="p1">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GISAQgZ4Tr0/ULollCsf2MI/AAAAAAAAPzM/fay3AexOq5k/s1600/Farmer.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><br /><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-GISAQgZ4Tr0/ULollCsf2MI/AAAAAAAAPzM/fay3AexOq5k/s1600/Farmer.jpg" /></a>I recently found myself at a banker’s table signing an enormous stack of papers to refinance our house. As I wrote out my signature for the twenty-fifth time, I couldn’t help but wish for hot wax and a seal, something to make it all even <i>more</i> medieval. Then upon a page appeared the word “mortgage” and perhaps due to distraction or just general waywardness I launched into how wonderful that word is in its French medieval origins. It was Friday afternoon and we were the banker’s last meeting and so he let me go on and on about the difference between mort-gag and vif-gage which I presented to him as the difference between something inert being held while a debt is owed vs. someone alive being held while a debt is owed. Warming to my subject, and to inexcusable neo-medieval fantasizing, I went on about duke’s nephews being held in vifgage while the duke paid his debts, and about how glad we are that it’s all mortgage today, no more vifgage.</div>
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<br /></div>
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Somewhere at some point I realized that this was more my financial fantasy that historical accuracy, so I looked a few things up. Arhum. Vifgage… well, I have to give up my images of forlorn duke’s nephews in towers. Vifgage turns out to be the holding of a possession that is allowed to be lively and productive while a debt is owed. For example, if your land is held in vifgage, the products (the liveliness) of that land are allowed to pay off your debt. If your land is held in mortgage, on the hand, the products of your land are used to pay off only the interest, not the principal, of the debt. Constance Berman explains this really well on page 380 of <i>Medieval France: an Encyclopedia</i> and of course made me want to read much more on this topic. For now, though, I newly understand that the liveliness in vifgage is the ability of the land’s products to free you of your debt; the inertness in mortgage is the dead-end arrival of your land’s products in your debt’s interest.</div>
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Two realizations occur at this point, aside from a serious talk I need to have with my neo-medieval fantasies of human drama. The first is that the land’s products have a trajectory: they are not simply products of the land, they <i>go </i>somewhere, <i>towards</i> something, either towards the debt or its interest. They have a fate, a narrative, that makes them more than transactional objects. I’d go so far as to say they have a subjectivity, that there is a moral care for these products of the land. For, mortgage was seen as usurious, morally reprehensible, and exploitative – it was downright “condemned by 12<span class="s1"><sup>th</sup></span>-century church councils” (Berman): condemned! Which leads me to the second realization: <i>are</i> we so glad that vifgage is gone and mortgage is our state of debt? We still pay off the interest long before we pay off the principal of a debt. And, well, vifgage sounds interest-free to me, which would be nice. More than nice when you think about the activism of debt forgiveness for nations (or people!): downright ethical. I’m completely taken now with the idea of land freeing debtors of their debts, of the fruits of trees and the vegetables of the soil working to return to the possession, use, and tending of their original care-takers; of land and its moral agency.</div>
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Three realizations, actually: I owe a banker in Indiana a long phone call.</div>
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-Anne Harris</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-65271947233013904032012-11-21T05:00:00.000-08:002012-11-21T05:00:12.571-08:00Wisconsin is not Michigan (Where's Troy?) <br />
<br />
<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aBU0-vSCdAc/UKFo9m0ehvI/AAAAAAAAPQ4/NDS-6BrjdAc/s1600/Topoftroy2007.JPG" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-aBU0-vSCdAc/UKFo9m0ehvI/AAAAAAAAPQ4/NDS-6BrjdAc/s200/Topoftroy2007.JPG" width="150" /></a>Last week, I posted <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/11/chaucer-in-wisconsin.html">a blog posting</a> on "In The Middle" about an inventive re-imagining of Chaucer's "Troilus and Crysede" - Francesca Abbate's <i>Troy, Unincorporated</i> (2012) re-tells the story of love and betrayal through a series of lyric monologues, and the story is set in the present-day in a place called Troy, Wisconsin.<br />
<br />
In my original posting, however, I misidentified the town in question as Troy, *Michigan.* Let me assure you that I very much know that WISCONSIN IS NOT MICHIGAN and these places are, like, two totally two different states and everything.<br />
<br />
This is not to make excuses for myself, but I might attribute my morning error to a late-night Facebook conversation: someone saw a link I had posted about Abbate's book and said that she wished the book had been set in <a href="http://troymi.gov/">Troy, MI</a>, instead - but she came around once I her that there is indeed a real unincorporated town of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troy_(community),_Walworth_County,_Wisconsin">Troy in WI</a>, and that <a href="http://www.beloit.edu/news/?story_id=362828">Abbate herself</a> lives and works in WI. Perhaps that conversation made me dream of "Troy, MI" during the night and when I woke in the morning I couldn't dislodge that idea from my brain.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hgj93MmhbXE/UKFoeo_Qg-I/AAAAAAAAPQw/cwhHawwrXkE/s1600/Troy.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="203" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-hgj93MmhbXE/UKFoeo_Qg-I/AAAAAAAAPQw/cwhHawwrXkE/s320/Troy.jpg" width="320" /></a>Of course, in Chaucer's day, Troy was already a strangely translated/transported city: London styled itself as Troynovant (New Troy), and the way Chaucer's representations of ancient Troy evokes his own contemporary London city life has been richly explored - see Sylvia Federico, <i>New Troy</i> (2003); Marion Turner, <i>Chaucerian Conflict</i> (2007); and Ruth Evans, "The Production of Space in Chaucer's London," in <i>Chaucer and the City</i>, ed. Ardis Butterfield (2006). Troy is always "here" and "not here," perpetually dislocated from itself. As far as the US is concerned, this "translatio urbis" (shall we say?) can be seen in the number of place-names: <a href="http://www.city-data.com/">a search of US cities</a> reveals *multiple* places named Troy (WI, MI, and 17 other states) but also Athens (14 states), Carthage (11 states), Rome (8 states), Ithaca (5 states), Jerusalem (2 states), and a solitary Thebes (IL).<br />
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Thankfully, Blogger allows you go back in and edit your postings - so I fixed this city-translation error at ITM. I can say I sincerely meant no offense to any Midwesterners (Michiganders *and* Wisconsinites) who saw the post before it was corrected!<br />
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-Jonathan Hsy<br />
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P.S. Thanks to Ben Tilghman - Wisconsinite and inventor of the name "Fumblr" - for bringing the "Troy, MI" error to my attention.<br />
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<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-42017794249642619862012-11-18T06:02:00.003-08:002012-11-18T06:02:38.266-08:00A revolting revolt<i>[Editor's Note: This is an anonymous grad student fumble! Other grads, send us your fumbles -- I, too, was once a grad student, and fumbled frequently (once unintentionally obscenely, even). Asa]</i><br />
<br />
<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jGv1OMaWD5w/UKjqVrmDBBI/AAAAAAAAPy0/MvtaXjQZxwE/s1600/300px-Richard_II_meets_rebels.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-jGv1OMaWD5w/UKjqVrmDBBI/AAAAAAAAPy0/MvtaXjQZxwE/s1600/300px-Richard_II_meets_rebels.jpg" /></a>I taught for the first time ever as a teaching assistant last year for a medieval literature survey class. I was teaching the students about Jean Froissart’s Chronicles and the 1381 Peasant’s Revolt. I had prepared by designing a lecture on the Peasant’s Revolt and had a handout outlining the main points of the revolt for the students. I got through the rundown of what the Peasant’s Revolt was just fine, and passed out a decent handout. Where I failed was in capably leading the discussion. I showed them a passage from the John Ball letters on the projection screen, and that’s when it started going downhill. For one thing, I didn’t take them through the passage, and attempted to jump straight into discussion--rookie mistake. I floundered through leading the discussion, and my (amazing) professor who I was TAing for jumped in to help direct the conversation, and we ended up co-teaching the class. Thankfully, my students gave me a break and were very enthusiastic and participatory during that particular class. I’m happy to say that my most recent teaching experiences have been much better- you live and learn I suppose!<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-36734769621279696252012-11-12T07:00:00.000-08:002012-11-12T07:00:14.797-08:00The Failures of Symbolism<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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Reading a host of recent reviews of exhibitions and publications all relating to Symbolism, I was reminded of a really uncomfortable experience. Years ago, when I was defending my dissertation proposal, one of the members of my committee told me that I “didn’t really understand Symbolism properly,” and that this failure would cause serious problems for the project. This was exactly the kind of comment a young and insecure scholar really didn’t want at such a pivotal moment. And as you might imagine, it also pissed me off to no end, because of course I had worked very, very hard to master the complexities of the topic. The diffuse, peculiar, murky late 19th century movement in art and literature loosely defined as Symbolism played a considerable role in my thesis and research into turn-of-the-century American art. Because it appeared in America very differently than it did in Europe, I felt this scholar had missed my point entirely. The question, as I saw it, was not whether I did or didn’t ‘get’ Symbolism, but whether Gilded Age Americans did or did not ‘get’ it. “What temerity and arrogance!” I thought, soothing my wounded pride. “They are wrong. Not me.”<br />
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Moreover, this scholar did not seem willing to acknowledge that the ‘failure’ to understand Symbolism was in fact a pervasive problem, even for this movement’s leading practitioners, some of whom, such as Stéphane Mallarmé, seem to have regarded it as a kind of massive game of interpretive hide-and-seek. But, given the person’s expertise in the history of 19th century art, the comment made me think—very hard—about the stakes of my potential failure in this regard. Was I just fundamentally wrong, and was the problem truly one of my own failure to understand? Or was this more a matter of their failure to understand the nuances of a field that was not quite the same as their own? Or, yet again, was the observation the result of an equally awful prospect: my utter failure to communicate my point? What was the underlying nature of this rather discomfiting, and potentially devastating mutual misapprehension?<br />
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That eventually led me (after a friend and a strong cocktail had helped me to settle down), to think about how in many ways the entire Symbolist movement is still widely regarded as a particular kind of failure. To many observers, Symbolist art is unforgivably weird and will always remain so, as demonstrated by the wide-ranging critical opinions concerning the work of Swiss Symbolist Ferdinand Hodler, whose work is <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/21/arts/design/ferdinand-hodler-view-to-infinity-at-neue-galerie.html?smid=pl-share">currently on view at the Neue Galerie</a> in New York. As Markus Verhagen observes, some believe mystifying art such as Hodler’s is the result of “the worst impulses of the Symbolist generation, exploring ill-defined metaphysical questions in canvases that have come to look hopelessly dated and affected.” In a recent review concerning Hodler’s contemporary Edvard Munch, Thomas Micchelli terms the diversity of Symbolism a product of its “florid hokeyness.” Yet others suggest Symbolist works may look ‘dated and affected’ because the art produced in the Symbolist spirit was meant to be confounding and very difficult—hard for viewers to encompass in a way that forced them to strive towards forms of knowledge beyond the facile scope of material reality, during a historical period of great anxiety propelled by rising commercialism and technocratic complexity. And just as scholars today seem to have considerable trouble coming to terms with Symbolism’s many manifestations and styles, there were also plenty of individuals, in Europe and America alike, who similarly tried, and perhaps often failed, to understand the intentionally vague, ambiguous or hermetic modes of thought governing the spirit of the movement. Thus, my committee member and I were both wrong, and both right: Failure was built into the system. <br />
<br />
In fact, as I mulled the stakes of ‘failure’ over more deeply, I discovered another question: isn’t such a ‘failure to understand’ any historical mode of thought, or movement, or object, or attitude, the kind of problem that provokes us in the first place? Is such an instance of ‘failure’ as the one I investigate—that is, the way in which Americans at the turn of the century ‘failed’ to look at Symbolism the way their European peers did—merely an alternative way of conceptualizing the movement in their own terms, and thus not a ‘failure’ at all? The deeper reasons for this apparent error in comprehension turn out to be far more interesting than I had initially realized, mired as I was in a crisis of utter confusion, irritation and humiliation.<br />
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In the long run, as I worked through the many consequences of my ‘failure to understand,’ I followed more investigations, worked through anxiety, thought deeply and—at last—reached an acceptance of the fact that I investigate a historical period that will always offer up such instances of profound discomfort. To wish it were otherwise would be to wish away that aspect of the problem that continues to inspire me, as much as it remains a challenge. And ultimately the nature of this scholarly misapprehension granted me some really valuable opportunities for insight regarding the complex, often competing claims of what ‘Symbolism’ was attempting to do. I am sure I will continue to fail to understand it, but those moments are the ones I welcome in anticipation of the worthy surprises they will reveal. Thus the many ‘Failures of Symbolism’ are in fact some of its signature virtues.<br />
<br />
-Emily Gephart<br />
<br />Unknownnoreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-25435331153458980942012-11-03T19:03:00.001-07:002012-11-03T19:03:19.234-07:00John Wayne goes to Oxford <div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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<a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PiqEWatv2so/UJXMkZ8yOEI/AAAAAAAAPQA/Jw6PtWwJ470/s1600/HumphreyGloucester.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-PiqEWatv2so/UJXMkZ8yOEI/AAAAAAAAPQA/Jw6PtWwJ470/s200/HumphreyGloucester.jpeg" width="156" /></a>One year way back when, I was planning a research trip to the UK, with stops to see some manuscripts at the BL and the Bodleian. I had never used the manuscript rooms at either place, so I emailed to see how to get permission. The BL was fairly straightforward with directions, but the person I contacted at the Bodleian wrote that he’d have to check with Duke Humfreys about the MS I wanted to see. He later wrote again to say that Duke Humfreys had granted permission to use the manuscript library.<br />
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<a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TDhthg3Hqbs/UJXMk7a20bI/AAAAAAAAPQI/u-qC-ldaAzs/s1600/jw-sm.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: left; float: left; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-TDhthg3Hqbs/UJXMk7a20bI/AAAAAAAAPQI/u-qC-ldaAzs/s200/jw-sm.jpeg" width="160" /></a>Somehow, my American brain just assumed that “Duke” was a first name, kind of like Bo or Jeb, or Butch — one of those. Why I did not think “Duke” = nobleman and “Duke Humfreys” = ancient aristocratic benefactor of Oxford for whom library is named, I don’t know. Instead, I thought that Duke Humfreys must be a very powerful librarian indeed, since the other librarians apparently deferred to him.<br />
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So I wrote back expressing my gratitude to “Mr. Humfreys” for letting me use his library.<br />
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Oops. heh heh.<br />
-Lara FarinaUnknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-58718245065049746832012-10-30T16:34:00.000-07:002012-10-30T16:34:29.768-07:00An Announcement From Your Friendly Fumblr Creators<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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Fumblr is now open to anonymous submissions, for those who do not feel comfortable attaching their names to their fails on the Internet. (After all, once it’s out there, it’s out there forever.) We do want to keep the conversation about scholarly failure going and we simultaneously understand that some people- particularly graduate students and junior faculty- do not feel comfortable submitting if they have to claim authorship. We respect your right to your anonymity. Should you choose to submit anonymously, PLEASE make sure that you tell us that in your email, and we promise to maintain your anonymity. Send your submissions to academicfailblog@gmail.com. Keep those fabulous fails coming!</div>
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-Shyama and Asa</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03819557816474024203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-24367884084600914692012-10-20T13:35:00.000-07:002012-10-20T13:35:07.322-07:00Failure is the New Black (Call For Papers)<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
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<i>A Call for Papers from Rachel Sullivan for the
<span style="font-size: 12pt;">2013 Midwest
Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC)</span></i><style>
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--></style>There’s much more to learn from the rough edges of failure
than the short-lived sheen of success. Basking in the glow of achievement and
accomplishment, other possibilities and voices tend to fade. What can we gain
through studying the cracks, imperfections, embarrassments, and dark moments of
history, culture, pedagogy, institutional practice, and lived experience? That’s
exactly what the 2013 Midwest Interdisciplinary Graduate Conference (MIGC) aims
to find out. MIGC will take place on February 15-16 at the University of
Wisconsin-Milwaukee – it will be a lively two days of conversations and
questions about the topic of failure. Who knows, some of the questions may even
be answered!</div>
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As someone who’s been involved with the work of planning the
conference for the last two years, I hope you’ll help me spread the word or—if
you’re currently a grad student—consider submitting an abstract! MIGC is a
wonderful experience that attracts participants from around the country (and
the world!), and we’re excited to feature J. Jack Halberstam (author of <i>The
Queer Art of Failure</i><span style="font-style: normal;">) as this year’s
keynote speaker. It’s a small, selective conference that allows for intimate
discussions and a well-paced schedule of panels. There will also be a super-fun
afterparty at a classic Milwaukee venue.</span></div>
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We’re looking for both creative works and traditional
papers, and (as always) we welcome submissions from grad students at any level,
in any discipline. You’ll find the full length CFP at http://themigc.com/cfp. Please note that the submission deadline is
December 1! <span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span>Some possible topics
might be:</div>
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- Failings of higher education</div>
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- Pedagogical success and failure</div>
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- Failure in film, TV, art, and literature</div>
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- Rhetoric of failure in theory and criticism</div>
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- Feminism and failure</div>
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- The “queer art” of failure</div>
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- Economic failure and debt crisis</div>
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- Failed states</div>
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- Digital technologies/humanities and failure</div>
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- Scientific advancements and failures</div>
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- Environmental disasters</div>
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- Legal failings, human rights, war, and genocide</div>
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Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03819557816474024203noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-61594412595622767442012-10-17T11:36:00.002-07:002013-02-27T16:26:31.406-08:00We really do need to see these things in the flesh...<a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xaXvuySO7Jk/UH77AjiIl4I/AAAAAAAAPNQ/3VK5G9qHKNU/s1600/BlemSm.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-xaXvuySO7Jk/UH77AjiIl4I/AAAAAAAAPNQ/3VK5G9qHKNU/s320/BlemSm.jpg" width="244" /></a>In my first book, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0415976138/ref=dp_proddesc_1?ie=UTF8&n=283155">Maps and Monsters in Medieval England</a></i>, I say, regarding the images in the Vitellius A.xv (Beowulf MS), Tiberius B.v and Bodley 614 <i>Wonders/Marvels of the East</i> texts:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Returning to the blemmyes, we find that their skin, so human in tone, is not a painted color, but simply the real skin of which the page is made. </blockquote>
I hadn't yet seen any of these three images in person, and was working with the black-and-white facsimiles in the EETS series (for Vitellius and Tiberius), and then with a few color reproductions I'd been able to track down. <br />
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I have since seen all three manuscripts, and it turns out that I was not only flatly wrong, but that the actual situation is much <i>weirder</i>: The image of the blemmye in the Tiberius manuscript (online at the BL in, it seems, odd color, <a href="http://www.bl.uk/learning/images/medieval/monstrous/large97326.html">here</a>, but the image in the current post is better) is indeed painted, but it is painted a shade of beige, of what Crayola, prior to the raising of consciousness of the civil rights movement, used to call "flesh color." I have asked Routledge to let me fix this, since they are still printing the book, but no dice. The error is there, in perpetuity, when the bizarre truth is much more interesting. <br />
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There are losses to the image, and they are barely perceptible. Why bother to paint the figure a shade that is almost totally indistinguishable from the color of the vellum? Does this <i>mean something</i>? Surely. Another book,* another time. <br />
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*(Note of further fumble: I intended to get this correction, at a minimum, into a footnote in <a href="http://acmrs.org/publications/catalog/inconceivable-beasts">a new book on the Wonders</a>, but that is now done, and I seem to have lost that note, somewhere along the way...)Unknownnoreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-78084966522954496362012-10-08T12:38:00.005-07:002012-10-08T12:41:49.707-07:00Prove Your Own Point by Doing. It. Wrong.<div dir="ltr" style="text-align: left;" trbidi="on">
From Martin Foys:<br />
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I spent seven years working on the <i>Bayeux Tapestry Digital Edition</i> (BTDE), working through a lot of ideas about how a New Media format helped free the presentation of this uber-long textile from the practical and physical confines of the medium of print. Along the way I developed an argument about the spatial and monumental nature of the work, and how it may have been displayed to end where it began, thus allowing King Edward and King William to be juxtaposed - a not so subtle hint about how to view the succession of William to the English throne. Books you see, never do this - they present the textile like they do a sentence - in a purely linear fashion, - so the Tapestry begins at one point and then many pages later, it ends at another. <br />
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So, you might imagine, I then programmed the BTDE so that when the display reached the end, it continued on at the beginning- it didn't just stop when you arrived at the end of the work, just like every book you've seen, right? Oh, ha,ah, heh, ho, oh, no . . . .no. <br />
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To compound this meta-critical myopia, at the time I was preparing the BTDE for publication, I was also reading Bolter and Grusin's <i>Remediation</i>, which argued that the logic of new media must first reproduce the logic of the older media before it can realize its own. It was not until about a year later that I understood what I had(n't) done: I had precisely illuminated B&G's point by remediating the BTDE's digital functionality within the linear logic of the book, and this in spite of my very own critical arguments to the contrary. I ruled. Or rued. Or something.</div>
Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/03819557816474024203noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-64891528788966002332012-10-08T11:25:00.001-07:002012-10-08T11:25:43.302-07:00Killing is OK. Or not. Or both. Or neither.From <a href="http://brooklyn.cuny.edu/web/academics/faculty/faculty_profile.jsp?faculty=675">Karl Steel</a> (with thanks for the First Fail Post!):<br />
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The second chapter of my <i><a href="http://osupress.blogspot.fr/2011/08/steel-how-to-make-human.html">How to Make a Human</a></i> opens with this unfortunate sentence:<br />
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To the question of “Whether it is unlawful to kill any living thing” (<i>Summa Theologica</i> 2a2ae q. 64, a. 1), Aquinas unsurprisingly answers yes, explaining that in the natural worldly order “animals use plants, and men use animals, for food” (61). </div>
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Try to get your head around that "yes." Yes it's unlawful to kill any living thing? That's definitely not the Aquinas we know. How about answering "no"? No it's not unlawful to kill any living thing? That's not much of an improvement. I feel into a weird syntactical trap and just couldn't get out. Thank goodness that it's in print forever. I blame scholasticism.</div>
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Unknownnoreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-4903077033901298760.post-44028935052583801802012-10-08T09:53:00.000-07:002012-10-08T09:53:44.130-07:00Welcome to Fumblr!<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
<a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MPyfW9j7DBM/UHME2ZPtjjI/AAAAAAAAPMk/IJEtS52Qexk/s1600/BeckettFail.png" imageanchor="1" style="clear: right; float: right; margin-bottom: 1em; margin-left: 1em;"><img border="0" height="192" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-MPyfW9j7DBM/UHME2ZPtjjI/AAAAAAAAPMk/IJEtS52Qexk/s400/BeckettFail.png" width="400" /></a></div>
Sometimes ideas don’t work. Failure is an inevitable fact of
life, and we have all experienced it—that teaching moment where the students
look completely confused, that one paper with a logical hole in it the size of
the (former) Soviet Union, that presentation that just did not fly. In the
humanities, however, we do not often discuss our failures. So how can we
understand the utility of being wrong?<o:p></o:p>
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In the sciences, when an
experiment fails, the results are often published so that the scientific community
can benefit from the errors, can learn from the errors, be they algebraic or
conceptual. In the humanities, we are less often demonstrably
"wrong," since much of what we offer is interpretive rather than
factual. You might disagree with Asa’s reading of the Donestre in the Beowulf
Manuscript's <i>Wonders of the East</i>, but
you would be hard-pressed to conclusively invalidate it. Still, we falter and
fail all the time. However, many of us in the humanities are still in our
19th-century paradigm of the lonely scholar, toiling in the solitude of a
garret, perhaps with a glass of absinthe at the elbow. And so <a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-RtG0XM6i8SQ/Tfi-KkOIgXI/AAAAAAAACXQ/rKDakmgjTNc/s1600/Albert%2BMaignan%2B%2B%2BLa%2Bmuse%2Bverte%2BGreen%2BMuse.jpg">our
failures are solitary</a>, which renders them of less use than they might
otherwise be. When I head down a wrong-headed path, I (hopefully) learn
something. But you don't, unless I share my failure with you.<o:p></o:p></div>
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It is for this reason that we
started “Fumblr,” a place for any of us to post our scholarly missteps for all
and sundry to read and learn (and laugh) from. The name (thanks, Ben Tilghman!)
grew out of discussions, in person, with <a href="http://thematerialcollective.org/">the Material Collective</a>, on
Facebook (Join our group at The Material Collective. No, not the knitting group. The other one.), and on <a href="http://www.inthemedievalmiddle.com/2012/09/academic-failblog.html">In The
Middle</a>, where several other great ideas were posted. We already wonder if
we have chosen the right one, or began the project, perhaps appropriately, with
a blunder. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Posts might be related to
research, teaching, job searching or any other aspect of the academic world.
Fumblr is about sharing those moments of tripping on the cracks with a
community, and opening up the conversation about process rather than simply
focusing on product. If we are serious about experimental approaches and risk
taking, we have to be prepared to fail. At least on occasion.<o:p></o:p></div>
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We invite you to submit your own
moments of “fail” to academicfailblog@gmail.com. So what say you—care to
stumble with us?<o:p></o:p></div>
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-Asa and Shyama<o:p></o:p></div>
Unknownnoreply@blogger.com6