I must have nodded off for a moment...

A couple of weeks ago, a non-academic friend emailed me, asking what I thought of the new Burton Raffel translation of the Canterbury Tales. I hadn't looked at it, so I did a quick Google search, read a few excerpts, and then handed down my judgment. The translation was not that bad, I told my friend, but I had some qualms about translations of Chaucer in general. The importance of Chaucer's contributions to English, the beauty of the original, and all that. We had a brief email conversation on the subject of translations and general readers, at the end of which my friend said: "You should blog about this."

Blog? I thought. What is this blog of which you speak?

I'm not a big fan of blog posts about why there haven't been any blog posts lately, but since a little while (cough...three months...cough) has passed since my last post, I feel an excuse is warranted. So here, in bullet points, is as little explanation as I can manage:

• I'm serving as President of our Faculty Council this year.
  
• We had to fire (yes, actually fire) a faculty member in the middle of last semester, with the result that I taught six classes for the last couple of months of the Fall. It exhausts me just to remember it.
  
• My daughter started kindergarten in August. For those of you with kids, enough said.
  
• Did I mention that I'm serving as President of our Faculty Council?
  

Suffice it to say that I've had little time, energy, or, frankly, inclination to blog recently. The Faculty Council thing is an absolute time pit. I have monthly meetings with the President and with the Board of Trustees, bi-weekly meetings with the VP of Instruction, and countless committee meetings (since the head of the Council is an ex officio member of about 400 different committees). Add in the time spent listening to various and sundry faculty complaints (all of which are pressing, extremely important, and not at all frivolous or petty, of course), and you're left with precious few hours to actually do your friggin' job. It's been disappointing to give up blogging, but not nearly as disappointing as it's been to give up being a medievalist. Working at a community college means that scholarship of any kind has to take place in the little time left when all other aspects of the job have been satisfied. For the past several months, that's meant that I've had to give it up altogether. I still read my regular blogs, of course, and I've glanced at an article or two when I've had a few spare minutes, but my scholarly productivity, always dicey, has fallen off completely.

There may be light at the end of this particular tunnel, though. Or, rather, two lights. A couple of exciting developments will soon force me back into the world of medieval scholarship. Well, exciting for me anyway. First, I'll be going to Kalamazoo this year. First time in a decade, if you can believe it. I'm a little nervous about my paper, however (and by "nervous" I mean "panicked"). I have a tendency to write conference paper proposals in the middle of the night when hopped up on cough medicine, and, as a result, they are often wildly ambitious and well above my actual skill level. The upside is that I always learn a lot while writing the paper. In my room an hour before the session. After I stop hyperventilating. But the conference is still three months away, so all is well for the moment.

The second development is something I'm seriously thrilled about. In the fall, I will be teaching a Medieval Literature survey course for the first time. To those of you who spend your afternoons conducting doctoral seminars on the idea of the body in tenth century poetry, my excitement probably seems a little pathetic. But since my courseload is normally restricted to lots of Freshman composition, made tolerable only by one or two British Lit survey classes per semester, the opportunity to teach a real medieval literature class is nothing short of monumental. I've already been working on the syllabus, and I'll likely be asking for help and suggestions in the near future. It's not easy to figure out how best to teach medieval literature to non-majors at a rural-leaning community college, but I'm having fun trying.

I hope this is not my last blog post for a while, but I know myself better than to promise anything different. As a result, I'll resist the temptation to say something like "stay tuned," and content myself instead with something like "I'm not dead yet."

Because New Kid is too busy with law school these days to skewer Chronicle articles

I don't know how many of you have read this piece on the Chronicle website this week. In it, the author highlights problems with the tenure system in American colleges and universities and suggests some sort of fixed-term contract (he argues for 30 years) to make sure that aging professors eventually retire and open up spots for new faculty. I'm not going to respond to his idea (mainly because my school has no tenure system and offers only one-year contracts to faculty), but I will respond to one example he cites. One of the problems with tenure, the author claims, is that departments often get "tenured in"; that is, they reach a point when all members of the department are tenured and likely to stick around for many years. The result is that departments find themselves not flexible enough to cover all of the areas they need to. Then he says:

"Does, for example, an English department with 30 members really need three medievalists?"

[pause for laughter]

I just want to know where these schools are. Where are these English departments that are terribly overstaffed in the area of medieval literature?

I also love the way he pulls "medievalists" out of the air as an appropriate example of obsolescence. Would he ask whether the same department "really needs" three Americanists? Three people covering the twentieth century? Probably not. But three medievalists? The absurdity! The waste of taxpayer dollars!

Sheesh!

Okay, I feel better now. Back to grading papers.

Irony out west

Scene: a group of academics, including an academic dean, sits down at a local eatery.

Waitress: Can I get your drink orders?

Academic #1: I'll just have water.

Academic #2: Iced tea, please.

Waitress: (turning to the dean) And you?

Dean: (sighing heavily) I don't know. Hemlock?

Waitress: (without missing a beat) I'm sorry, sir, we just have Pepsi.


My only question: was she was one of our students?

And we have a winner!

Well, kind of.

As of 8:00 this morning, I had received five comments on my previous post. Two commenters wanted me to finish the "teaching post," two voted for the "research post," and one expressed a preference for the "meditations on the profession" post. Since there was a tie, I decided to finish both the teaching and research posts and to start with the teaching post, since it was closer to being finished.

Before I could get it posted this afternoon, however, I received an additional comment from Carrie K, who voted for the research post. I considered throwing out her vote on procedural grounds (a la the 2000 Supreme Court decision), but in the end I relented. So the official winner of the contest is the reasearch-oriented post, which I will finish in the next couple of days. Until then, you can read the runner-up below.

******************************************

I've worked here in Hawtch-Hawtch for almost ten years now. I grew up about 25 miles away, and I've lived in the state for all of my life, excepting seven years in grad school. In other words, I know this place. I don't agree with most attitudes I encounter 'round these parts, but I'm rarely surprised by them. At times, however, my students (most of whom grew up approximately 25 miles in the other direction from the college) say things that I have trouble even processing. It's not that I can't believe they think this way; I just can't believe that they say it out loud.

When I walked into class a few weeks ago, I was greeted with a question. "Why did you make us read those articles?" a particularly burly student asked before I had gotten all the way through the door. I asked if he had a problem with the articles. "I sure had a problem with the second one," he responded. I looked at him innocently, though I was pretty sure I knew what he was talking about. The first article I had assigned to my composition class for the day discussed the challenges faced by families in which the wife works while the husband stays home with the children. The second article discussed the similar challenges faced by homosexual parents.

Again, I know where I work, and I know that homosexuality is still something of a novelty to these students. A critical reading assignment I often use in my comp classes, for example, asks students to question whether the word "couple" has to refer to a man and a woman; my students usually greet this question with giggles. Actual giggles. So, yeah, I know what I'm getting into when I ask them to read an article that treats homosexuals as...well, normal. But I decided to play along. "What kind of problem did you have with the article?" I asked.

Looking back, I probably shouldn't have asked that.

"Gay people are disgusting," my burly student said in a loud and matter-of-fact tone.

Well. Okay.

"Are you sure that you want to start class with a pronouncement like that?" I asked him.

"What do you mean?" he replied, looking genuinely confused.

"Well," I started, "you don't know everybody in this class, do you?"

He just looked more confused.

"What I mean is," I continued, "do you really want to start class by making this kind of blanket statement about a group of people, when you don't know whether some people in the class might belong to that group?"

But he knew he had me beat on that score. While it was certainly possible that some people in the class might be homosexual, he knew, as I did, that it was extremely unlikely that any of them would be stupid enough to admit it. Especially now.

Earlier this week, I attended an information session administered by our Institutional Research department. The subject was our campus results of the Community College Survey of Student Engagement, a national instrument designed to measure student attitudes and experiences at the CC level. One particular result jumped out at me. When asked how often they had engaged in conversations with people of different race, ethnicity, or economic status while on campus, almost half of our students said "Never." Not "Rarely." Never.

On my good days, I see a statistic like that as an opportunity. I start thinking about ways of increasing diversity, or at least awareness of diversity, in my classes. And it often works. I had a pretty good conversation with the burly homophobic during the break in our class that day. He admitted that his attitudes are a product of his environment, that his father would "beat the crap" out of him if he ever let his future wife work for a living while he stayed home with children (I didn't ask what his father would do if this kid announced he was gay). By the end of the class, I think he was at least thinking about why he has such strong feelings on this subject.

Which is all I want, of course. I firmly believe that it's not my job to change these kids' values, or even to "broaden their horizons." Mostly, my job is to make them better writers. To achieve that goal, all I ask is that they try to understand why they believe what they believe.

Oh, and if they believe something really nuts, like that gay people are disgusting, I also ask that they keep it to themselves.

Are you ready to play our game?

I know what you've been thinking. No, the tarantula did not eat me alive. Summer school almost did, though. Teaching two classes while working on an article and a proposal for Kalamazoo, beginning a Latin translation group with a colleague, and deciding whether my oldest child would be starting Kindergarten next week left with very little time for blogging over the past month. I know, I know, there's always time for the things you put first, right? But as much as I enjoy the blog, it often comes in very low on my list of priorities.

I haven't been absent from the blogosphere, however. I've been reading all of my favorite blogs regularly, almost all of which have had interesting things to say. I've been following the In The Muddle controversy (though I admit I came to it rather late and was only tipped off to the now-defunct blog's existence by a mention of it on Unlocked Wordhoard). I don't really have anything to say about it that hasn't already been said, by Larry Swain among others. I will say that, though I've publicly admitted that I'm not much of theory person and that I often have difficulty following the more esoteric posts at In The Middle, I have found the bloggers there, particularly Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, to be exceedingly generous and welcoming. I have little respect for those who pick on nice people (especially when those nice people are doing good work).

And it's not really true to say that I haven't written anything here in the past month. In fact, I've written quite a bit, though none of it has made it into a publishable post. I've started three different posts, only to be interrupted by work, children, or sleep. As a result, I have three fairly substantial but unfinished posts sitting in my Drafts folder. I had planned on just ditching all of them--returning to a piece of writing after a long absence is always difficult for me--but Miss Goddess had a better idea (as she often does).

Instead of letting these poor, orphaned pieces of prose pass into oblivion, I'll give those few remaining of my readers a chance to save one. I'm posting below the first paragraph of each of the three posts in question. If you would like to see one of those posts finished, please say so in the comments. Whichever potential post gets the most votes will be finished and posted in its entirety later this week. Here goes:

Contestant 1 (the teaching post):
I've worked here in Hawtch-Hawtch for almost ten years now. I grew up about 25 miles away, and I've lived in the state for all of my life, excepting seven years in grad school. In other words, I know this place. I don't agree with most attitudes I encounter 'round these parts, but I'm rarely surprised by them. At times, however, my students (most of whom grew up approximately 25 miles in the other direction from the college) say things that I have trouble even processing. It's not that I can't believe they think this way; I just can't believe that they say it out loud...

Contestant 2 (the research post):
One of the great joys and frustrations of being a medievalist involves having to face head-on the pervasive misconceptions held by the general public about the Middle Ages. Mary Kate Hurley recently asked medievalists about times when they have found themselves using their knowledge of the period in unexpected settings, but surely the most common, almost clichéd, scenario begins with the question "Did they really...?" Did they really burn witches? Did they really believe in magic? Did they really eat dirt? And so on. It is our privilege, nay, our duty to correct these misconceptions, no?...

Contestant 3 (the meditations on the profession post):
I've been thinking a lot recently about my approach to scholarship: why I do it, what I get out of it, etc.. As I've mentioned before in this space, I feel like I'm something of a special case here. Because I teach at a community college, my scholarly output has absolutely no bearing on my job security. In a way, I suppose, I'm a bit like an independent scholar, though I've never thought of myself in those terms. Because I went to grad school at a big-name R1 program, I've always conducted my research and writing as if I were on the tenure track, in that I plan to write one or two conference papers each year, and I then try to turn those papers into articles to be submitted to journals (though I admit that I often abandon those projects once they get to the article-writing stage)...

It's now up to you, faithful readers. If I get no comments, all three of these posts will die a painful death and never be heard from again. But if you're the type who tears up watching Extreme Makeover, who can't pass by a kitten without smiling, you'll reach out to save one of these paragraphs. The clock is ticking...

No words

Okay, so I was in the middle of writing a long post about the future of online scholarship a few minutes ago, when Older Monkey came out of her bedroom and told me she was going to the bathroom. A few seconds later, she came back into the living room and told me that she saw a spider in the hallway that scared her. I did the good dad thing and got up from the sofa to help her, though I assumed that the probably tiny spider she had seen was already long gone. Imagine my surprise when I saw not just a spider but a TARANTULA!!! In. My. Fucking. House!

I just don't even know what more to say about it. I mean, Miss Goddess and I got it out of the house, in a low-comedy procedure that involved luring it into Older Monkey's cardboard-box-cum-pinhole-camera from last month's Art Camp. I'd like to say that I behaved throughout with the detached grace and calm befitting a scholar, but that would be a lie. I'm just thankful that I didn't wet myself.


Tarantula, with Younger Monkey's right Croc for purposes of scale.

Snakes in the water and other discoveries

Sorry to have been so long without posting. We've been extraordinarily busy around here. Miss Goddess decided that, as a birthday gift, she wanted to completely redo our kitchen. The kitchen now looks absolutely beautiful, though we had to neglect the rest of the house (and both of our children, to some extent) for more than a week to get it that way. Last week was Older Monkey's sixth birthday, an event which we celebrated by taking her and two of our nieces to see Kit Kittredge: An American Girl, followed by a trip to the American Girl Boutique and Bistro. I was dreading this stop, but I have to say that the American Girl operation is quite impressive. The stuff is crazy expensive, of course, but the attention to detail (aesthetic and historical) is remarkable. Too bad the dolls are taken only from American history. I found myself wishing for Aethelflad: A Mercian Girl, but, alas, it was not to be. I also started teaching summer classes last week, so I had to play like an employed person again. I wasn't really ready for long pants again so soon.

Though I haven't been posting recently, I have been reading. Specifically, I've been rereading Heinrich Henel's edition of Aelfric's De Temporibus Anni, a text which I posted about a few weeks ago. It's been a strange experience going back to this work after such a long hiatus from it. The last time I looked carefully at it was before I even chose a dissertation topic, probably twelve or thirteen years ago. At the time, I was just learning Old English, just learning how to be a medievalist, in fact. Now I'm still learning Old English, still learning how to be a medievalist, but returning to this work has shown me that I have at least matured somewhat in my understanding, and what little I have learned has colored how I read De Temporibus Anni, raising some interesting questions about the work and about Aelfric's approach to it.

In the first section of the text, for example, Aelfric attempts to explain the relationship between the sun and the earth, leading to a fuller discussion of the concept of day and how the earth is lit by the sun. He begins by recounting the first six days of Creation, in language close to that used in his own Old English translation of Genesis. That's not a surprising strategy for an early Medieval writer, I suppose, but it is a bit surprising for Aelfric, I think. Perhaps the best-known piece in all of Aelfric's works, a piece often anthologized in introductory Old English textbooks, is his Preface to Genesis, in which Aelfric expresses his deep concerns about Biblical translation, explaining that he undertook the translation of Genesis with great reluctance and that he was careful to translate as exactly as possible. He specifically says that he "did not dare to write any more in English than the Latin has, nor to change the order of words, except in the case in which Latin and English do not have the same way of expressing" (my translation).

So I found it a little surprising that Aelfric includes what is essentially a translation of much of the first chapter of Genesis here at the beginning of De Temporibus Anni. I was even more surprised by an apparent error in this section, however. When discussing the fifth day of Creation, Aelfric states:

On ðam fiftan dæge he gesceop eal wyrmcynn and ða micclan hwalas and eal fisccynn on mislicum and menigfealdum hiwum.

[On the fifth day He created all reptiles and the great whales and all kinds of fish in various and manifold forms.]

The problem, of course, is that Genesis does not say that God created reptiles on the fifth day. Or at least I don't think it does. The situation is actually a little complicated. See, Genesis 1:20-21 in the Vulgate reads as follows:

Dixit etiam Deus: Producant aquæ reptile animæ viventis, et volatile super terram sub firmamento cæli. Creavitque Deus cete grandia, et omnem animam viventem atque motabilem, quam produxerant aquæ in species suas, et omne volatile secundum genus suum. Et vidit Deus quod esset bonum.

[And God said: Let the waters produce the creeping live things, and those flying over the earth undter the firmament of heaven. And God created the great whales, and every living and moving creature, which the waters produced in their kinds, and all flying creatures according to their kind. And God saw that it was good.]

The crux here is the Latin word reptile, which does not really mean "reptile" in its English sense, but rather "creeping" (though it is, of course, the source of our modern word "reptile"). In fact, the word appears again in verse 24, which covers the sixth day of Creation:

Dixit quoque Deus: Producat terra animam viventem in genere suo, jumenta, et reptilia, et bestias terræ secundum species suas. Factumque est ita.

[And God said: let the land produce the living creature in its kind, cattle and creeping things and beasts of the earth according to their species. And it was made so.]

It's not difficult to imagine how Aelfric may have been confused by the appearance of "reptile" in Genesis 1:20. Really, (and I'm soooo not a Biblical scholar, here) the Hebrew word that the Vulgate translates as "reptile" appears to mean something more like "swarming things" than "creeping things," so Aelfric may be getting it no more wrong than the Vulgate before him.

But here's the thing: Aelfric knows better. I know he knows better, because he doesn't make the same mistake elsewhere. In his translation of the first part of Genesis, for example, Aelfric renders verse 20 as follows:

20 God cwæð eac swylce: Teon nu ða wæteru forð swymmende cynn cucu on life and fleogende cynn ofer eorðan under þære heofonan fæstnysse.
21 And God gesceop ða ða miclan hwalas and eal lybbende fisccyn and styrigendlice, ðe ða wæteru tugon forð on heora hiwum, and eall fleogende cyn æfter heora cynne; God geseah ða ðæt hit god wæs.

[20 And God also said: Let now the waters bring forth swimming creatures that are alive and flying creatures over the earth, under the firmament of heaven.
21. And God created then the great whales and living and moving kinds of fishes, which the waters brought forth in their forms, and all flying creatures according to their kind; God saw then that it was good.]

The substitution of swymmende ("swimming") for Latin reptile ("creeping") is not, I think, evidence that Aelfric doesn't know how to translate the word. Probably he just thought that swimming creatures made more sense coming out of the waters than creeping creatures did. His willingness to make this change, however shows a certain thoughtfulness on Aelfric's part regarding this word, a thoughtfulness that makes it even harder to understand his treatment of the fifth day of Creation in De Temporibus Anni.

There are, I suppose, a few different possible explanations for the discrepancy between De Temporibus Anni and Aelfric's translation of Genesis. It's possible that one of the two texts is corrupt, the result of a scribal error. I can't speak to the textual integrity of the translation of Genesis (mainly because I don't have Crawford's edition of the text before me at present). Considering the text in question (as well as Aelfric's explicit warning to copyists not to make any changes), however, a scribal change there seems unlikely. We're also on pretty firm ground regarding the text of De Temporibus Anni, which appears in a manuscript that may have been supervised by Aelfric himself (or based directly on another manuscript so supervised). So I'm reluctant to take the easy way out and blame the scribe here.

The more interesting possibility, and the one I favor, is that what we see in these two different interpretations of Genesis 1:20 is a development in Aelfric's own understanding of the verse. The chronology of Aelfric's works is a question of some debate, and it's not known where in that chronology De Temporibus Anni fits, but scholars generally believe it to have been written early in Aelfric's career, some time before he wrote his translation of Genesis. In the intervening years, his Latin must have improved. Or maybe he just came across the more orthodox view in his own reading. In his translation of Basil's Hexameron (also a later work), for example, Aelfric says that on the fifth day, God created fish, whales, and birds, but resigns the "creopendan wyrmas" ("creeping reptiles") to the sixth day. For whatever reason, Aelfric seems to have abandoned the idea that reptiles were created on the fifth day not long after writing De Temporibus Anni.

I've now gone on much longer than I intended to about what is an extremely minor textual point in this relatively minor text. But I have to admit that I love this kind of thing. To me, scholarship is only really fun when you're making discoveries, no matter how small they may be. And this kind of discovery, the kind that can give you real insight into an author's development, is especially rewarding. I'm reminded of the first time I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, when I was still a teenage and something of a novice at art museums. I remember standing before a huge Matisse painting and being blown away by the fact that the pencil lines were visible beneath the paint. Those lines made that painting and Matisse much more real for me. For just a minute the painting became something more than an artifact; it became a particular product of a real live person. I could imagine Matisse in his workshop actually drawing those lines, planning the eventual painting. It was a very cool moment to my seventeen-year-old self and changed, at least a little, the way I view art even today.

And that's why I love medieval studies in general, because those glimpses happen all the time when you're studying such old and little-known stuff. The first manuscript I ever worked with, for example, was a collection of booklets from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, bound together in the early fifteenth. The booklet I was particularly interested in was really just a quire and had, at least for a while, been carried around in somebody's pocket (or the medieval equivalent thereof). I know this because the booklet was clearly creased across the middle, and the back leaf was heavily worn from being folded against itself. The moment I figured that out was the moment that I became hooked on manuscript work.

Anyway, sorry for going on at such length. I still plan to post more about De Temporibus Anni, but I'll try to make future posts about more than a single word.

Now I have to go back to Freshman papers. In July. There ought to be a law.