Mern Þonke

The Children of Húrin

2007-04-23T12:00:00.000-07:00

People are starting to ask me about The Children of Húrin, the new Tolkien yarn which was released. For anyone who doesn't know, this is an old yarn, which Tolkien began writing before 1920. He never completed it, and our knowledge of the story comes from references in The Lord of the Rings and the cut-down versions produced by his son Christopher for The Silmarillion and Unfinished Tales of Númenor and Middle-earth. Other materials related to the story were published by Christopher Tolkien in The War of the Jewels and The Lays of Beleriand, vol. 3, which contains a remarkable version in alliterative verse. The Children of Húrin is a new attempt by Christopher Tolkien piece together a longer, more novelistic version from his father's unfinished drafts. I have not yet read the new volume; my copy should arrive sometime in the next couple of days. My greatest fear is that it will be too similar to the materials we have seen before. But my disappointment should that prove to be the case, is not a critical judgement on its quality as a work of literature.

In fact, the first couple of reviews have already appeared on the web: Bryan Appleyard's odd piece in The Times, Elizabeth's Hand's review in the Washington Post, and the blog "review" of Michael Drout. I am struck by the fact that Appleyard, who is unsympathetic to Tolkien's writing, claims to like The Children of Húrin. [Note: This is updated wording. My original post accidentally lumped Elizabeth Hand's approach in this categoricy and thus misrepresented her review. Thanks to Hand for pointing this out.]

Appleyard's approval (however qualified) has got me thinking. Perhaps Tolkien's impact and influence is simply undeniable now, and saying you don't like Tolkien is beginning to sound simply contrary--like saying you don't like Shakespeare. It is legitimate to quibble about details, but dismissing Tolkien's work as rubbish, as some critics once did, is perhaps no longer possible.

I wonder, however, if there is not something else at work here. The Children of Húrin does not have a happy ending; it is ultimately a tragedy. I don't want to say much more for fear of introducing spoilers. Instead, I want to think about the possibility that this tragic quality is in fact what is triggering the approval of normally unsympathetic critics. Tragedy is somehow weightier and more profound than comedy (in the medieval sense of a story with a happy ending) or romance (which also gestures in that direction). Perhaps the arbiters of modern taste feel that Tolkien has finally obliged them with a work which meets modern criteria. I think this is a bit unfair with respect to the dynamism of Tolkien's earlier published work (especially as this tale has already appeared in shorter forms). On the other hand, this would be the first complete free-standing tale in the tragic genre--and perhaps there is something new and significant in that. I have always felt that the tale of the Children of Húrin--even in condensed and draft forms--was particularly powerful, and this version might enhance that power considerably. Perhaps this is the workfor which Tolkien could have said,

Go litel bok, go litel myn tragedye,
Ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye,
So sende myght to make yn some comedye.
But litel bok, no makyng thow n'envye,
But subgit be to alle poesye,
And kys the steppes where as thow seest pace,
Virgile, Ovyde, Omer, Lukan, and Stace.

I hope at least, that this new work will give the reflexive comparisons to Homer and Virgil a new meaning.

More on The Children of Húrin once I've actually read it.

More on Space

2006-03-26T09:24:00.000-08:00

UPDATE

Some weeks ago I wrote an opening piece on some thoughts about space, which, unfortunately, I have not been able to follow up on. (The reasonse are the subject of another blog entry). I do still intend to write more on this subject. For now, however, I want to link to "When Virtual Worlds Collide", a recent article in Wired which treats the question from another angle (video games). My commentary will follow soon (hopefully).

UPDATE:

In the comments to this post, Sharon points out that there is a response to the Wired article at Terra Nova, and also a Tablula Rasa role-playing game which exemplifies the convergence of online gaming communities. I don't have time for a significant commentary this morning, but some of the issues under discussion resemble narrative intertextuality. It might be interesting to think about how such intertextuality functions in the construction of community. More later, but, for now, thanks for the tips, Sharon.

An LA moment

2006-03-05T21:12:00.000-08:00

I just got back from the Medieval Association of the Pacific Conference in Salt Lake City. Most of my spare time for the past few weeks has consisted of getting my paper ready, so I haven't had much time to post new blog entries. Despite it's being an easy trip between Los Angeles and Salt Lake City, I'm pretty tired from the conference, so now I'm in recovery mode.

My one achievement since arriving back in LA has been to help my wife shop for a formal attire business event tomorrow. So here's the LA moment. The saleswoman in Macy's shoe department, when she learned that my wife was looking for shoes to match her dress, enquired: "Are you looking for something for the Academy Awards?" We were much amused.

Save the 76 Ball!

2006-02-21T18:40:00.000-08:00

For background, see the BBC News article "Can we have our balls back, please?".

A question of space

2006-02-02T17:27:00.000-08:00

I have been thinking for some time about the existence in our mode of though of a grand narrative which, through a convergence of various fields of knowledge, defines the function of space in the Middle Ages. The narrative in general goes like this: the medieval period lacked the technology of large-scale movement of people and information; medieval society was thus characteristically local, and its cultures defined by local conditions. In modern times, more advanced technology allowed for greater movement and interaction. This allowed for the growth of bureaucracy and the overlay of larger ‘imagined communities’ such as the nation on top of older, disparate affiliations (so argues Benedict Anderson). Today, that technology had propelled us into the post-modern world in which whole populations are displaced from their geographical origins and juxtaposed, and in which complex communications between geographically distant locations can take place in cyberspace. Communities no longer function within the contiguous boundaries of nations, and geography is becoming increasingly irrelevant. In short, communities functioned first within regional space, then national space, and now in cyberspace.

There are lots of holes in this narrative. Local communities are just as likely to be ‘imagined’ as national ones. The nation is pre-dated by plenty of examples of bureaucracy and ideology that were shared across diverse geographical spaces. And it has yet to be shown that the entry of the participation of the human intellect in virtual communities involves a breaking free of the cultural constructs of the region where its body is housed. Indeed, there are thousands of web sites devoted to local communities. Even the web sites of multinational corporations often divide themselves into subwebs based on region. Finally, many web sites contain proprietary sections not accessible to the global community. (For example, most universities have web-based enrolment and administration sites, as well as on-line teaching sites, which are accessible only to members of those universities.) One possible lesson to take from this is that, as communities expand, they also shrink. There will always be microcosms within the macrocosm. The question is, how do they relate?

Well, I don’t intend to supply an answer in this blog entry, as I don’t have time to write more than a couple of not-very-polished paragraphs at a time (they don’t pay us to write at universities with 4-4 teaching loads). But in the coming weeks I hope to address different aspects of this question in further entries.

Some delays

2006-01-30T08:23:00.000-08:00

Today is the first day of classes, but, as my first one is at 11 am, I have time for a quick blog entry. The inteneded writing I mentioned earlier has been somewhat delayed by my duties on the personnel committee (we had thirteen candidates to evaluate for retention, tenure, and promotion) and by continuing problems with my house. Whilst I was at the MLA Convention in Washington DC, my wife discovered a leak in a copper pipe inside the living room wall. She had to have someone come and rip open the wall to repair it, but the damage was done. Dehumidifers under the brand new carpet installed after the last flood prevented any mould growth, but our place is trashed. However, the laminate flooring which makes up approximately half of our floor space, has started to come up, and the nature of the beast is that the entire floor must be replaced. I am estimating that all the repairs will cost about a tenth of my annual gross income, and I am not sure how much will be covered by insurance.

Wish me luck in dealing with the money pit where I live. In the meantime, , since it's pretty obvious that I'll have to abandon any hope of substantive research activity in the near future, rest assured that I will get around to writing something more substantive here in a few days.

Not what I needed to read

2006-01-20T17:52:00.000-08:00

Looking through the film reviews in The Week (a journal which gathers assorted media views on a wide range of topics). I came across one for Tristan and Isolde -- sorry, Tristan & Isolde -- which quotes David Germain in the Associated Press as follows: "Great, now Hollywood's handing out homework." The review continues: "Tristan & Isolde may not be quite as mind-numbing as a weekend assignment to read the works of Thomas Malory, 'but it's close'."

I have no opinion on the film -- which I haven't seen -- but isn't it lovely to know that one's subject matter is viewed with such sustain, and that great literature is nothing more than a boring chore?

On a slightly less critical note, the review points out that, although the story "packs as much longing and dramatic pedigree" (I think they're still quoting Germain here) as the stories of Romeo and Juliet and Lancelot and Guinevere, it "has, for the most part, been relegated to history's dustbin" (a quote from the review, not Germain). I'd agree with that. I wonder why?

Looking for England

2006-01-16T21:29:00.000-08:00

Today the BBC ran an article entitled 'Looking for England', which I'm linking to here mainly as a bookmark for some future writing. For a while now, debate over the definition of Englishness (and Britishness) has been taking place in a very explicit way in the United Kingdom. The discourse in government and media circles, although not always as sophisticated as academic discourse, nevertheless resembles academic attempts to understand multiculturalism in today's world much more closely than is normally the case. The basic question is whether it is possible to find a unifying principle of community in today's world. This touches on some ideas I have been working with for some time. I hope to get more posts up on it in the next few days.

A Headline News Story on the Yogh

2006-01-10T07:56:00.000-08:00

A headline news story on the yogh! I thought it would never happen! I'm feeling a wee bit weepy.

Incidentally, Menzies Campbell was my local MP when I was a student at St Andrews. I frequently use him when teaching students about the yogh. There was once an attempt to create a Europe-wide voice recognition system for telephone directory enquiries. They tested it by having Menzies Campbell say his name. If you want to know why the system didn't work, follow the link above.

No new reading today

2005-11-29T23:00:00.000-08:00

Gemma's literary pursuits did not extend to any new titles from the book shelf today, perhaps because I was working from home. However, my wife did find a (toy) mouse drowned in her drink -- not for the first time. Perhaps Gemma is also into inventing new cocktails.

My cat's interesting reading habits

2005-11-28T19:54:00.000-08:00

After Sunday's discovery of my cat's propensity for Shakespeare, I may have to begin a regular chronicle of her reading habits. Today I returned from work to find Fahrenheit 451 and Middlemarch removed from the shelf. If this keeps up, maybe some kind of pattern will emerge (suggestions welcome).

My cat's name, incidentally, is Gemma. I'll try and get a picture of her up in the near future.

OK, here she is, as she sinks to full fathom five...

Can't you just hear her pitiful cries for help?

What is my cat reading?

2005-11-27T17:21:00.000-08:00

Some bloggers regularly post the titles of books they are currently reading, a practice to which I have not yet succumbed. However, I will indulge myself by posting my cat's current reading list, which, to go by the books she had arranged on the floor when I got home today, consists of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida, The Tempest, Hamlet (two editions), All's Well That Ends Well, Anthony and Cleopatra, and As You Like It. Now I know what she gets up to when I'm not around.

Happy Thanksgiving

2005-11-23T12:23:00.000-08:00

To those readers in the appropriate country--

Have a Happy Thanksgiving!

Just a quick test

2005-11-18T12:15:00.000-08:00

It has been some time since I used BlogThis! to submit a blog entry since it stopped working when I updates some software (Windows, Internet Explore--I can't remember which). However, I've just discovered that it has been added as an option to the Google Toolbar, so I thought I'd try and see if it works. Here goes...

Tolkien's Use of 'Weapontake'

2005-11-14T18:29:00.000-08:00

Within the last week or so a discussion has arisen about the use of ‘weapontake’ in The Lord of the Rings. The discussion seems to have been started by Horace Jeffery Hodges, progressed to Scott Nokes, and then on to Mike Drout.

What follows will be rather lengthy because I’m reproducing a fair amount of my comments on Drout’s blog and Drout’s further discussion. Here is what Drout had to say:

The context of 'weapontake' in Tolkien is the "Muster of Rohan," when all the men able to bear weapons are assembled in preparation for the ride to Minas Tirith. It seems from the passage (RK, V, ii, 72) that Tolkien is using the word to mean the assembly of all the able-bodied men of Rohan in companies. Although a folk etymology might construe the passage as meaning that the king provided the weapons--i.e., the able-bodied men arrive and are issued weapons from the king's armory-- (as was the case in Peter Jackson's depiction of the Rohirrim in both The Two Towers and The Return of the King), I don't think Tolkien intended that meaning, and I don't think that would be accurate for Anglo-Saxon England (I could be wrong here).
[Snip]
The etymon for the word seems to be ON "vápna-tak," though this is used in a different sense. It is, according to Bosworth-Toller, a Northern word; in the south "hundred" was used (which is why I think that folk-etymologizing the word and assuming that it means that men showed up somewhere to "take" their weapons is probably wrong), and its being Northern would explain the ON etymon. Bosworth-Toller gives the primary source as the laws of Edward the Confessor.

The point here is that Tolkien is likening the Rohirrim to the Anglo-Saxons yet again (even though the "Northern" word is a bit of a curve ball here, since the Rohirrim are linguistically Mercian), suggesting that at the king's call, all the men of Rohan were expected to assemble for military service and form themselves into companies that were, apparently, led by the professional soldiers of the king's household. This practice is in contra-distinction to the customs of Gondor, where a large, standing, professional army was in place.
The larger point is that Tolkien is not merely being archaic for the sake of archaism: he is being particularly precise, using exactly the right word (both in terms of definition and cultural connotations) that he needs for this particular situation. Tolkien's sense of the "right" word, which includes sound and etymology, is actually more 'theorized' than the word choices of the great Modernists to who he is often unfavorably compared (do you really think Faulkner, or Hemingway, or Woolf knew anything of the History of English; they were great talents, but they were working by gut instinct. Joyce is a somewhat different case, but he was no historical philologist--although knowing and sampling so many languages made him more sensitive to the interconnections of European languages).

For the sake of completeness, I also reproduce my own comments here:

Here are some thoughts on weapontake. The Old Norse use of vápnatak seems to have involved the confirmation of a vote at an assembly. In England, the word came to be used for the assembly itself and was, in areas with heavy Danish populations applied to the local judicial body. It was probably also used for the place where the assembly met. As the administrative and judicial boundaries within English counties became more stable, the sense was extended to refer to areas of jurisdiction in addition to the bodies themselves, rather than just the body or the place of the court. We can thus see a sort of evolution in the word from the taking up of weapons to an area of jurisdiction, and it might be possible to locate Tolkien’s usage on this timeline.
It seems to me that, when Tolkien writes that ‘all who could be spared were riding to the weapontake at Edoras’, he could mean a point of assembly, but probably not an official jurisdictional unit for the region of Edoras (the precise meaning of which is also quite interesting, especially given its use in two different senses in Beowulf 1035-1045). In other words, it’s in the middle of the timeline. But, of course, there is no necessity to assume that the weapontake of the Rohirrim accurately reflects the wapentake of Anglo-Saxon England, since the Rohirrim do not exactly match the Anglo-Saxons. Tolkien modernises the spelling (unlike Edoras), which, conceivably takes it in a new—or an alternative—direction consistent with a possible folk etymology: a taking up of weapons as part of a military gathering. The modernisation of the spelling curiously gives the word a more archaic effect by restoring the original connection to weapons. Perhaps this was necessary. Words like Edoras don’t seem particularly archaic to anyone who doesn’t know Old English; they’re simply foreign words like Minas Tirith. But if Tolkien wanted to give the sense of something familiarly English, but archaic, the term weapontake worked pretty well.
As a side note, Higden’s definition is very interesting. Here it is in John of Trevisa’s 1387 translation (with the thorns changed to ‘th’ and yogh to ‘y’): ‘Wepentake and an hondred is al oon, for the contray of an hondred townes were i-woned to yilde vppe wepene in the comynge of the lord.’ I take this to mean: ‘A wapentake is the same as a hundred, for the country of a hundred towns were wont to present weapons at the coming of the lord’. Clearly the word was prone to folk etymology, and it is not impossible that Tolkien had something similar in mind; i.e. Théoden would take the weapons offered by those who owed fealty to him.

Drout draws attention to a little thread at The One Ring, which refers to the discussion and queries the importance of such philological knowledge in the interpretation of The Lord of the Rings, questioning Nokes’s observation that “a deep understanding of medieval language or culture is a prerequisite to serious study” of Tolkien.

Drout responds:

I think this raises a very interesting literary-theoretical question (one which I tried to deal with in my essay "Towards a Better Tolkien Criticism," which should be out any day now in a collection called Reading The Lord of the Rings): which reader's interepretation is more likely to be correct? I can come up with a number of types of readers, each of whom will have slightly different information with which to interpret. What is the authority of each reader?

Drout points out that a philologist with training like Tolkien’s is more likely to have insight into Tolkien’s mind and to possess more information (like the meaning of the historical meaning of “weapontake”) with which to read his work than is fanboy/girl. The philologist’s interpretation is therefore theoretically “richer and more likely to be correct than that of fanboy/girl.” However, he also points out that empowering the philologist in this way privileges author intent as the only meaningful type of interpretation. Furthermore, “even if we do accept author intent, we have to take into account the very insightful comment by Curious [on the One Ring that] ‘Tolkien did not write LotR for an audience of philologists’.”

I want to take up a couple of the issues raised here. First, I don’t entirely agree with the statement that Tolkien did not write The Lord of the Rings for an audience of philologists. After all, he does state explicitly that in the foreword to the second edition and elsewhere that the story took shape according to his own tastes; and Tolkien was a philologist. However, I do accept that Tolkien was thinking about the use to which philology could be put in reaching a non-philological audience. If I’m right, then philological knowledge is essential to our understanding of his intent. That is not to say that it provides the complete picture—just that it should not be ignored. The same is true for other fields, so I agree with Drout’s suggestion that we foster multiple perspectives. How Tolkien intended his philology to affect a non-philological audience is a fascinating and worthwhile question, which may require us to adopt multiple fields of knowledge. But what if we wish to abandon authorial intent altogether? What if we just look at reader response? Do we need to abandon philology, which is unknown to the majority of readers? I believe that Tolkien’s use of “weapontake” provides an interesting test case.

Let’s look at my analysis of “weapontake” more closely. A philological analysis reveals some interesting data to start out with. The element –take is not a native English word; it was borrowed from Old Norse taka perhaps as early as 1000, and occurs first in northern and eastern England, more or less in areas where they had wapentakes instead of hundreds. The first element, however, is derived from the southern dialect form of Old English wæpen (with a long vowel in the root). In other words, Tolkien’s “weapontake” is a hybrid word, not the historical wapentake. As a philologist, I can say this much. Now comes the difficult bit, where I have to put myself in the shoes of a nonphilologist. I take as my framework for speculation two possibilities. First, an intelligent reader, one who makes a serious effort to understand the literature, even if they do not share Tolkien’s background. Such a reader, coming across the strange word “weapontake” would, logically, go and look up the word. Because of the spelling, they might not find it. If they did, they would begin speculating about whether Tolkien’s matches any historical one. All sorts of questions would be begged about the relationship of the Rohirrim to the English past. I’m not sure what the answers would be, in part because I can’t divest myself of my philological perspective enough to put myself in the shoes of this reader. On the other, by this point, the reader would already be trying on one of my shoes. In other words, whether Tolkien intended it or not, the use of the word “weapontake” prompts the reader to begin speculations of a philological nature even if they’ve never had a course on philology.

Of course, there’s another type of reader, one who doesn’t have the same intellectual curiosity. This reader is more likely to pass over the word and not enquire of its meaning. Of course, it’s even harder for me to put myself in the shoes of this reader. Does a word like “weapontake” have no effect at all on this reader? Does it induce a sense of disorientation? Other effects? Does these effects influence broader views of the book? Suggestions are welcome.

The California Special Election has barely started, and there are already problems

2005-11-08T09:54:00.000-08:00

Polls in the California Special Election have been open for less than two hours, and there are already problems. My wife and I went to our usual polling station to find it closed with a note providing a number to call to find out where to vote. The recorded message we received when we called the number directed us to a local Mexican restaurant, which also had signs telling us that the polling station was closed. A concerned citizen had posted another sign directing us to a Jeep dealership about a half a mile away, where, at last, we found an open polling station--which did not look very busy. We gave lift to another voter who had come to the Mexican restaurant and probably spent almost a half an hour getting to the right location. Although I work from home today, my wife had to get to work, and she might have just thrown in the towel after the second closed polling station. These circumstances are bound to produce a low voter turnout, and, by all accounts, a low turnout will help the propositions sponsored by Arnold Schwarzenegger. This creates a deeply disturbing scenario. For an election which Schwarzenegger himself is billing as "Judgement Day", we cannot afford to have the electoral process tainted by the disenfranchisement of voters. If these problems are occurring in my comfortable and affluent West Los Angeles neighbourhood, I wonder what is happening in poorer areas. It is the Presidential election all over again.

Please, if you are reading this and have not yet voted, find your polling station (whatever the obstacles) and make your opinion heard. The issues (some of which I have discussed here) are too important to stay away from. You can find your local polling station here (and the web site does seem to be accurate).

The California Special Election, or, Terminate the Teachers

2005-10-27T10:32:00.000-07:00

The California special election takes place in just under two weeks time, and I need to return to the discussion I began here and here. This will be a very important election, as it will have a number of long-term consequences. Aside from the effects of the individual propositions, they will set some important precedents, which will determine attitudes towards public services in the future. Where California goes the nation follows. It is vital that everybody get out and vote.

It is with great reluctance that I place any personal endorsements in this sphere, but the advertising on both sides has been appallingly simplistic and manipulative. I feel compelled to give my perspective, particularly for the three propositions—74, 75, and 76—which will effect education. Here’s my take on these issues:

Proposition 74
This proposition increases the probationary period before tenure for teachers from two years to five. The reason for doing so is to eliminate the large number of bad teachers that plague the school system. But how big is this problem? Small fries compared to the other problems: low funding for education and many social problems amongst the student population. If there are a large number of bad teachers, the reason is because the low pay and the difficulty of working conditions make the profession unattractive to those who might make better teachers. Schwarzenegger’s solution, will certainly get rid of some bad apples, but will also make the profession even less attractive. The result? The lost teachers and potential teachers will lead to a shortage of teachers in the schools. The schools will be forced to adopt recruiting strategies to respond to this crisis, and the only way to do so is to lower standards. In other words, voting yes on this proposition will not lead to any improvements. It will, however, lead to the further degradation of the teaching profession. In combination with Proposition 75 and/or 75, its negative effects would probably be magnified. If you care about having good teachers—if you REALLY care about having good teachers—in our schools, vote for education reforms that support the profession. It’s the only way to improve things.

Proposition 75
This proposition prevents public employees’ unions (such as the teachers’ union and university faculty unions) from spending employees’ dues on political lobbying (such as television advertising against propositions like this one) without the employees first opting in to such a programme. Currently, they have a choice to opt out. In other words, the default is changed. The argument is that these unions spend their money on causes which the dues payers do not necessarily support. Here’s the real situation, at least for the California Faculty Association. Our pay is docked about $25 a month for union dues—even if we don’t join the union. If we do join, we pay more. That sounds horrible! But consider this. The union does not always lobby for positions I support; but it is the ONLY pressure group that lobbies the government to raise my salary. Name me one employee who doesn’t want a higher salary, especially in a low-paying profession? Unions are the major lobby for the teaching profession, since the general public—since the seventies—voted not to fully fund education through property taxes. We need them, even if we don’t always agree with their positions on individual issues. The best way to address one’s disagreement with a union is to get involved and try to influence it. At the very least, opt out of paying the higher dues but support the union’s activities by agreeing to pay the lower ones.

But what if you are not a public employee? Is it appropriate for you to vote to change the rules? Yes, if you truly believe that public employees have too much power, and that public professions are just squandering your tax money on frivolity and cushy salaries. But surely they are not. Public education, to name the system with which I am most concerned, is chronically underfunded by the general public, who then complain about its ineffectiveness, as do the devisers of Proposition 74. Proposition 75 weakens the only organisations that consistently speak up for education. Voting yes on 75 will make the teaching profession less attractive and, ironically, feed the poor teacher problem that Proposition 74 claims (wrongly) to address.

Proposition 76
This proposition gives the governor broad powers to adjust the State budget downwards in order to prevent overspending by the legislature. It is marketed as fiscally responsible. It is—according to a business model. But the public sphere is not a business. There are some things you can’t downsize to balance your books. The Governor claims that the legislature will not be fiscally responsible on its own. That’s true because they are influenced by other forms of responsibility like education and public services. Schwarzenegger, I believe, clearly feels no responsibility for these social goods. Nor does he see their long-term value. Cutting funding to education weakens education and leads to a less educated work force. A less educated work force leads to a weaker economy and more social problems. A weaker economy and more social problems lead to more budgetary woes. In order to have a stable economy you need to have invest a certain minimum amount in public services, and we are already well below the necessary minimum. Republicans might argue that balancing the books and keeping taxes low will stimulate the economy and filter down. But even if this is true, it does not help the public sphere in a society where the wealthy don’t pay taxes which fuel money back into the public sphere. Proposition 76 is a great proposition for a governor who will be able to use it to great effect and who will long be out of office when the negative effects hit.

An important provision of Proposition 76 is that it will roll back Proposition 98 (approved by voters in 1988), which sets a minimum amount of spending for education. That this provision should be included in Proposition 76 shows precisely where the Governor will take aim if the proposition is approved. The fact that there are three propositions supported by the Governor targeting education lends further credence to this.

Coda
Things to remember:

You get what you pay for. If you don’t pay for education—one way or the other—the available educational opportunities will not be good ones.

Teachers (and professors) are human. Just as you wouldn’t expect quality products to come from a sweatshop, you can’t expect educators to deliver a quality education under poor working conditions.

I really am cursed

2005-10-19T08:37:00.000-07:00

One week after dealing with a blocked sewer line sending dirty water welling up from my sinks, I came home from work to find a small wet patch in the carpet right beneath my desk chair. The wet patch started to grow--fast. It turned out that there had been a leaky pipe in the (thankfully fresh) water injection system in the toilet of one of the units above me. Water had come out at the rate of at least a gallon a minute and flooded my neighbour's second bedroom. He didn't notice since he currently not living there -- that because his place is under construction, since it was flooded during the last rainy season due to our poorly constructed roof. So the water gradually made its way under the wall and into my carpet. It was 11 pm before I had managed to get a plumber to ascertain that (a) it was not more sewage, (b) it was not rainwater (we had been experiencing torrential rain all day, (c) turn off the water to the offending toilet upstairs, and (d) vacuum up some of the water in the carpet. It took another two hours yesterday for the carpet shampooers to come, suck up more water, and clean. Needless to say, very little work has been done in the intervening time. Sigh.

Living the High Life

2005-10-13T07:53:00.000-07:00

My planned ramblings on PhD reform have been trumped today by my response to an NPR report on the new Miller High Life (that's what loosely passes for beer, if you happen to be reading this from a country with a fine brewing tradition) advertising campaign. For the present, you can see the advert at http://www.millerhighlife.com/. Although The basic thrust of the campaign is that Miller High Life, with its Girl in the Moon emblem, has been around for most of the historical events (major and minor) of the last century. It appeals to nostalgia, not for things remembered, for the past in general--at least the past that overlaps with Miller's history. The obvious message is that by drinking the beer you are somehow connected people and events in, say, 1906. It's a very effective advert, albeit some of its effectiveness comes from its abandonment of the traditional conventions of beer advertising.

The way the Miller High Life advert connects people to the past got me thinking about the way that we in the world of literary criticism, and more specifically those of us who study the Middle Ages, form such connections. To read the publications of the MLA and other professional organisations, there is a crisis in the profession about how we sell ourselves to the public. Our discipline will never survive unless we show how it is relevant, and we've been doing a very bad job of it in recent years. But I wonder. Have we really been doing such a bad job. Yes, the discipline is in trouble, but look at the resources available to us for getting our message across. Almost nothing. We have minimal budgets, a wealth of competition from a myriad other subjects, the general difficulty of the field (ack! all those languages), and the subject doesn't directly generate a lot of money. Nevertheless, we continue to gain new students and there's certainly a fair amount of medievalia (however distorted) in the general pop culture. Given the circumstances, surely we are doing a fabulous job. Perhaps we should be congratulating ourselves rather than agonising over our seeming irrelevance.

But could we do better? Could we be as effective as, say, a Miller High Life advert? What's the difference between those who use the past to deliver their product and those who deliver the past as their product? Well, don't answer that one. I'm sure there are a great many differences between a brewer and a medievalist. My point, though, is that both work with the premise that the past is somehow relevant. Admittedly, Miller has a product, the beer, which serves as the medium for the connection between the consumer and the past. Perhaps that's what medievalists (and literary critics in general) need: a product to help forge that connection. Supposedly we have various such projects: good writing skills, critical analysis, and the like. But these are nothing like as tangible as a bottle of beer. Could we come up with something more tangible?

To approach that problem, I think it is helpful to look at things from Miller's point of view. Their beer is really just a fermented liquid, not a metaphysical medium for connections between the past and the present. The rest is good marketing--devised by a good marketing company. And this is where I think the medievalists really differ from the brewers. The medievalists have to do their marketing on their own. The brewers can call on experienced marketers who (for the right price) will devise a way to sell their product. I wonder whether things would be different if we had the same resource available to us. In fact, I think there are ways that this could be done by clever interdisciplinary work, the use of grant money, and the like. But even if no such solutions are taken on board, it might be a good idea for us all to take a closer look at the techniques used by professional marketers to see what, if anything, we can learn from them.

If this seems like a load of nonsense, wit it the ale of Milwaukee, to misquote another Miller entirely.

I think I'm cursed

2005-10-09T13:40:00.000-07:00

Yesterday's plans were disrupted by my discovery that my copy of Microsoft Outlook had become corrupted and had not sent any mail for the past week. After I spent about two hours fixing the problem, I set out to return to the Saturday I had intended to have. But then there was a loud "glug glug" sound, and dirty water started well up into our sinks and overflow. It turns out that there was a block in the sewer line. Eight hours later, after much flooding and working with plumbers, the problem is fixed, but we are still cleaning up the mess. So much for a relaxing weekend. Alas, my planned entry on reforming PhD programmes will have to wait...

Spam Attack

2005-10-07T09:30:00.000-07:00

Sadly, this blog has finally fallen prey to spam in the comments, so I have had to enable word verification. Apologies for the inconvenience to anyone leaving comments.

I have a backlog of topics for discussion, so look for another post over the weekend.

Where have I been?

2005-09-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

I haven’t been doing much blogging over the summer, as I have been fighting against numerous mental and physical obstacles in order to get some work done. Stomach flu levelled me during June and July, with exhausting family-related trips before and after. Recarpeting meant that my study had to be dismantled and moved into the living room, and to top off the summer I banged my toe on items of furniture—twice—fracturing it. (Actually, the X-Rays don’t show anything, but, as it’s still not healed, there must be an invisible fracture.) I’m also trying not to add to the barrage (I almost said flood) of Hurricane Katrina analysis on the web. I’ll just make two comments. First, I have had e-mails regarding the plight of some medieval scholars in the New Orleans area, whose houses were destroyed, and my heart goes out to them. Second, it is a mess down there, and money is needed. Please give as much as you can by whatever means.

So did I get any work done? Never enough—but yes. Here’s a précis:

Entries for the forthcoming J.R.R Tolkien Encyclopedia. Topics were on the Middle English King Horn, the Danish chronicler Saxo Grammaticus, Tolkien’s article ‘Sigelwara Land’ on the Old English word for Ethiopian, and his reviews of philological publications in the 1920s for The Year’s Work in English Studies. I still have a number of further entries to complete, including ones on Tolkien’s knowledge of Middle English and his depiction of kingship.

An entry for the International Encyclopaedia for the Middle Ages--Online on ‘The Normans in Britain and Ireland: 1154-1217’.

Ongoing research for my book Regionalism and Identity in Medieval England. This summer I began work on the South English Legendary, a collection of saints’ lives and other material which was one of the more popular and widely distributed Middle English texts.

Began writing my paper (titled ‘Somerset before Dante’) for the MLA Convention in December.

Embarked upon a major re-design of the English Department web site. I’m hoping to unveil it by the end of the semester.

Is that enough? Oh yes, and I was promoted to Associate Professor. At Cal State Northridge, that means more work. I’ll find out next month whether my cheque compensates for it.

Medieval Medicine

2005-08-06T21:02:00.000-07:00

Years ago I did some research on an eleventh to twelfth-century medieval text called Peri Didaxeon. I have been interested in medieval medicine ever since. Recent research is showing new evidence of its sophistication; witness this recent article on the BBC web site. Check out the related articles for further information.

Follow-up to Schwarzenegger's Education 'Reforms'

2005-06-16T08:20:00.000-07:00

It seems that Schwarzenegger has already got part of the control over education spending he seeks through the propositions to appear in the November ballot (see discussion in yesterday's post). The plot is summed up in an article in today's LA Times:

SACRAMENTO — Republicans in the Legislature spoiled an effort by Democrats to meet Wednesday's constitutional deadline for passing a state budget, calling the plan too expensive — although it differed little from the one proposed by the Republican governor a month ago.

Only eight Republican votes were needed for lawmakers to approve the $115.7-billion budget bill and send it to the governor's desk for his signature. But all Republicans in both houses voted no, saying they opposed some spending in the Democratic plan that was not in the governor's budget.

[snip]

The budget the Democrats presented largely conceded to the demands of Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to limit spending in several areas. The lawmakers had abandoned their demand that he give $3 billion more to schools, and that the budget include new taxes on wealthy Californians.

Democrats did not want to wage a prolonged budget battle after Schwarzenegger this week called a Nov. 8 special election. They feared that a fight could motivate voters to pass state spending controls he helped place on that ballot.

In addition, the influential California Teachers Assn., which is threatened by that measure and one that could hamper unions' ability to fund political campaigns, counseled the Democrats — who benefit from union donations — to move on.

Although the budget will be slightly better for education than we feared it might be six months ago, the failure of Democratic legislatures to secure even more funding gives a good idea of where the political will is in California today.

Reforming Education in California

2005-06-14T12:54:00.000-07:00

As the Michael Jackson mania begins to die down, it is about to be replaced in California by the Schwarzenegger show. To wit, the Governator has called for a special election in which he will be pushing for some very controversial reforms (as he calls them). As education is a prime target of Schwarzenegger’s proposals, I want to provide some analysis of their implications. Before I go on I should make clear my two areas of bias. First, I’m a university professor, and, when push comes to shove, I care first about the implications for higher education. Second, I have consulted the web sites of both sides in the debate and found that they contain mostly platitudes and sound bites, rather than analysis. Of the sites I examined, Schwarzenegger’s provides the least information on the arguments in favour of his proposals. If I am unpersuaded of them, this is in part because he has not effectively presented whatever merits they may have.

That said, let me attempt to evaluate those merits. The governor’s proposals for education seem to involve the following actions.

A constitutional amendment removing legislated minimum funding requirements for schools and essentially giving the person of the governor (as opposed to the legislature) discretion to reduce the education budget to “live within our means”. Fiscal impact is unknown, but spending cuts on education are made more likely.

An increase in the time for teachers to reach tenure from two to five years. Two consecutive unsatisfactory evaluations would be made grounds for teacher dismissal. Fiscal impact is unknown, probably varying from district to district.

Prohibits unions from using dues for political contributions without prior consent from the employee. Fiscal impact is probably minor state and local government implementation costs potentially offset in part by revenues from fines and/or fees.

I hope that by adding the predicted fiscal impacts I have made clear one flaw in the Governor’s proposals. There is great uncertainty about whether we will emerge fiscally better off. In the case of union dues, the impact might be a raising of fees to compensate for the lost income routable to political campaigning. Can you really make changes with such uncertain financial consequences and call it reform? In all likelihood, educational institutions and individual educators will suffer more often than they benefit.

I do have a lot of sympathy for what the Governor is trying to achieve through changes in the tenure and dismissal procedures: he wants better teachers. His proposal to introduce merit-based pay, which did not receive enough support to make the ballot, was part of the same proposal. It is true that the teaching profession employees and continues to attract people who are poorly suited to the job: people who lack sufficient knowledge and training or lack (for whatever reason) the ability to acquire sufficient knowledge and training to build a more educated populace. In principle, the Governor’s move is the right one: get rid of those people who shouldn’t be there.

But let’s look at his method a bit more closely. Teaching is in many ways a thankless profession, with few material rewards and often very hard working conditions. Making tenure harder and dismissal easier adds greater uncertainty to the job. This, combined with the likelihood of further spending cuts and an undermining of the power of teachers’ unions to fund the advancement of teachers’ political agendas will make the profession even less attractive. The result will be twofold. First, people who have the potential to meet the requirements Schwarzenegger wants for teachers in the system will actually be further discouraged from entering it. In short, the result will be a brain drain. Second, the profession will become a revolving door job in which people will teach for a few years and then leave either because they do not see any benefits on the horizon or because their performance is unsatisfactory and they are forced out. The result will be not only a chronic lack of experience in the profession (a further brain drain), but also a chronic need for more teachers to enter the revolving door.

And this is where my concern for higher education enters the picture. The proposals which are on the ballot, if passed, will, as I have argued, create a greater demand for universities to produce more qualified (i.e. certified) teachers. We are already buckling under this imperative with more and more of our time being spent on teacher training and many of our curricular designs limited by the requirements of our teacher education programmes. Student learning is suffering and teaching in the CSU is becoming increasingly unattractive. More and more, I am hearing of potential job candidates being advised not to accept any job in the CSU. In all likelihood, the Governor’s proposals will encourage the brain drain in higher education.

Finally, a word about merit pay. The California Faculty Association (the faculty union for the California State University) opposes introducing merit pay to teachers because this “would make it very easy for a merit pay scheme to creep back into the CSU, leaving faculty members vulnerable to subjective standards of good teaching.” Although merit pay for teachers will not be on the November ballot, there is a good chance that it will be reintroduced in the future, especially if the proposed changes in tenure are adopted. I stridently oppose the CFA’s line of reasoning here. Merit pay for teachers and merit pay for professors are two different items. Teachers are judged primarily on teaching; university professors have a more dynamic range of activities on which they can be judged meritorious. For higher education, tenure decisions are already based on subjective standards of merit; but, on the whole, they are fair and effective standards. The true agenda is that the fear in the CFA that merit pay will be based primarily on research activities, the very activities that distinguish professors from teachers. This is not a fear that I share, but that’s a debate for another time. Suffice to say that merit pay has serious problems when introduced at the pre-University level. However, that is not an argument against merit pay in higher education.

In summary, I believe the Governor’s “reforms”—however well-intentioned they may be—should be opposed for the following reasons:

Their fiscal impact is unknown, but probably overall detrimental to educational institutions and individual educators.

They will undermine the teaching profession by depriving it of revenue important to advancing its cause in government and by making it less attractive to potential educators.

They will not produce better qualified teachers. The results of the proposals will run counter to their intent because the profession will become an unattractive revolving-door profession.

They will adversely impact higher education by undermining the teaching profession at that level.

I believe that if you truly support education you must put your money where your mouth is. Many would counter that throwing money at the educational system has not improved standards. If this is true, it is often so because the barriers to achievement lie in factors outside of the control of educators (poverty, family life, and so on). But improving the quality of teachers—one of the Governor’s stated goals—can be achieved with money. Make the profession attractive to society’s best and brightest and a great many other improvements will follow.

Advanced Symptoms of Advanced Degrees

2005-03-02T09:36:00.000-08:00

This article courtesy of this week's Chronicle of Higher Education was just too good not to reproduce here:

Advanced Symptoms of Advanced Degrees

By LAWRENCE DOUGLAS and ALEXANDER GEORGE

It is hardly news that graduate students are often not the happiest of campers. Only recently, however, have scientists, psychologists, and discourse pathologists come to appreciate and diagnose the full range of maladies afflicting the graduate-student population. Now the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual for Graduate Students (DSMGS-1), the first book ever dedicated specifically to disorders of those pursuing advanced degrees, promises relief to this long-suffering population. An excerpt follows:

Global Irony Syndrome (GIS)
Indications: GIS is an affective disorder most commonly characterized by the following symptoms: an erosion of belief in Enlightenment values; snideness toward the concepts of truth, objectivity, and universal ethical codes; cynicism about the two-party system and the wealth-leveling effects of global capitalism; an ironic stance toward all physical laws and reality itself. The onset of GIS is often signaled in the sufferer by the replacement of easygoing laughter with sarcastic smirks, and by the refusal to debate any issue except through indirection, punning, and sneering banter.

Prevalence: GIS has been largely concentrated in humanities departments, with occasional outbreaks in the "softer" social sciences, such as sociology, anthropology, government, and politics.

Treatment: Intensive viewing of It's a Wonderful Life has proved salutary. Failing that, a semester's leave spent in a hard-labor camp of a despotic regime is effective in more than 75 percent of reported cases.

Hyper-Theory Disorder (HTD)
Indications: HTD is a cognitive disorder distinguished by an increasingly abstract frame of mind. Sufferers gradually lose the ability to speak in a manner unmediated by poststructuralist theory. In extreme cases, sufferers come to view all aspects of popular culture (e.g., SpongeBob reruns, Oprah, the National Football League) through the filter of Heideggerian metaphysics or Lacanian psychoanalysis. HTD is often misdiagnosed as Tunnel Visionitis (TV), a similar, though etiologically distinct, malady marked by a gradually escalating inability to communicate with anyone -- including friends, family, spouses, and domestic pets -- who does not share all of one's theoretical presuppositions.

Prevalence: HTD is endemic to literature departments. TV, by contrast, is rampant throughout all disciplines, often hitting the natural sciences hardest.

Treatment: Complete abstinence from all French and German texts remains a controversial treatment for HTD. Until further therapeutic remedies have been discovered, a travel advisory for Continental Europe has been issued to all humanities students.

Sycophancy-Authority Malady (SAM)
Indications: SAM is considered a speech pathology increasingly common among advanced graduate students. It is marked by a tendency to speak in flattering, fawning, ingratiating, and even idolatrous terms to persons in positions of authority such as full professors, conference organizers, and powerful department secretaries. Oddly, sufferers of SAM, when conversing privately, tend to speak of these authorities in only the most derisive, disdainful, and even violent terms. (This syndrome is not to be confused with Manic Mentor Mimesis; see below.)

Prevalence: Cases of SAM have been reported in most graduate centers, though serious outbreaks tend to be concentrated in the lobbies, conference rooms, and bars of hotels hosting annual meetings of professional associations at which job interviewing is taking place.

Treatment: Tenure-track appointments were once considered effective in curing SAM, but recent studies challenge that conclusion. Those studies also suggest that tenure itself provides less relief than previously assumed. Researchers now believe that retirement constitutes the only fully effective treatment for this complex and poorly understood malady.

Manic Mentor Mimesis (MMM)
Indications: The disease, difficult to diagnose in its earliest stages, first manifests itself in the sufferer's subtle mimicry of an adviser's hand gestures. Gradually, the mimetic tendencies deepen and spread to include head movements and distinctive eye rolls of the adviser, as well as slouches, gaits, and even, if opportunity presents itself, dancing styles. As MMM becomes more systemic, tones of voice, sighs, vocal tics, and even idiosyncratic expectorations come to be included within the ambit of imitation. In its final and most humiliating stages, sufferers find themselves mimicking the dress of their advisers and adopting their hair styles. Typically, Acute Adornment Ataxia then sets in as the sufferer finds movement restricted by all the laser pens, cellphones, soda cans, backpacks, and assorted pedagogical props used by the adviser.

Prevalence: MMM is especially prevalent in departments, such as philosophy and mathematics, with high concentrations of eccentric faculty members.

Treatment: Extreme ridicule from peers outside academe, such as siblings and attractive baristas, has been known to abate the condition.

Terminal Graduate Paralysis (TGP)
Indications: This chronic, debilitating, and sometimes fatal condition represents the most serious and widespread of the many behavioral disorders facing the graduate-student population. Symptoms often appear in the fourth year of graduate study, though this can vary from discipline to discipline.

Early signs are typically mild and therefore easily overlooked or ignored. These often include a subtle shift in media-consumption habits, from National Public Radio to South Park, and from professional journals to extreme-makeover television. More serious symptoms include compulsive retitling of the dissertation; a pathological overinvestment of time in TA-ing; a tendency to misplace routinely or otherwise lose or obliterate thousands of hours of work as a result of alleged computer failures (clinicians investigating these mishaps frequently find suspiciously mutilated hard drives). Advanced symptoms include substantially impaired performance on all cognitive tasks; hyperanxiety and night sweats; bibliophobia; comma-shifting mania; and a marked adviser-avoidance response. At its most extreme, sufferers display a deer-in-the-headlights appearance; epistemological aphasia (the conviction that one no longer knows anything); morbid feelings of lack of self-worth often accompanied by paranoiac delusions of victimization; a deepening of syntactic torpidity (the loss of the ability to write clearly, simply, and, ultimately, at all); a resurgence of teenage acne; even renewed thumb-sucking and bed-wetting. Failure to File (F2F) represents a particularly heartbreaking, and dimly understood, form of TGP, in which the sufferer mysteriously disappears on the eve of filing the completed dissertation, or otherwise inexplicably decides to "tighten" the argument.

Prevalence: Cases of TGP have been reported in every state and in every graduate department. The Morningside Heights district of Manhattan has produced rates suggesting a veritable epidemic that is matched only by certain areas in Berkeley, Calif.

Treatment: In its advanced stages, TGP is considered untreatable. For early-stage sufferers, long walks in open farmland accompanied by a complete termination of parental financial support has proved effective. Application to law school has also been known to offer relief.

Back to the world of the living soon

2004-12-05T19:09:00.000-08:00

It's been a long time since I've been able to post anything here, and I'm not quite able to do so yet. Finals week begins tomorrow, and then I'll be returning to the world of the living. Stay tuned.

Assessment in a Learning-Centred University

2004-11-14T10:47:00.000-08:00

Yesterday’s department meeting introduced the newest command from the powers that be. As part of the university’s decision to become a learning-centred institution, every department will have to engage in regular self-assessment, with reports made to unnamed bodies above us. The department’s current activities for the five-yearly departmental review are deemed inadequate, not because they have been examined for such inadequacy, but because the university itself has been given a blanket mission of introducing new assessment techniques.

I am a great supporter of assessment in principle, but in practice it leaves much to be desired. One very great problem is the format in which it has been introduced as a mission. For those not involved in the daily process of teaching to ask departments to demonstrate that they are fulfilling their learning objectives runs the risk of insulting faculty members by implying that they are not doing so. To date, technocratic initiatives have failed to avoid alienating faculty members in this way. A notable example is the recent mandate by the State of California to overhaul the teaching credential programme. Our department was forced to engage in a year-long project of collecting syllabi and sample assignments for every class, along with explanations of how each class contributed to the various areas of expertise which students working for the teaching credential are now expected to acquire. I cannot exaggerate enough the immense burden of wasted time and bureaucratic paperwork this placed on us, not just on our credential adviser, but on the entire department. There was apparently little thought given to the consequences of what we were being asked to do. Many faculty members felt that they were being scrutinised and second guessed. Certainly they felt a strong message that there was a lack of trust in their professional expertise.

The sheer amount of time bureaucratic exercises like this take up shows another danger of assessment. The process of gathering and processing information can leave no time (or energy to act upon it). This process also takes time away from teaching and research, the two primary means by which learning takes place within the university. It is true that self-assessment is a type of learning as well, which justifies its place in a learning-centred university. But is this type of learning important enough to be worth diverting time and resources from student learning or faculty contributions to their fields of study? I suspect that promoters of assessment would deliver a resounding, if somewhat rhetorical, no in the case of student learning and an even less convincing no in the case of faculty research. In actual fact, though, I observe signs that there is a hierarchy of interests here, and that attention and resources are being diverted away from research. In addition, there is already a built-in diversion of resources away from student learning. Cal State Northridge, has an abysmal graduation rate and a deepening financial crisis. In this climate, we cannot enforce pre-requisites which would benefit learning outcomes. Further, we are being urged to graduate students with few courses in larger class sizes. All this does not translate into a smaller teaching load for faculty, who are so overworked that they are unable to offer students the attention they deserve. Although I have seen no suggestions of how assessment can contribute to the (nominal) research mission of the university, it is argued that assessment will help faculty devise better ways to help students learn in the current climate. I agree that assessment can fulfil this function and have used it myself to this end.

However, it can also be a grave burden on faculty members, whose time is already limited by an overburdened workload. There has been some recognition of this in suggestions that we embed assessment in the coursework we assign and that we not assess everything at once. Good suggestions, but they can easily get out of hand. One thing is clear. We will not have an outside body examining the data we have collected; rather, our assessment committee will be asked to collect and analyse the data, and then file a report of some sort. If the level of assessment is enlarged too much, this will be a great burden, and it is not clear that anything will come out of it.

I should add something from my own personal experience with assessment. The data I collected revealed that I was already doing almost everything I could do to help my students reach the learning outcomes I had set for them. For the most part, the factors that prevented them from reaching those outcomes were outside my control. In my first two years at Cal State Northridge I made heroic efforts to overcome these factors and found that my efforts resulted in diminishing returns. There was also considerable collateral damage. I took time and energy away from my research efforts, which led to a degree of scholarly stagnation and a dampening of my enthusiasm in the classroom. I also took time away from my personal life, which affected my family and my health. In the end, assessment led me along a very unhappy path. It promoted activities for which resources were insufficient or unavailable and distracted me from those activities which make my professional life dynamic and successful. It proved to be navel gazing of the worst kind.

I am not arguing that we should not engage in assessment activities. I am arguing that they should not be mechanical bureaucratic exercises, that they should not be too extensive, and that the limits on their usefulness should be firmly part of the perspectives of those who promote and engage in them.

Blessed be alwey a lewed man

2004-11-03T09:12:00.000-08:00

Ye, blessed be alwey a lewed man
That noght but oonly his bileve kan!

(Yea, blessed be always an ignorant man who knows nothing but his his faith!)

So says John the Carpenter in Chaucer's Miller's Tale. Or was it George Bush and the American public?

My trepidations for the future are greater than they have ever been. Timor mortis scientiae conturbat me.

Was the Reformation Launched in a Privy?

2004-10-22T09:28:00.000-07:00

A recent discovery of a privy in an annex to Martin Luther's house in Wittenberg has led to some rather exaggerated claims about his religious ideas being worked out as he battled constipation. Still, it's a good read.

Gauging High-School Students' Readiness for College

2004-10-14T11:01:00.000-07:00

I'm reproducing in its entirety the following article from today's Chronicle of Higher Education. It seems to show that the vast majority of students are woefully inadequately prepared for university level English. The statistics, however, need some interpretation. What proportion of the 88% of students considered "not proficient" in English (the academic subject) are actually not proficient in England (the language) because it is not their native language? This must be taken into account in judging the effectiveness of the school system. From the other sid of the coin, the university's perspective, what proportion of these students are we seeing? Are 88% of our students "not proficient"? Or, at least, were they "not proficient" when they started their university careers? Probably that percentage should be lowered. The question is, by how much?
------------------------------------------------

Cal State Releases First Results in Program to Gauge High-School Students' Readiness for College

By SARA HEBEL

The results are in from the first year of a new California testing program that is designed to help high-school juniors learn how they can better prepare for college, and the findings, released on Wednesday, show that many students have more work to do to become proficient in mathematics and English.

Of the more than 115,000 students who opted to take the math portion of the program's test last spring, 55 percent scored high enough to be declared ready for college-level courses at California State University. Of the more than 150,000 who took the English portion, only 22 percent were classified as being prepared.

In all, nearly 40 percent of the state's 385,000 high-school juniors chose to take part in the Early Assessment Program, which its creators say is the first of its kind in the nation.

High-school juniors decide whether to participate in the program when they take California's mandatory standardized test, to which optional questions for the Early Assessment Program are attached. Students who want to learn whether they are ready for college-level work must complete 15 multiple-choice questions for math and 15 multiple-choice questions and an essay for English.

Cal State administrators, faculty members, and trustees developed the Early Assessment Program, in collaboration with public-school and other state education officials, so that students could gain information about their level of preparedness for college when they still have time to improve their skills in high school.

University and state leaders hope that the program will prod high schools to increase the rigor of their courses and reduce the number of students who show up for college needing remedial help. That goal is especially important as the state's public colleges and universities struggle with how to handle a huge influx of new students over the next two decades.

More than half of first-time freshmen entering Cal State now need extra academic preparation in at least one subject, university officials said. The university aims to slash the percentage of freshmen who must take remedial courses to 10 percent by 2007.

David S. Spence, Cal State's executive vice chancellor and chief academic officer, said that giving students an early signal about their readiness for college amounted to a "fairness issue for students."

He also said that the results of the tests were about what university officials expected for the first year of the program. He believes the scores will improve in each successive year.

Jack O'Connell, California's superintendent of public instruction, added that the findings confirm the need to continue to improve the state's public high schools.

"The Early Assessment Program is an enormous step to better preparing our students," Mr. O'Connell said. "I believe the senior year in high school will become much more productive."

Surgery in Late Anglo-Saxon England

2004-10-05T17:53:00.000-07:00

The BBC report new evidence of the use of advanced surgical techniques in late Anglo-Saxon England. The article contains some speculation about the circumstances in which it took place (whom the surgery was done to and whom it was done by), and my impression is that it is just that--speculation. Still, an interesting read (and there's even a video version!).

I'll be away from my desk for the next two days, so more thoughts on core curriculum ideal will have to wait until then.

Continuing Discussion of Liberal Education

2004-10-04T09:02:00.001-07:00

The nature of liberal educations seems to be a recurring theme in my thoughts and those of others at the moment. The latest is a discussion of the relative merits of the core curriculum and distribution requirements models of general education in The Chronicle of Higher Education. By coincidence, my university is in the process of re-designing its general education programme, very much on the distribution requirements model. If you dare, follow this link to see the models currently proposed, though I warn readers that I found them largely incomprehensible (which is probably not a good sign).

I think I want to discuss this issue in depth and include some basic definitions, which will take me a while to put together. So tune into this space for more in the coming days.

OK, here's a summary of Barry Latzer's article in the Chronicle:

Barry Latzer writes: “Several months ago a committee of the Harvard Arts and Sciences faculty recommended changes in the university's core curriculum, the required courses outside the students' specialization. Although the committee proposed new, multidisciplinary core courses, it also recommended the standard distribution approach to general education, which allows students freedom to select from a distribution of courses in five or six areas.” Latzer points out that “despite the popularity of the distribution model and Harvard's apparent endorsement, I've heard no fully persuasive argument in its defense. Moreover, a core curriculum provides certain marked advantages.” He continues:

Under the traditional core system the faculty designates the general-education courses in which the student must enroll. Over the years, by consensus, that has been subject to two limits: first, that the core courses would be relatively few in number, and second, that they would be general in scope. The result is a curriculum consisting of a small number of broad-based courses, like "Great Works of Philosophy" or "Landmarks of Literature"--courses that embrace the central knowledge and skills areas that the faculty deems important.

[…]

The typical distribution system requires the student to select a few courses in each of the following areas: physical and biological sciences, humanities, social sciences, writing skills, mathematics skills, and multicultural studies. The student is free to choose his or her courses from lists for each area. The trend has been to expand those lists almost without limit as faculty members press to have their favorite courses included and students seek greater and greater choice.…

Virtually unbridled student choice is not, however, a persuasive rationale for a general curriculum. It means that some, if not most, students will be deprived of the common core of knowledge typically expected of a liberal-arts education, thus risking the loss of what one might call a "cultural heritage." It ensures that students will study no common course work; they will have merely a set of exposures to broad fields. Worse, it invites trendy, esoteric, and even dubious offerings, courses ill suited to a sound general education.

In some cases, it has been possible for students to fulfill requirements by taking courses with dubious claims to belong to the distribution category. For instance, Latzer cites a “Living Religions of the East” course which fulfills a requirement in “Historical Perspectives” at the University of Iowa. Although one can see how such a course might be historically oriented—in spite of the title—one can also see how easily such categories can be abused. Equally, Latzer points out that under the distribution model, it is easier for students to fulfill requirements by taking courses that are so narrow that they lack the “depth and gravitas desirable for the students’ exposure to the humanities.” (He cites a number of pop culture-oriented courses, which I won’t copy here. Without getting into debates about high and low culture, I want to acknowledge the potential kind of abuse he describes but not attach that abuse to specific subject matters.) Latzer continues:

Leaving students free to choose courses without guidance from the faculty invites selection on the basis of superficialities, convenience, and mere whim. The result is a trivialization of general education to the point where the claims of the college catalogs--like Princeton's statement that its requirements "transcend the boundaries of specialization and provide all students with a common language and common skills"--simply cannot be taken seriously.

One of the consequences is that universities themselves are no longer directing their students into some of the fields of study traditionally deemed essential to a liberal education. According to Latzer, a recent American Council of Trustees and Alumni report showed that in a representative sample of institutions of different types, very few required a broad range of fields. Of seven key fields of study-- composition, literature, foreign language, U.S. government or history, economics, mathematics, and science—nearly half the institutions required courses in less than six. Only 12 percent of the colleges require a general course in literature; a mere 14 percent call for American history or government; and not one college among the 50 demands that its students study economics. I suspect that the two most commonly omitted were foreign languages and history.

As Latzer points out, “Whether or not that is an unfortunate development depends on one's view of the proper purpose of general education. Yet it is that basic question that has all too often been left unexamined. The core and the distribution models offer two very different answers.” He continues:

With the distribution model, general education is a series of diffuse course experiences that expose students to ways of thinking about five or six academic fields. It does not matter if the courses are highly specialized, or even idiosyncratic, because the knowledge to be gained is less important than an appreciation for the methodology.…

The core model, in contrast, views general education as providing a common base of knowledge in the principal fields as well as common skills. That knowledge is viewed as the benchmark of a liberal-arts education, as well as a foundation for future study and reflection. The model also sees general education as preserving and transmitting from generation to generation the great works of music, art, and literature that are considered the crowning achievements of civilization.

Admittedly, one reason for the disfavoring of the core approach has been the challenge in recent decades to the canon of great works. A core curriculum, it is said, privileges some knowledge and writings over others and hence tends to leave out women, minority groups, and non-Western cultures. But a core curriculum need not have the same courses or readings that it had 50 years ago. It can include important works by all peoples. The Columbia University core, for example, has a major cultures component that explores the civilizations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America. One can accept that there are great works and support a core approach to general education while debating the content of the honor roll.

Another objection to the core-curriculum approach is that it compels students to enroll in (and faculty members to teach) a mere handful of courses, like them or not. Of course, the essence of the core-curriculum concept is that only a relatively small number of courses are worthy of general education. For those accustomed to virtually unlimited choice, a core would require a new set of expectations. But as no fixed number of courses defines such a curriculum, there is no reason for a core to be unduly restrictive.

Academe routinely calls for critical examination of every conceivable social and political issue, yet at times remains curiously indifferent to its own policies. If, however, the quality and cohesiveness of general education matter--and surely they d--then trustees and college administrators must work with faculty members everywhere to undertake a thoughtful review of what general education is and what it can and should be.

For starters, here are just a few questions to consider: Should general education provide a common foundation of knowledge for students to share? Should general education expose students to the most important ideas, readings, and events? Should general education seek to provide a common foundation to facilitate the teaching of advanced courses?

So far, Harvard professors have not really answered those questions. If they were to do so, they might just develop a general curriculum for the 21st century that could once again serve as a model for the nation.

Another note on liberal education

2004-09-24T13:10:00.000-07:00

Just another note relevant to my previous discussion of the status of liberal education. We may also have to consider the status of traditionally arts and humanities subjects, and opposed to those of the sciences that contribute to the liberal curriculum. Once upon a time, these subjects were considered to be of like kind, but their separation into different colleges has long marked the existence of an intellectual divide. Interdisciplinary work promises to help address this divide, but it remains to be seen what the result will be. In this context, I want to bring to readers’ attention the Worldwide Universities Network (WUN), which seeks to establish collaborative research projects by faculty from universities around the world. Currently, medieval studies is the only field embracing traditional humanities subjects sponsored by the WUN. This is an important recognition of the prominence of medievalists in the forefront of contemporary interdisciplinary work, and, of course, pleases me enormously. But it also indicates how far we need to go put the humanities on an even playing field.

I also wish to point out that the WUN project is currently limited to a selection of participating research-oriented universities. This leaves scholars at non-research universities who could benefit by participation in collaborative projects, and could benefit the projects through their collaboration, out of the loop. A lot of good talent is being wasted, and organisations like this have the potential, if they can see it, to combat the increasing trend for well-trained scholars to sink into obscurity under the pressures of heavy teaching loads and diminishing commitments to research at many universities.

Practices in Liberal Education

2004-09-20T16:07:00.000-07:00

I found Carol Geary Schneider's views on Changing Practices in Liberal Education thought provoking, though I haven't had a chance to fully process the article. I thought I'd put the link up and come back to it. I'll re-edit this entry with some comments later.

After a couple of days of processing, here's a bit of discussion. In looking at Schneider’s article, I am continually reminded that I did not have a “liberal education”; my Scottish degree did involve two years of “general education”, but they consisted of medieval history, philosophy, and Greek, during which I time I also did my general survey English courses. They were all full-year courses, which makes for a very different dynamic. Schneider paints the general twentieth-century model for “liberal education” in America as one that emphasises “breadth” and “depth”. Clearly, my own background leaned more towards the latter, and I am partial to it. So that is where I am coming from.

Schneider actually makes a more sophisticated analysis of the history of liberal education in this country, arguing that the model has shifted over the course of the twentieth century from one in which the general education courses designed to encourage breadth simultaneously formed the foundation for the disciplinary courses to follow to a model in which the general education courses were essentially disconnected from the disciplinary field (major) selected by the student. All sorts of factors have contribute to this: the increasing popularity of “professional” majors and the tendency for general education courses to be taken at community colleges (or even at high schools if the students take Advanced Placement courses which allow them to skip lower-division requirements at the university level). Essentially, the disciplinary major (whether in traditional or “professional” fields) can no longer provide education in depth. I will return to this point below.
This scenario has far-reaching consequences for those teaching in the liberal arts. First and foremost, their fields are likely to be marginalised, as they become associated with lower-level study. This will add to an already present tendency in our society to see studying these fields as anything more than a luxury. Funding will be diverted in other directions.

Schneider suggests that we meet this challenge by adapting our curriculum. She summarises the common themes of current innovative thinking (the “New Academy”) as follows:

A new focus on inquiry skills and intellectual judgment. The New Academy is strongly concerned not just with what students "know"--the implicit agenda in the era of "breadth and depth"--but also with what they are prepared to do with their knowledge.

A renewed concern with social responsibility and civic engagement. The New Academy is increasingly concerned with students' preparation and disposition to connect their learning with issues beyond the academy and to take an active role, both as citizens and as professionals, in a diverse, contested, and global community.

A new interest in integrative learning. The New Academy is taking seriously the fragmentation of knowledge, not just in our courses, but through the knowledge explosion in the world around us. Many of the most interesting educational innovations clearly are intended to teach students what we might call the new liberal art of integration. Not only do these innovations invite students to integrate learning from different sources, but they also provide models, frameworks, and practice in actually doing so.

I confess that a lot of this doesn’t look very new to me. Much of it is old rhetoric about the value of a liberal arts education. Some of it reflects the same thinking motivating my own university's attempts to become more learning centred. Schneider argues that the new generation of faculty members should be prepared to embrace innovations in the curriculum to meet today’s challenges. She provides a number of suggestions for how graduate education can be adapted to better prepare graduate students to work in this environment. I’ll comment on these in another entry soon.
But as far as undergraduate education goes, what seems to get lost in the attempts to find a new model curriculum is the requirement for depth of learning, and, as I have mentioned above, this now seems like an impossibility at the undergraduate level. Here is one opportunity for educators in the liberal arts to make their case for relevance in today’s world. They can at least strive for a properly integrated educational experience, whereas the “professional fields” are simply two-year introductions. Furthermore, since study in professional fields is so limited, it really conveys no advantages. A liberal arts student will easily close the gap with a few months of on-the-job training. This case must be made to potential employers. One way in which students in “professional” majors have an advantage is through organised internships. Liberal arts majors must engage in the same practices. This means a variety of things. Those who are inclined towards graduate school in their field must become assistants on their professors’ research projects. Those who wish to go out into the work force must have experience prior to graduation. Departments and universities must make programmes available to encourage students along this route. In particular, departments should have well-advertised student assistant opportunities, and business and government internship opportunities should be clearly open to all students, not just those in the relevant majors.

Our society’s “widespread resistance to the very idea of liberal education” might also be countered if standards were raised in liberal arts majors (even in lower-division courses). If we can show employers that liberal arts majors are better qualified, they will hire them; a field such as English will be more esteemed as a subject, and more people will want to study it. A common complaint about university graduates is that they “know nothing”. This is the problem we must really tackle. How can we teach students to acquire and retain knowledge. This is the most vital intellectual skill.

I think I agree with Schneider that the loss of “depth” is a result of the fragmentation of the curriculum, and I would add that a side effect has been the loss of the ability to acquire a body of knowledge. For the liberal arts, this is increasingly dangerous, as liberal education courses are being relegated to lower division work. In my view, this was actually always the case; one got a BA or BSc before going off to, say, a medical or law school. But what is happening is that the BA/BSc is being reduced to two years (or the equivalent thereof in units) and the professional schooling is begun earlier. But what are the implications of this? Should we be giving upper-division English courses a more vocational orientation?
Well, I find I’ve run out of energy on this topic. I want to write about the implications for graduate education at another time, but hopefully I’ve generated enough issues for comment.

Why We Look So Bad

2004-09-20T08:38:00.000-07:00

Regina Barreca in The Common Review writes of the sartorial habits of professors:

It is a truth universally acknowledged that an academic, even one given a clothing allowance, will dress like a schlemiel. Historically, academics have been the subject of both high and low humor. From the sixth century onward, how we look has prompted nearly automatic laughter from onlookers, even if the onlookers were dressed in twigs and had painted their faces blue. Why are we, as a group, so sartorially impoverished that we make other professionals, even those in the actuarial or previously owned vehicle sales forces, look good? (Just to make sure we're all clear about this one point: I include myself in this group. And I am including you, dear reader. Trust me on this one–the following observations are not about other people.)

I don't know. I dress like James Dean. Right?

Some New Links and Some New Readers

2004-09-15T08:48:00.000-07:00

Mike Drout has kindly mentioned me at Wormtalk and Slugspeak, and that has pushed some new readers over to this web space. Although this is the busiest of times for me, I've tried to welcome them by some new and reciprocal links. So welcome all new readers. I hope to have some more changes and new material in the coming days.

I may not know about art...

2004-09-09T11:10:00.000-07:00

The theft of Edvard Munch's The Scream from the Munch Museum in Oslo prompts Tom Utley to speculate about the value of art in an opinion piece in the Daily Telegraph. How much does it matter, he asks, if The Scream is never returned and is therefore unavailable for public viewing? After all, we have plenty of photographs. Would anyone miss the original if it were replaced with a poster?

These philistine thoughts have been prompted by my first ever visit to the Louvre, where I went with my family last week. Like so many other visitors, we made a bee-line for the Mona Lisa, because everyone knows that this is the painting that you just have to see when you are in Paris.

I couldn't help noticing that in the great stream of tourists following the signs to the Leonardo, hardly any of us glanced for more than a couple of seconds at the hundreds of masterpieces we had to pass on the way. Perhaps if they had put price-tags on the paintings, instead of the artists' names and dates, we might have been more interested.

When I finally saw the Mona Lisa, after my 50 years on this Earth, I found it a terrible disappointment. I don't know quite what I was expecting. I suppose that I was hoping at least for some glimmer of understanding of why this was the most talked-about painting in the world - at best, for a rush of joy at the sheer beauty of this, the real thing.

What I got instead was, well, the Mona Lisa - looking exactly as she does on a trillion coffee mugs, posters and tea-towels the world over.

There was a very slight "coo" factor - the thought that these brush-strokes had been made more than 500 years ago by Leonardo's own hand, and that the master must once have stood exactly where I was standing in relation to his work.

But it was no greater than the coo factor that you get from seeing the suit of armour once worn by Henry VIII, now displayed at the Tower of London, or the prayer book that Lady Jane Grey was holding when she was beheaded. As far as aesthetic pleasure went, I confess that I got more from looking at the pretty American tourist in front of me in the queue than from contemplating La Gioconda's peculiar smile.

Utley sees the journey to the Louvre not as a quest for "aesthetic pleasure", but "just to tick the box marked 'Mona Lisa'." He suggests that to seek more would be nearly impossible, at least at the Louvre:

In our defence, it must be said that if we had given the other paintings and statues in the Louvre the attention that the cognoscenti say they deserve, we would have been there for the rest of our lives. There are just far too many of them for any of us to begin to appreciate them. But, if I am right, most of us don't get a great deal of pleasure from paintings - and we wouldn't appreciate them very much no matter how long we stood gazing at them.

We traipse around galleries because we know that this is a civilised thing to do. We certainly try to enjoy what we see, and of course some paintings strike us as quite pleasing. But not as pleasing as all that. Not as nice to look at, anyway, as the girl in front of us in the queue.

Given, the relatively little payback he gets for viewing the original paintings, Utley questions their value full stop. He tries to put some perspective on the £30 million value of The Scream.

To put it into some sort of perspective, £30 million is about the equivalent of the per-capita income of 108,000 Indians for an entire year. How can anybody in his right mind claim that the aesthetic pleasure to be had from owning an original of that silly, swirly picture (not even the original, since Munch painted some half a dozen versions of it) is worth that much?

But of course, the art market isn't really about aesthetics. A mere difference of attribution can make a hundredfold difference in the amount that people are prepared to pay for a painting. "After" Vermeer? Let's call that £140,000. "By" Vermeer? Stick a couple of noughts on the end. Never mind that the picture is exactly the same - no more or less beautiful - whether it was painted by Vermeer or the girl next door.

Utley can only dream that the never-ending journey to stare out paintings without real appreciation -- "half pretending, half longing to enjoy them" will someday be rewarded when a painting lifts the "philistine scales from [his] eyes."

Utley makes two enormous mistakes if he wants to really appreciate original paintings. First, he seeks pure aesthetic value from them, forcing them to communicate pleasurable epiphanies. Second, he commodifies art; his obsession with the "art market" accurately reveals that it is absurd to quantify the value of an individual work of art. I think he plays down the "coo" factor a bit too much. Physical proximity to the same artefacts that were handled by historical figures--not to mention great historical figures--does help to give us an emotional connexion to the past which our society sadly lacks. But he also hints at the real reason for his lack of appreciation of the Mona Lisa; he hasn't given any of the lesser known paintings any sort of attention. Or, to use Utley's terminology, he hasn't tried to "appreciate" them either. He lacks a context. He can coo at seeing a painting which he is told is historically significant, but he has no idea of its actual significance. The Mona Lisa, The Scream, a painting by Vermeer, they all have value because he is told they have value by the "cognoscenti"; but not being one of the cognoscenti--and apparently not knowing how to become one--he is forced to commodify paintings, following a paradigm for value with which he is presumably more familiar.

Utley's Philistinism is, as my last sentence indicates, not entirely his fault. I would criticise him for failing to see that the Mona Lisa in a museum surrounded by other Renaissance paintings studied and displayed by experts is a very different context from the Mona Lisa on a coffee mug or a t-shirt. But what if the museum curators are also at fault for not making this context useful his "appreciation" of the paintings. What Utley fails to recognise is that appreciation follows from understanding. You can't really appreciate a painting just by staring at it; you have to learn something about it. It is the job of the museum curators to help convey this understanding.

But museum curators have long been divided about how--and whether--to do this. There is a school of thought that information about the paintings be kept to a minimum, lest the viewers be distracted from the paintings themselves. In the United States, many curators have attempted to provide more information--particularly through multimedia presentations--to those who are interested by placing a small section to the side of the exhibit where people can who wish to learn, rather than appreciate, can go to find out more. Needless to say, this is not a perfect solution. But I don't want to fault the museum curators too much; they are trying, and doing so with small budgets and severe limitations of physical space. One innovative approach was recently tried at the Michaelis Collection in Cape Town, where the curators turned all the paintings back-to-front. As one curator pointed out, "Researchers, collectors and curators always look at the backs of paintings because they have a lot of information on them, such as signatures, dates and notes from collectors, which the general public don't have access to." This is the sort of historical information which helps the public understand that original paintings, unlike reproductions of coffee mugs, have histories. One visitor even pointed out an attempt at forgery--of a Vermeer, as it happens. Sadly, the curator's approach may not have been as educational as it might have been; the curator of the exhibition admits that it is "conceptual": "I'm trying to refigure the notion of what a museum is all about," he says. "I want to subvert people's expectations so that they're forced to look at familiar objects in a completely different way."

What I am trying to oppose here is the idea that art can or should be appreciated in a vacuum without study. The point is perfectly illustrated by Mike Drout's commentary on the response of Peter Robinson in National Review Online's The Corner to the horns on Michelangelo's Moses. Robinson states:

What we see in Moses here--Moses the law-giver, Moses the chap who has just had an awful (in the old sense) encounter with God--is the results of an artist's effort to represent visually something that exceeds the boundaries of the representable: the horns are a sort of objective correlative of that overwhelming moral awesomeness: forbidding, grotesque, yet commanding. That, anyhow, is how it appears to me at first blush. (The proper question here, I suspect, is not 'What does it mean?' but 'How does it feel?' That is, the issue is less one of symbols and semantics than one of aesthetic force and religious passion.)

Herewith, at last, a completely satisfying explanation of what Michelangelo was attempting. The convention of portraying Moses with horns may very well have arisen because of a mistranslation of one or two terms of Hebrew into Latin. But Michelangelo uses it not out of confusion or ignorance but for the high purposes of his art.

Drout points out that this passage is characterised by "gooey, unsupported assertions of greatness and sublimity", rather than genuinely enlightening discussion. The importance of the mistranslation as the origin of Moses's horns should not be dismissed. Well after the mistranslation was discovered, the horns persisted in the "visual tradition" of art: something that can be verified by placing beside Michelangelo's Moses numerous other contemporary and earlier works of art containing the figure. The horns were an essential part of Moses' identity. As Drout points out, the idea that the horns are an "objective correlative of that overwhelming moral awesomeness" does not explain "Why horns?" and does provide a convenient analysis with which one can't disagree, "since there's no arguing with how something feels." Drout concludes:

Look, it's great to appreciate art, and art should make you feel something. But the job of the critic is to attempt to explain what the art does and why it works that way.

I would add that to appreciate art the viewer must also make an effort to understand what the art does and why it works that way.

New Site Search Feature

2004-09-02T08:51:00.000-07:00

Blogger have just added a navbar at the top of the screen which contains a Google site search form. Some time ago I tried to install the Google site search form with miserable results. I ultimately opted for a service called Free Find, which did the job beautifully. However, with the advent of the new navbar, there is no need for the Free Find search form, and I have disabled it. The only problem is that the navbar does not tell you that it is for a site search, as opposed to an internet search. It would be nice if Blogger changed this.

Frið and Fredom

2004-08-24T13:59:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I heard on NPR Jeremy Rifkin talking about differing European and American notions of freedom, as discussed in his book The European Dream: How Europe's Vision of the Future Is Quietly Eclipsing the American Dream. Today, I read at excerpt from Cornel West's forthcoming book Democracy Matters, in which he writes:

How ironic that in America we’ve moved so quickly from Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Let Freedom Ring!” to “Bling! Bling!”—as if freedom were reducible to simply having material toys, as dictated by free-market fundamentalism.

Meanwhile, as I reach the conclusion of my work on "Frið and Fredom in La3amon's Brut," I find that notions of freedom are highly contested in the Middle Ages.

There is something going on here, a nice convergence between my research and a contemporary isssue. I'm going to pursue this more when I have time.

One thing after another

2004-08-22T18:28:00.000-07:00

Readers (if there are any still with me) will I have noticed that I have had very little time to post new entries this month. I have been feverishly trying to finish an essay on forest law in La3amon's Brut, and, as soon as I returned from the conference, I learned that my mother-in-law was in hospital, and I had to fly up to San Francisco. I'm almost finished with the article, my mother-in-law is still in hospital, and classes start tomorrow. Pause for breath.

Amongst all this, I have been thinking about a number of issues related to current developments in the academic profession, and my university in particular. I have been reading Gerald Graff's Clueless in Academe, the central thesis of which is that many students and the general public find the intellectual culture of academia inaccessible; academics must therefore make the culture of academic ideas and arguments more readily understandable. I'll reserve judgement on the book until I've finished it, but this is hardly revelatory. Making academic ideas accessible is what teaching is all about. We're not always successful at it, but the reason is not because we're not trying. The reason is because it's hard. Graff often implies that the majority of students are simply outright anti-intellectual in their attitudes. If this were actually true, academics are not to blame if some students cannot be "converted". In my experience, students are more often passively anti-intellectual. They may not be able to do what their professors do, but they respect what their professors do.

Often the reasons for students' failure to achieve in an academic environment has nothing to do with the efforts of their professors. The number of students in this country is growing, but funding for education is not growing in a way that allows students to work full time on their studies. In the end of the day, not being able to devote time and energy to learning is the largest barrier to achieving fluency in academic culture. This is especially the case for students at a place like my university, Cal State Northridge.. The majority of our students not full-time students, and they are also almost all transfer students (and soon will be all transfer students if current trends continue), meaning that we can't even shepherd them from lower to upper division courses. I should add that faculty are equally distracted. Teaching four courses per semester means that we must back off from some of the ambitious pedagogies which we would like to employ.

It is in this context that I am staggered by the university's drive to become a "learning-centered institution." I rather suspect that this is a euphemism for "teaching-centred", with teaching implying contact hours with students, and reduced support for research-based activities. I suspect that "learning" means student learning, rather than faculty learning or faculty contributions human learning. But leaving aside such a contraction of what the word "learning" means, it's just a stupid idea. According to our university president, the impetus is for greater accountability or assessment (the terminology varies depending on where the pressure is coming from). People want to know what students are learning. Well, if teaching four courses isn't difficult enough, having to document this will distract faculty from their teaching activities even more. Becoming learning centred will mean reduced learning.

In addition, we have to accept that in many ways we're not a learning-centred institution and are not well placed to be one since students are so distracted by jobs and family, and faculty have such a heavy teaching load. A truly learning-centred institution, one which produces measurable learning all around is a well-funded institution which can support economically a community devoted to studies full time. Somehow, I don't think these are the sorts of changes those who have decreed that we should be a "learning-centered institution" have in mind.

Or if this is a bit cynical, put it down to the stress I'm under at the moment. No doubt I'll be returning to this subject again.

A Brut-ish Experience

2004-08-08T15:07:00.000-07:00

In case anyone is wondering where I have been for the past week, I have been at the 5th Internation Conference on La3amon's Brut in Providence, Rhode Island. I'm still on the East Coast, but I'll be returning next week to bore you with new editions to this web log.

Pictures from Italy

2004-07-25T10:59:00.000-07:00

Here are a few pictures of Italy. I'm slowly adding commentary:

Naples from Virgil's Tomb (a round tower, the top of which is in the foreground)

Virgil is (supposedly) buried in a small park next to the Mergellina railway station. We walked there on a blisterlingly hot day, braving one of the noisiest parts of Naples, and found a relatively small park planted with flora mentioned in Virgil's works. The tomb was a tower, most of which was covered in scaffolding, so that we could not identify it, despite the seventeenth-century drawing on a nearby sign. The tower is stuck against some cliffs which contain the remains of a Roman aqueduct and some Christian frescoes of indeterminate age in some niches. We eventually found a small stairway, which took us to the top of the tower (see picture). There we found some archaeologists (?) scrubbing the stones.

Herculaneum and Modern Ercolano with Vesuvius in the background

Mount Vesuvius erupted on 2 August, 79 AD, destroying the residential town of Herculaneum. Some might say that the modern Ercolano, which borders on the archaeological site, could use a similar treatment. Herculaneum is quite small, and we missed some of the key sites because they were closed in the afternoon. The whole place was not very well run, as if they really didn't expect anyone to come and see the ruins. For all that, there are some frescoes and even surviving woodwork which escaped destruction, and you can sort of see what life was like in a small town, as opposed to the great metropolis of Pompeii. Just don't try to read the guide books. They are impossible to follow.

The Archiginnasio in Bologna, the first university building

The university of Bologna is the first university in Europe, and the Archiginnasio is its oldest building (though sixteenth century). It has very ornate frescoes in the courtyard, which has a pleasant arcade to shelter you from the heat of summer in Bologna. That was our major concern, as it was perhaps our hottest day in Italy. Bologna does not seem to have a lot of trees or parkland, which made the experience even more sweltering. They do, however, have impressively long stretches of porticoes, many of them medieval or early modern.

The Bosco del Cansiglio, a nature preserve in the foothills of the Dolomites

The Bosco del Cansiglio is a nature preserve northeast of Vittorio Veneto. To get there you climb a seemingly never-ending windy road up the mountains until you get to the top. The road then descends into a densely wooded valley with a large open plain in the middle with sheep and horses grazing. The temperature drops noticeably as you descend. Once there, we hardly saw a soul. However, when we found a trail into the forest we encountered after about a hundred feet one of those training circuit exercise areas that you see at parks. It's never possible to escape wholly civilisation (or, at least, those obsessed with fitness).

Verona, approaching the Castelvecchio

I'm calling this Verona, but I have a sneaking suspicion that it's Vicenza, and my memory is playing tricks on me. Regardless, it wasn't anything significant--just a pretty view.

Verona, San Zeno

This was in Verona. The Basilica di San Zeno Maggiore is just off the beaten track enough to be free of too many tourists, but it's a real treasure. The church was built between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries and contains an impressive amount of good frescoes to which, unusually, you can get quite close. There are also some wonderful bronze doors with scenes from the Old and New Testaments.

Verona, Piazza dei Signori (aka Piazza Dante)

This piazza goes by the name of Piazza Dante because it contains a large statue of the poet just to the left of the view in the picture. The scene seemed quintessentially Italian, complete with kids playing football. Alas, there was also a quartet playing 'O sole mio'. Being quintessential is one thing, being cliché quite another...

More commentary will be added soon...

Back from Italy and England

2004-07-23T11:08:00.000-07:00

Today is my first full day back from Italy and England. A full report and the resumption of this web log will begin as soon as I get over jetlag.

Ciao Italia

2004-06-19T17:37:00.000-07:00

I'm off to Italy in the morning. Blog entries will be patchy to non-existent for the next month or so, as I'll also be going to England. Updates on my activities and perhaps a few photos will eventually make it to this space.

Chaucer and sports scandals at the University of Colorado

2004-06-17T16:01:00.000-07:00

Medieval literature has recently entered the ongoing scandal of the University of Colorado sports programme. Here is the account as reported by ESPN. I reproduce a few excerpts for commentary:

The University of Colorado president was criticized Tuesday for refusing to condemn a vulgar anatomical reference allegedly used to describe a female football player who says she was raped by a teammate.

University President Betsy Hoffman's comments in a federal court case sparked a fresh storm of protest surrounding Colorado's flagship school. Women's groups and a member of the Board of Regents said they were appalled by what they called Hoffman's lack of sensitivity.

The comment came during a deposition given this month in a lawsuit filed by three women who say they were sexually assaulted by football athletes in 2001.

One of the women's attorneys told Hoffman the vulgar term had been used by a football player against teammate Katie Hnida. The attorney asked Hoffman whether she thought the term was "a filthy and vile word."

Hoffman replied it was a "swear word" and that its meaning depended on the circumstances in which it was used, according to a copy of the deposition released by the school.

Asked if it could ever be used in a polite context, Hoffman replied: "Yes, I've actually heard it used as a term of endearment."

Hoffman defended her answer Tuesday in a meeting with Durango Herald reporters and editors, but said she should have phrased it differently.

"I was immediately sorry I said it," she said.

Hoffman began to cry at one point in the discussion at the Herald and left the room briefly to compose herself, the newspaper reported.

University spokeswoman Michele Ames said Hoffman knows the word has "negative connotations" but it did not in its original use centuries ago.

"Because she is a medieval scholar, she is also aware of the long history of the word dating back to at least Chaucer," Ames said. English writer Geoffrey Chaucer lived in the late 1300s and used the word in "The Canterbury Tales."

The rest of the article provides more context, though it must be said that the story has to be followed in several publications in order to understand the full contexts which prompted Hoffman's statement. A few things should be noted immediately:

Hoffman never referred to the Middle Ages in her statement; that reference was made later by university spokeswoman Michele Ames.

Hoffman was once an historian (not a literature specialist); but she is really a career administrator. She is known for hiring Stanley Fish at the University of Illinois-Chicago.

The word referred to in the article was cunt, and Hoffman's claim to have heard the word used as a "term of endearment" could be taken as a legal strategy of denying the premises of opposing counsel. That is, the word need not have been intended to have offensive meaning (though, of course, it was).

The last point is where Hoffman made an error of judgement by seeming to deny the gravity of the offence. But the subsequent statement by Ames compounds the error beyond belief. I am not quite clear what it is intended to prove. That medievalists are nitwits so lost in the past that they are insensitive to present-day meaning? That because the word did not have negative connotations in the Middle Ages, we should not see them now?

The second option requires some more commentary since it forms part of a trend to use the Middle Ages to justify present-day deviant behaviour. An even more absurd example is the notorious Abercrombie and Fitch Christmas Field Guide, which was wrapped in a paper sleeve reading "280 pages of moose, ice hockey, chivalry, group sex & more" and containing statements like "Orgies and group sex were common in the Middle Ages. Promiscuity was popular with both the peasantry and the nobility. Since divorce was forbidden by the Church, adultery was common and socially accepted."

The context (which I have not quoted) of this statement is a recommendation for sexual promiscuity. Even more than the "it was once a term of endearment" argument, this seems to be adopting the medieval as an authority for present immoral behaviour. Viewed objectively, this is striking, since the "medieval" in modern parlance represents backwardness and barbarism. That today's use should wish to emulate "medieval" practices or to accept these practices as legitimising their own is quite amazing, given the long history of modern disparagement of the Middle Ages.

Viewed somewhat less objectively, the modern representations of the medieval in the two examples above are truly appalling. Note that I have placed the word medieval in inverted commas above where it does not strictly indicate the historical Middle Age. In other words, the "medieval" may refer to the "backward", as it is often used today, or to an inaccurate unhistorical representation of the Middle Ages, such as the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogy refers. Where did they get the idea that adultery was "socially acceptable" in the Middle Ages? This is a Middle Ages that reflects their own fantasy rather than historical reality. Nevertheless, there is an explanation for this fantasy, one that is perhaps large than I can deal with in this entry. The clue is the word "chivalry" on their cover. Most likely, they mean the word in its most inclusive sense, encompassing notions of courtly love. Since C.S. Lewis made adultery a central component of courtly love in The Allegory of Love, this practice has often been regarded as synonymous with adultery, at least in definitions widely available on the internet. Lewis's views have been widely discredited; see, for instance, Larry Benson's remarks in Courtly Love and Chivalry in the Later Middle Ages. But it remains widely influential (I often see it in student essays). More could be said about this, but I believe it's a separate topic.

My larger point is that both this and Michele Ames's justification of the use of "cunt" by past usage during the Middle Ages re-makes the medieval to serve modern in ways that are unconvincing but apparently credible enough to have social power. That the medieval can have such power is encouraging; that it should be used to support immoral practices is not. What, then, is the social power of the authentic Middle Ages?

American Idioms Have Gone Missing

2004-06-17T08:55:00.000-07:00

Today's Chronicle of Higher Education contains an article entitled American Idioms Have Gone Missing by Ben Yagoda. The article begins as follows:

One of Peter De Vries's comic novels has a character who accumulates Briticisms. As I recall, he orders shrimp cocktail as a "starter," refers to a friend "called" James (instead of "named" -- that's a subtle one), and fills his car with "petrol" for the ride home. Eventually, he winds up in hospital.

De Vries's conceit, delicious as it was, was an exaggeration. Generally a Yank can get away with at most one such locution in his or her active vocabulary, for example the person I know who likes to refer to his time "at university," the university in question being a large land-grant institution. Any more than that and he would be laughed out the door, like the professor who habitually shows up at faculty meetings in a bespoke suit, Turnbull and Asher shirt, and Liberty of London tie, done in a Windsor knot.

Lately, however, the American press has become that professor.

What follows is a fascinating catalogue of the extent of recent borrowing from British English in the United States, for which readers should view the whole article. Here, I am primarily interested in Yagoda's conclusion:

It's hard to pinpoint the cause of the use of all these Briticisms. Anglophilia hardly seems to be rampant at the moment. Perhaps the success of BBC America is a factor, or maybe the importation of British editors like Tina Brown and Anna Wintour a decade ago is finally trickling down. But I wouldn't underestimate the eternal appeal of sounding classy without seeming pretentious. The gathering storm of Briticisms would seem to provide a perfect opportunity.

At this point, the trend is moving beyond journalism, and to terms that (unlike "go missing" and "run-up") have perfectly good American counterparts. In his campaign for governor, Arnold Schwarzenegger talked about having "a" (not "some" or "a cup of") coffee. A visiting friend of mine talked of "booking" (not reserving) a hotel room. David Letterman recently made fun of Oprah Winfrey's saying that she couldn't appear on his show because she was "on holiday" -- what was wrong, he wondered, with "vacation"? A friend has taken to saying, "I'll ring you" instead of "phone you" or "call you up." From various sources, I have heard repeated uses of "sack" (fire), "row" (argument), and "chat up" (talk to, usually in a flirtatious way). Briticisms all: Together they constitute a cultural equivalent of De Vries's poseur.

I'm afraid I can't resist the inevitable conclusion, so here goes: Briticisms have passed their sell-by date, and the odor (or should I say odour) is getting a bit rank.

The wittiness of Yagoda's conclusion--given in British English--perhaps reveals its insubstantiality and triviality. It does not follow in the least from his discussion--except from the example of fictional poseur, who presumably represents the cultural prejudice that British means classy. If Yagoda finds this offensive, he is surely buying into the prejudice even though he is reacting against it. Moreover, his horror at the loss of "good ole" American idioms sounds a lot like the nineteenth- and twentieth-century passages I teach in my history of the English language classes in which British speakers are horrified by the borrowing of "Americanisms". It seems that Yagoda has inherited that model of linguistic isolation and exclusivity.

And this is what Yagoda acknowledges only obliquely. The two cultures (British and American) interact, and English is not evolving separately in each country. Every day, Americanisms arrive in that sceptred isle through the gargantuan American media; should Professor Yagoda be surprised that the reverse process also takes place. (I'm forced to wonder if, Yagoda, as a professor of journalism, is not in some way trying to protect his own turf.)

Yagoda also misses a larger point. Although he acknowledges that the likely cause of this linguistic borrowing is unlikely to be Anglophilia, he falls back on cultural prejudice as an explanation. He misses the importance of English as a world language. Many of the "Briticisms" he identifies are not just British, but Indian, Australian, South African, and (here's the one that will really horrify Americans) Canadian. American English is as much influenced by English in these countries as English in Britain. Yagoda's desire to retreat from British influence is really a desire to retreat from world influence. From my point of view, linguistic interaction with the rest of the world is part of a larger process of cultural and political interaction from which the United States can only benefit (even if it means that many of its top media positions go to foreigners).

American English is participating in this cultural exchange. Have no fear that it is being entirely replaced on the shelves by goods imported from abroad. Multiculturalism is here to stay, and, as far as I can tell, has no sell-by date.

More on Asterisk Reality

2004-06-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

The ramblings of my previous post remind me of the debate over the relationship between fantasy and allegory. One is a fictionalised world where meaning "resides in the freedom of the reader", not in the "purposed domination of the author" (I'm quoting here from the Foreward to the second edition of The Lord of the Rings). If allegory dominates, it is an exercise of power, rather like what Tolkien calls magic in "On Fairy Stories". There he describes this "magic" as a fiction that enduces primary belief. I'm not sure that this is exactly an appropriate or accurate way to look at allegory, the function of which seems to me to vary by contest. But it does approach what I have been saying about historical conspiracy theory fiction when you think about the response of readers who are all too eager to embrace conspiracy as historical fact. Fantasy, by contrast, precludes the possibility of primary belief. But is it then truly reconstructive in the philological sense? Philology can only really recover essences, rather than actualities. The Proto-Indo-European word for father was something like *pater, not actually *pater.

When we turn again to reader response, there are some interesting implications. Asterisk-Reality fiction thrills use through the recovery of something that was lost. Historical conspiracy theory fiction thrills us through the discovery of something that was hidden. The former is often accompanied by a sense of regret at what has been lost, the latter by a sense of grievance towards those who do the hiding. Both promise a sort of liberation (perhaps Tolkien's term "escape" would be appropriate), but, whereas recovery delivers something essential--and so factual, if intangible--conspiracy theory delivers a lie. It is truly escapist in the negative sense--a flight from reality--whether you are convinced by it or whether it is pure entertainment. Hence, as reconstructed history, conspiracy theory assembled from historical sources functions quite differently than asterisk-reality fiction.

What happens when there is no conspiracy theory involved? What about historical fiction? This seems to me to be a much harder case.

Asterisk Reality Fiction and Historical Conspiracy Fiction

2004-06-08T22:17:00.000-07:00

I've been thinking about the differences between the fictional technique Tom Shippey calls "asterisk reality" and the fictional technique we might call historical conspiracy theory. The former refers to the philological technique of reconstructing aspects of cultures of the past based on surviving linguistic and narrative materials. In philology, comparison of, say Latin pater, Sanskrit pitar, and English father (along with a few dozen other languages) enables us to suggest that each of these languages is descended from a common ancestor, called Proto-Indo-European. Further, we can conlude that the word for father in Proto-Indo-European probably began with a p-. Further reconstruction allows us to suggest that the Proto-Indo-European word was probably something like *pater, with the asterisk indicating that the word has been reconstructed rather than attested from surviving evidence. And yet still further, we can take a word like English feed and trace it to the same Indo-European root. This gives us a window into the cultural consciousness of a lost civilisation. But, like its asterisked linguistic forms, this civilisation does not exist in reality. It is an asterisk reality, reconstructed from evidence surviving in cultures (and sometimes multiple cultures) from later periods in history. Shippey's argument in The Road to Middle Earth is that J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle Earth is a sort of asterisk reality; Tolkien has taken surviving evidence to reconstruct languages and cultures unattested by any historical record but possible given the languages and cultures that are attested.

What I mean by historical conspiracy theory is the fashioning of fictional histories (generally ones in which there are secret societies conspiring to control historical events over the course of centuries) based on a piecing together of diverse scraps of historical evidence, mythological material, and linguistic ambiguities. A perfect example is Dan Brown's, The Da Vinci Code, which I have already discussed at some length. One obvious difference between the historical conspiracy theory of this type and Tolkien's asterisk reality Middle Earth is that the one claims to represent our immediately accessible history (i.e. it concerns events taking place in the present, near future, or near past in locations we can visit) and the other takes place in a time so distant that it can only be accessed through a single (fictional) surviving manuscript and in a location unrelatable to any we can visit. But I'm not sure that this really represents a necessary generic difference; it may just be a product of the individual works I've used as examples. But what other differences might there be? The historical conspiracy story generally purports to unveil a hidden and suppressed truth about history. The asterisk reality aims at the recovery of what has been lost.

Well, I'm not really sure where this thinking is leading, but hopefully I can return to it in a future entry.

Folk Etymologies

2004-06-05T09:57:00.000-07:00

The Daily Telegraph is running a series of extracts from Michael Quionion's Port Out, Starboard Home, which tells the stories of common folk etymologies. Follow the link to read the full text or have a look at a small clip below:

Bee's knees

Something that is the "bee's knees" is stylish and the height of excellence. It is sometimes explained as being from an Italian-American way of saying "business". I've also heard it argued that it is properly "Bs and Es", an abbreviation for "be-alls and end-alls".

Both are wrong. "Bee's knees" is actually one of a set of nonsense catchphrases from 1920s America, the period of the flappers. You might at that time have heard such curious concoctions as "cat's miaow", "elephant's adenoids", "tiger's spots", "bullfrog's beard", "elephant's instep", "caterpillar's kimono", "turtle's neck", "duck's quack", "gnat's elbows", "monkey's eyebrows", "oyster's earrings", "snake's hips", "kipper's knickers", "elephant's manicure", "clam's garter", "eel's ankle", "leopard's stripes", "tadpole's teddies", "sardine's whiskers", "pig's wings", "bullfrog's beard", "canary's tusks", "cuckoo's chin" and "butterfly's book".

None of these made much sense – but then, slang fashions often don't – and their only common feature was the comparison of something of excellent quality to a part of an animal with, if possible, a bit of alliteration thrown in. Another example was "cat's whiskers", which is sometimes said to have been the first of the bunch to arise, from the cat's whisker that was the adjustable wire in early radio crystal sets.

However, "cat's miaow" and "cat's pyjamas" (an exception to the anatomical rule, referring to the then new fashion of wearing pyjamas at night) are both recorded slightly earlier, in about 1921. The first appearance of "bee's knees" in print was found by Barry Popik in a flapper's dictionary in the Appleton Post-Crescent of Appleton, Missouri of April 28, 1922, glossed as meaning "peachy, very nice". Clearly, by then it must already have been well established.

It was a short-lived, frivolous slang fashion and only a very few such expressions have survived, of which "bee's knees" is perhaps the best known. A British example from the same period is "dog's bollocks". This, too, indicates something excellent, admirable or first-rate. Eric Partridge suggests it arose as a term for the printer's mark of a colon followed by a dash. This fits the pattern and period of the others, but its first sense suggests it came out of a different tradition. Certainly, it only became a general slang term much later.

Curry favour

It's an odd phrase. Why should "curry" have anything to do with winning the favour of somebody or ingratiating oneself with him?

It becomes even weirder when you discover that the phrase really means "to stroke a fawn-coloured horse".

Its origin lies in a French medieval poem called the Roman de Fauvel, written by Gervais de Bus in the early 1300s. Fauvel was a horse, a conniving stallion, and the poem is a satire on the corruption of social life. There are several layers of meaning in his name: fauve is French for a colour that is variously translated as chestnut, reddish-yellow or fawn. A close English equivalent is the rather rare "fallow", as in "fallow deer", an animal that has a brownish coat.

In addition, fauve can be the collective name for a class of wild animals whose coats are at least partly brown, such as lions and tigers (the fauverie in a French zoo is the section devoted to the big cats). In the poem, the name Fauvel is also an anagram of the initial letters of the French names of six sins: flattery, avarice, depravity, fickleness, envy and cowardice. And his colour evokes the old medieval proverbial belief that a fallow horse was the symbol of dishonesty.

The poem was well known among educated people in Britain, who started to refer to "Fauvel", variously spelled, as the symbol of cunning and depravity. That quickly became "curry Favel". "Curry" here has nothing to do with Indian food (that word arrived in the language from Tamil via Portuguese much later, at the end of the 16th century) but is the term for rubbing down a horse. The idea behind "currying Favel" is that the horse in the poem was susceptible to flattery, figuratively a kind of stroking.

Among people who didn't know the poem – then, as now, that was nearly everybody – "Fauvel" or "Favel" meant nothing at all. "Favour" seemed a much more sensible word; by the early part of the 16th century popular etymology had changed it to that and so it has remained ever since.

More on Plagiarism

2004-06-04T08:09:00.000-07:00

Here is an update on yesterday's story about the the British student suing his university for not catching his plagiarism. The Chronicle of Higher Education reports:

Michael Gunn, an English major at the University of Kent at Canterbury, could not be reached for comment, but last week he told The Times Higher Education Supplement, "I did plagiarize."

"But I always used the Internet, cutting and pasting stuff and matching it with my own points," he continued. "It's a technique I've used since I started the course. I never dreamt it was a problem."

[...]

University officials have declined to comment on Mr. Gunn's situation, but they point out that students are told of the university's ban on plagiarism when they enroll. Kent's Web site features a discussion of cheating and plagiarism that includes the following warning: "There's the chance of being found 'guilty' even if the crime happened accidentally."

Dan Ashley, a spokesman for the National Union of Students, said he was unaware of any lawsuit similar to the one Mr. Gunn is contemplating. But he acknowledged that the number of university students in Britain who plagiarize may be increasing, in part through ignorance.

"We're completely opposed to plagiarism," he said. "But we do understand that there are much greater pressures on students these days and the Internet has completely changed how students research. The key is that if any student is unsure of what the guidelines are, they need to speak to their lecturer."

So here's the scenario. A student does research (e.g. Googles a topic) on the internet. The student then copies text from the internet into their paper. A simple source citation would avoid any chance of plagiarism. The omission of such a citation would have to come from dishonesty. To me the ignorance excuse would only apply if the student somehow failed to realise that he was doing research. But it seems to me that a student could only re-classify his activity if he viewed it as belonging to some other activity: say, deliberate cheating.

There remains an unlikely scenario that the student was never given any intellectual foundation for research activity, in which case he probably should not have been admitted to university. But, leaving that aside, what if the university failed to supply that foundation. Is having a web page enough. What if the student does not visit this page? In America, composition courses (supposedly) introduce students to the forms and consequences of plagiarism. I'm not a great fan of composition courses, but it seems to me that they do play a role as a required introduction to plagiarism issues early in the student's career. This at least provides the university with protection against the ignorance excuse.

Discussions on Tolkien

2004-06-03T17:17:00.000-07:00

This morning the Chronicle of Higher Education hosted a live question and answer session with Mike Drout on Tolkien scholarship. I thought I'd provide a link to the transcript here. There was a good range of questions, though the scholarly response to Peter Jackson's films was predictably dominant. I am not sure what to do with this question. Jackson's divergences from the book have provided me with some insights into how to read the original text (although that was not the purpose of the divergences), but this type of "scholarly" response can't lead to much actual scholarship. The films are of interest to the field of film studies, but it seems to me that this interest does not focus on the study of Tolkien's work per se, except as a source for the films. If the study of the films is to be scholarly, it seems to me that it will have to move in different directions from the study of Tolkien's literature.

In a separate development, I received today a copy of the report I did on the state of Old English in North America for the news Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) Newsletter. The newsletter also contained a couple of articles on whether or not (and if so, how) teachers of Old English should exploit the popularity of Tolkien (books and films). I have certainly engaged in this sort of exploitation in my senior seminar on The Lord of the Rings, and the result has been to raise the profile of Old English immensely. Although a course aimed at seniors is a bit late for moving students into academic scholarship, it does give students an experience at examining the themes of Old English literature and applying them to questions to be found in a broader literary and cultural history. Can we ask for more? Yes. We can ask the students to learn Old English, read the literature in the original, and subject it to the sort of focused discussion that would engage in when taking, say, a Chaucer course. Perhaps this is where the use of Tolkien's work can have minimal effect. It can raise the cultural prestige of Anglo-Saxon studies, but it may not be able to add many students to focused courses on Old English.

A Very Public Act of Plagiarism

2004-06-02T09:38:00.000-07:00

I couldn't resist reproducing this short piece from The Week, 4 June 2004:

Alberta's prime minister has been caught cheating, said Ira Wagman in The Ottawa Citizen. And like many high school dunce, it was his own brazen stupidity that got him caught. During a debate, Alberta Premier Ralph Klein recently made a throwaway comment that if you let socialism go too far, you invite dictatorship, just like "what happened in Chile." Canada's expat Chilean community erupted in outrage at the implication that socialism was to blame for the crimes of the Pinochet regime. In his defense, Klein entered into the public record a copy of a paper he'd just written on Chile for a university correspondence course. Big mistake. Once it was published, it was quickly discovered that Klein cribbed most of his paper from the Internet. At 61, Klein should know better: He is not par of the "Generation F" that was raised to think that copying and pasting together interesting paragraphs constitutes research. At the very least, he should have been savvy enough to change a few words here and there to disguise his plagiarism. Instead, "Klein has given those of us in the academic world a poster boy for next year's lectures on academic dishonesty."

We've seen any number of examples of high profile plagiarists in recent years and varying degrees of condemnation. Now we learn that a student at the University of Kent is suing the university for not catching him in the act (from the London Evening Standard). Here's a clip:

A new row over exam cheating erupted today after a student was told he would get no marks for his essays because he copied them from the internet.

The University of Kent at Canterbury has told 21-year-old Michael Gunn he will leave with nothing after a three-year English literature-course - except £11,000 in debts. But he has hit back, accusing the university of allowing him to complete three years of study and giving good marks for the essays it now says are worthless. He is planning to sue the university in the hope of recovering some of his student debt.

Mr Gunn, from Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, said: "I can see there is evidence that I broke the rules. But they've taken all my money for three years and pulled me up the day before I finished. If they had pulled me up with my first essay at the beginning and warned me of the problems and consequences, it would be fair enough. But all my essays were handed back with good marks."

Mr Gunn's father, Leonard, said one tutor told his son: "Everybody does this. You're the unlucky one. You got caught."

[...]

"Of course he knew what he was doing. One of his tutors told him everybody did it and that he was just the tip of the iceberg.

"They must have known what was going on but they were happy to take his fees all that time. Now he has been put in an impossible position. Ask yourself who is going to employ him now that this has come out."

Michael's mother, Elaine Gunn, said: "Where is the fairness in the way the university has treated him?"

There is clearly more to this story than the article reveals. Did Gunn plagiarise for more than one tutor? When was his plagiarism actually suspected and when proven? The rhetoric of the article turns the situation around and makes the university the cheater--not only complicity in Gunn's dishonesty, but deliberately so out of institutional self-interest. The final query by Elaine Gunn--"Where was the fairness"--is revealing about society's expectations that academia will pander to the student. Did not Gunn abdicate his expectation of fairness when he engaged in academic dishonesty? If a criminal is caught by the police after three years of committing crimes, can he sue them for not catching him earlier?

On the other hand, the story tells the very real difficulties that academia has in dealing with the problem. It is so widespread and so easy that academics are unable to take systematic effective action. Instead, it can only hold up a few unlucky ones who get caught as examples. Clearly, this is the moral standard for academic dishonesty. It's plagiarism if and only if you get caught.

Why I never wanted to teach high school English

2004-05-31T08:12:00.000-07:00

A recent article in The Onion on teaching English to high school students has already been commented on by Critical Mass. It remains for me to add that the captioned picture in the article contains a "teacher" holding a copy of the Riverside Chaucer. Anyway, the article provides an excellent summary of why I never wanted to teach high school English.

An Update

2004-05-30T17:26:00.000-07:00

The past week has not provided much opportunity for blogging -- nor, I should say much that was thought-provoking. The major exception was the California Medieval History Seminar, which occurs at the Huntington Library several times a year. A bunch of historians (and me) from various Califonia universities, and occasional scholars visiting California from elsewhere, gather to discuss works in progress for a day. Most of the papers this time around were on subjects pretty far removed from my own research, but I did come across a few references that were valuable. I'm looking forward to following up on some of these things over the summer, when I get to focus on research full time.

For now, I am still grading. Final exams ended on Thursday, and, so far, I have one class done. I have another set of exams to do, and then two sets of essays and a set of Middle translations. If I'm lucky, I'll have it all done by next Thursday, but it's going to take some pretty intense grading sessions. This morning, I did about fifteen exams before taking the possibly more daunting task of cleaning out our closet. Camille and I finished (more or less) around 4:30, and now we're exhausted. Tomorrow is Memorial Day, and I'm going to try to take some time away from work and domestic chores. We're hoping to have some folk over for drinks in the evening, and then on Tuesday it's back to the slog.

The only other news to report is that a book project I have been involved with -- a volume of essays on The Lord of the Rings -- has been given the go-ahead by the publisher Continuum. So now I've got to think about writing my chapter over the summer. It's on models of service in em>The Lord of the Rings . I'm going to be dead busy.

Shepherd's Pie

2004-05-23T17:51:00.000-07:00

I just came across an online recycling of my recipe for shepherd's pie as published in Bon Appétit. I was fairly appalled at the way they butchered it when I first saw it, but, now that I look again, it's not too bad. They took out all my Mediterranean herbs (oregano and thyme) and replaced them with parsley, and they added a ton of butter to the mashed potatoes; but, apart from that, they simply didn't give the Bisto gravy -- understandable, since it's only available in import shops in the United States. Ah, I feel like I'm revisiting an old friend.

Site Search Engines

2004-05-22T09:29:00.000-07:00

As some of my earlier entries have noted, I have been having trouble getting Google site search to work. The problem, it turns out, is that Google has not yet built in the technology to search individual directories--only whole domains. However, I had to take a very roundabout route through Google's FAQs in order to find out this information. The same roundabout route uncovered a temporary workaround. You take the code that they give you at the address above and insert

<input type=hidden name=hq value="inurl:domain name/directory/">

(Replace the bolded text with the appropriate information).

This seems to work pretty well. However, there are a few drawbacks. Although Google has some customisation features, most of them are simple HTML or CSS additions which you could do yourself with a bit of coding knowledge. It doesn't give you a lot of flexibility to exclude password-protected directories, or other useful managerial functions. More importantly, as far as I can tell, it can take weeks to have your site spidered by Google (in laymen's terms--for Google's software to index your site and make it available for searching). If you update regularly, you've got a real problem. I could just about put up with that for my web site, but not for a web log.

Currently, I am trying some alternatives. Right now, I have a form for FreeFind on my web log (see the links column to your right). I like it a lot, and it's very easy to set up. I have a slightly more complicated service called PicoSearch on a draft version of my web site. Both these services work very well. Their main advantage over Google is that you can exercise much greater control over how often their spiders index your site. You can initiate the indexing if you want or even configure the spider to index your site every day. I haven't yet decided which of these services I prefer.

Of course, there are a range of technical issues about which type of service is the best, but these issues are only of interest if you're even geekier than I am. Still, it's a relief to get a site search capability working in some form. The need is not desperate for my web log (yet--although I have already made use of the search capability for something other than testing), but, as my web site has become quite large, the need is rather more pressing. The next step is to place the search form in the design of the web site, which will take some more work. Eventually, I'll want to integrate the technology into the English Department page, which is also becoming quite large.

Major Work Crisis Almost Over

2004-05-19T08:22:00.000-07:00

This week I have had a major work crisis: a mountain of grading to do, research commitments, and four courses to teach. I'm almost to the end, though. Tomorrow is the last day of classes, and next week is finals. I can't wait, as this has been one of my most exhausting semesters ever (or is it just that I'm getting old?)

Hugin and Munin

2004-05-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

I must take time out from the pile of grading I have before me to relay part of a story from The Economist on avian theories of the mind. The article tells of an experiment by Thomas Bugnyar of the University of Vermont published last month in Animal Cognition, which “suggests that ravens may have mastered the art of deception.” The experiment is described by The Economist as follows:

Dr Bugnyar was conducting an experiment designed to see what ravens learn from each other while foraging. While doing so he noticed strange interactions between two males, Hugin, a subordinate bird, and Munin, a dominant one.

The task was to work out which colour-coded film containers held some bits of cheese, then prise the containers open and eat the contents. The subordinate male was far better at this task than the dominant. However, he never managed to gulp down more than a few pieces of the reward before the dominant raven, Munin, was hustling him on his way. Clearly (and not unexpectedly) ravens are able to learn about food sources from one another. They are also able to bully each other to gain access to that food.

But then something unexpected happened. Hugin, the subordinate, tried a new strategy. As soon as Munin bullied him, he headed over to a set of empty containers, prised the lids off them enthusiastically, and pretended to eat. Munin followed, whereupon Hugin returned to the loaded containers and ate his fill.
At first Dr Bugnyar could not believe what he was seeing. He was anxious about sharing his observation, for fear that no one would believe him. But Hugin, he is convinced, was clearly misleading Munin.

As it happened, Munin was no dummy either. He soon grew wise to the tactic, and would not be led astray. He even stooped to trying to find the food rewards on his own! This made Hugin furious. “He got very angry”, says Dr Bugnyar, “and started throwing things around.” Perhaps ravens have something else in common with people—a hatred of being found out.

Medievalists will get the joke immediately: Hugin and Munin are the two ravens of the Norse god Odin, who probably survive in the fourteenth-century English poem Havelok the Dane as Hugh Raven, the hero’s foster-brother. Hugh Raven is the son of Grim, whose name, according to Edmund Reiss, derives from Grimnir ‘disguise’ a nickname for Odin.* To the extent that the adoption of a disguise is a form of deception, the ravens in the experiment discussed above are apparently partaking in the time-honoured tricks of their mythological name-sakes’ master. Did the ancient Scandinavians observe the same behaviours as Dr Bugnyar?

* Edmund Reiss, “Havelok the Dane and Norse Mythology,” Modern Language Quarterly 27 (1966): 115-124. For more information, see the Wikipedia entry on Hugin and Munin, which contains a quote from Grimnismal.

Return to Normality (?)

2004-05-15T14:56:00.000-07:00

This past week has been something of a marathon. Four classes whom I haven't seen for a week, a mountain of grading, an essay to finish, fatigue from the conference in Kalamazoo, and missing my wife, who flew off to Boston on a business trip just hours before I got back. Throw in a couple of needy cats, and, well, need I say more?

Anyway, Camille returns today (I'm off to pick her up in a couple of hours), and the mountain of grading has undergone some erosion. The essay is done (for the moment), and I even managed to read the proofs for another essay. Just one thing: I still have to find time to talk to my family. There has been some discussion on Critical Mass about the advisability of doing a PhD. Most people are concerned about whether there's any chance of a job at the end of it, but another thing to consider is whether the working conditions when you get a job are worth it. When you teach four courses and try to do research, there really is no time for family and friends.

Comments Enabled

2004-05-12T09:11:00.000-07:00

I've just enabled comments, though it wasn't a straightforward process, as Blogger seem to have introduced the technology before it was quite perfected. You basically have to insert the code into the template yourself, but this isn't a big deal. Meanwhile, I still cannot get Google's search site technology to work.

I have now introduced a meta refresh to the mBlog site so that anyone going there will be automatically re-directed here. This, I think, prompts a few words about why I switched to Blogger. It's pure coincidence that Blogger's recent upgrade addressed some of the differences between its service and that of services running with Movable Type (comments, image hosting, and the like). There are still some problems with Blogger: no (working) site search capability, advertising at the top of the page (in the free version), and no hosting of other web pages with the same URL as the web log. All of these are, I believe, addressable with a bit of work. On the immediate plus side, the most important aspects of web log maintenance are much easier on Blogger: posting (especially using BlogThis!), managing settings, and changing the template. Blogger does not have nearly the flexibility of Movable Type (e.g. multiple templates for different parts of the web log), but its template structure is much simpler and easier to edit. I've been able to get what I want done much faster.

In the end, taking the various trade-offs into account, Blogger seemed better for me.

Up and Running

2004-05-10T21:46:00.000-07:00

I've just posted an official notice on the original mBlog version of this web log that I am moving to Blogger. As of today, I'm supporting this web log exclusively. I will continue to develop its content and appearance. For anyone moving over from the mBlog version -- welcome!

NB. Currently, I am not supporting comments, but I expect to get them up and running soon.

Back from the Zoo

2004-05-10T09:50:00.000-07:00

I've returned from a successful but exhausting conference in Kalamazoo. As always, I return with a host of new references and lines of enquiry to pursue in my research--and, more importantly, a renewed drive that twelve weeks of class preparation and student papers have sapped from me. However, we still have three weeks of the semester to go, so I am going to keep things relatively short and return to the topic of my research agenda in a future post. Also, I am continuing to port log entries from my old blog to the new one. All of April is now done, and I should have the entire thing complete by the end of the week. Then I will put some attention into revitalising the intellectual content of my blogging...

Template Problems Postings

2004-05-04T11:29:00.000-07:00

The last few days have had a number of postings on template problems. These relate to my old blog on mBlog.com, which didn't work out. The reason the postings are on this blog is that I have begun porting them over. Hence there is a certain amount of overlap (I am making sure that the dates of the original postings are preserved).

More on the Subjunctive

2004-05-04T11:11:00.000-07:00

I'm always looking for more examples of the new subjunctive with "would". I'm recording one here so I don't forget it.

Every day I wish I would have been brave enough to reach out and find some way to get some kind of health care

Kalamazoo

2004-05-04T09:07:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm off to Kalamazoo for the 39th International Congress on Medieval Studies, so further development of this web log will have to wait until next week.

I forgot to mention in my previous post that I am slowly removing the horrible orange colour from my template. No offence to Blogger, who clearly like it for theirs.

More Changes

2004-05-04T09:01:00.000-07:00

I haven't yet discovered the problem with the Google search button. I suspect that I don't know the correct domain name to place in the script, and I haven't been able to find out what it is.

Another problem with this service is that it seems to require you to host pictures and web pages on your own server and link to them. That's not so great a problem for the pictures, but it would be nice to have web page links with the same domain in the URL. Both these services are, however, available if you pay to upgrade, so that may be something to consider in the future.

On the plus side, I installed a script which writes an e-mail link from variables. This should prevent it from getting captured by spam spiders.

Also, I really like BlogThis! It makes posting a snap.

Search Capability

2004-05-03T18:16:00.000-07:00

I installed the Google site search button, but it doesn't seem to work. I'll have to play with this when I have more time.

BlogThis!

2004-05-03T18:02:00.000-07:00

I've just installed BlogThis!, which allows me to post and publish blog entries from a contextual menu. Let's see if it works.

Internal Links

2004-05-03T17:44:00.000-07:00

After much searching, I finally discovered that the only way of finding out the URL for blog entries is to click the "#" beneath them. Here's the one for the entry on adding titles. Right now, my main problem is that there is no blog search facility for outside users. My next step is to see what it takes to get one.

Apologies

2004-05-03T17:26:00.000-07:00

My apologies to anyone who should stumble across this blog in its nascent stages. All of its postings will be rather boring updates on the steps taken to set up the blog. Once it's up and running, they will get more interest.

Adding Titles

2004-05-03T16:37:00.000-07:00

My first post did not have a title. I worked out that you need to change a setting to get titles. Let's see what it looks like.

Test

2004-05-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

This is a test beginning post to see how this technology works -- and if I like it. NB. I have re-edited this post after working out what is necessary for adding titles.

Or was it just a false alarm?

2004-05-03T08:21:00.000-07:00

No sooner do I identify more template problems than they go away. It looks like the page just didn't load fully. For now on, my first resort will be to refresh the page.

The Template Problems Continue

2004-05-03T08:19:00.000-07:00

Just when I think everything is all right, the template problems spring up again. This time a bit of code has popped up on the screen, half my calendar is gone, and all my links have disappeared. Apologies to my readers (both of them) for these ongoing problems--and my incessant commentary on them.

The Zoo

2004-05-03T08:13:00.000-07:00

Just when I’m getting back into regular posting after dealing with technical problems, there is about to be another posting hiatus. This is because I am leaving tomorrow to go to the 39th International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, MI (AKA the Zoo). This annual ritual, in which thousands of medieval scholars converge on a small (and very underprepared) town in the midwest has perhaps become the defining institution in the field: where all its colour (and can you believe a conference of medievalists is quite colourful), oddity (the pseudo-society “alternative” session comes to mind), and, frankly, seriously good scholarship surfaces from the paper and print on which the personalities of medievalists appears outside the classroom. Not that anybody sees this, apart from a few overwhelmed service workers in a small midwestern town. But it’s a joy to go every year. I have only two complaints: (1) every year it coincides with my birthday, and (2) there appears to be only one working espresso machine in the town.

This year I am chairing a session on racial, ethnic, and religious identity in medieval England, a theme that I began last year and will probably make a regular event, since it seems to be quite successful. I’m also giving a short introductory paper in a session on the Middle English poem Havelok the Dane. Both sessions are on the first day, so I’m looking forward to being able to relax and have fun after that. However, I may have to do a bit of work, as I’m trying to meet a deadline of 14 May for getting an article done.

Grade Inflation

2004-05-02T03:23:00.000-07:00

I have been thinking about Michael Bérubé's comments on grade inflation in response to Princeton University’s announcement that it would place quotas on A grades, limiting them to no more than the top 35% of students in any course. I am intrigued by the implications of Princeton’s actions, and of Bérubé’s solution. He proposes to take statistics from faculty grading patterns and factor these patterns into student grades. He outlines the system as follows:

Every professor, and every department, produces an average grade -- an average for the professor over her career and an average for the discipline over the decades. And if colleges really wanted to clamp down on grade inflation, they could whisk it away statistically, simply by factoring those averages into each student's G.P.A. Imagine that G.P.A.'s were calculated on a scale of 10 with the average grade, be it a B-minus or an A-minus, counted as a 5. The B-plus in chemical engineering, where the average grade is, say, C-plus, would be rewarded accordingly and assigned a value of 8; the B-plus in psychology, where the average grade might be just over B-plus, would be graded like an easy dive, adequately executed, and given a 4.7.

It should be pointed out that this would be a nightmare system for employers to read. A student who majored in chemical engineering with a GPA around 8 would look much the same as a student who majored in psychology and also had a GPA around 8. But the psychology student, having survived the ravages of forced grade deflation would be truly outstanding, whereas the chemical engineering student would merely have succeeded in a hard subject. Factoring subject matter would create such complexities as to render it uninterpretable.
But this raises a very serious point. In order for GPAs to have meaning, they must be transferable from subject to subject, but also from university to university. At my university, English courses have the lowest average grade of any subject area; whereas, to be honest, my impression is that many students choose English to avoid subjects that they think are harder. I should add that the English department services a large number of (again, to be honest) low-achieving education students, which skew the statistics somewhat. On average, I’d say that no more than 15% of my students in any class get As. On the other hand, at a very selective institution Princeton, surely a much higher percentage of As is a reflexion of the calibre of the student. What we really need, then is a way to factor this in. However, other countries have tried to enforce national standards with limited success. In the end, I believe institutional reputation serves the purpose.

Another question that arises out of this discussion is the meaning of the average grade. Does this mean the average for an individual class, the average over a number of semesters, or something else? I tend to view average as implying that a piece of work displays a certain skill set—whatever could be expected of a person with little exposure to the subject matter or to educated literary discourse who has a serious crack at the assignment. Such work tends to be somewhat lacking in the rhetorical and mechanical expectations of an educated treatment of the subject matter but shows a genuine, if not perfect, familiarity with the subject. It generally lacks much insight. Work that improves on this is above average (B range); work that improves seriously is excellent (A range). I generally award Ds to work that falls below this standard and Fs to work that is not turned in. The one exception is in my grammar courses, where students do so spectacularly badly that the scale for submitted work tips from three passing grade ranges (A, B, C) and one failing grade (D) to one with two failing grades (D and F). Student grades cluster in the B and C range for most of my classes but more in the C range for my grammar classes.
I think we need to look closely at the institutional and cultural pressures that govern grading policies in order to derive some clear notions of what an average student actually is.

Template Problems

2004-04-29T09:05:00.000-07:00

I have been having problems with my template lately, and, along with my heavy workload, these problems have been preventing me from updated my weblog. I hope to have the problems sorted out soon.

Image Display Experiments

2004-04-14T08:56:00.000-07:00

Yesterday, in a geeky moment (as if having a web log isn’t geeky enough), I figured out how to prevent the proliferation on my web site of web pages devoted solely to displaying images. I created an Image Viewer. This is a web page, which can be linked to from anywhere in the web site, containing an image supplied by the page that links to it. In other words, my medieval literature students can click on the link to an image of Chaucer in the medieval literature web site, and my history of the English language students can click on the map of the Angevin Empire from the web site for that course, and each will go to the Image Viewer web page which loads the image specified in the link. Then a simple “back” link returns the user to the page they started from.

The problem is how to tell the Image Viewer page which image to load. The solution is to place a “query string” at the end of the link on the original page. This is a question mark followed by a variable name such as “image” an equals sign and the value (in this case the address of the image). The URL ends up looking like http://www.randomsite.edu/?image=images/chaucer.gif. That’s easy enough to do. The Image Viewer page is a bit more complicated. It needs a script to parse the query string into a variable name (“image”) and a value (the address). There are lots of scripts like this available on the internet. I experimented with several and found one that is flexible enough to parse multiple variables. That way I can stick one in for the title of the image as well. After pasting in the parsing script, I just needed to write a script to write HTML which prints the title and loads the image. In the end, the solution was so elegant that it’s worth improving. I want to modify the parsing script to handle variables for height and weight. That way I can display images in the image viewer pretty much any way I want by supplying this information when I create the link.

This will save me the trouble of creating new display pages for each image I add to the site in the future. Once I get it perfected, I may well make the Image Viewer scripts available to the public.

Hnæf the Terrorist

2004-04-12T10:36:00.000-07:00

Last week I suggested that terrorist acts derive from blood feud-like impulses, which Richard Kaepur says are characteristic of mostly stateless societies. Here are a few more thoughts:

In Beowulf we are told the story of Finn, King of Frisia, who marries the Danish princess Hildeburh, presumably to keep the peace between the two peoples. When her brother Hnæf comes to visit, he and is men are attacked at night, and the resulting battle brings about the death of both Hnæf and the son of Finn and Hildeburh. Both armies are so depleted that a truce is called. The Danes, under the leadership of Hengest, will remain with Finn, receiving honourable treatment, on the condition that no one should speak of the events that led to the conflict. The agreement does not last the winter, as the Danes cannot forget how they have been wronged. They attack the Frisians, kill Finn, burn his home, and carry Hildeburh back to Denmark.

The entire episode is narrated by a minstrel of King Hrothgar of the Danes and is used ironically in the poem as a harbinger of the fall of Hrothgar’s son and successor Hrethric in similar circumstances. There are family sagas in these accounts of historical feuds which creates dynamics unlike those that I am suggesting parallel modern-day terrorist impulses. But the basic idea that a consciousness of past wrongs cannot be let go (that you cannot “heng vp þyn ax, þat hatz innogh hewen,” as King Arthur says in Sir Gawain and the Green Knight) out of ideological notions such as honour is relevant. The feud, like the curse, is a form of self-help, when there is no state-backed remedy for the consciousness of being wronged. To me, this suggests that US policy regarding terrorism is highly misguided. The US needs to throw its considerable weight behind the United Nations, boosting its authority to offer alternatives to the self-help feud as a remedy for perceived wrongs.

Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3 speed

2004-04-09T11:49:00.000-07:00

Further speculation about terrorism and blood feud will have to wait because I couldn't resist inserting this article on the latest in transport technology, courtesy of the BBC News web site. Here are some excerpts. Click the title to go to the full article.

Radar clocks Mini at Mach 3 speed

A Belgium motorist was left stunned after authorities sent him a speeding ticket for travelling in his Mini at three times the speed of sound.

The ticket claimed the man had been caught driving at 3380 kph (2,100 mph) - or Mach 3 speed - in a Brussels suburb, a Belgian newspaper reported.

However, police later admitted that a faulty radar had been responsible for the Mini's incredible feat.

[...]

"We called the local police to find out what height the plane caught speeding along the Boulevard Lambermont was flying at," a member of the Brussels public prosecutor's office joked to Belgium's La Derniere Heure newspaper.

Police also said they had made a mistake in still sending out the ticket, given that it was impossible - even for a doughty little Mini - for a car to have travelled so fast.

Terrorists and the Blood Feud

2004-04-08T10:07:00.000-07:00

The recent testimony of Condoleezza Rice to the commission investigating the attacks on September 11 has reminded me of a phrase I saw in Richard Kaeuper’s War, Justice, and Public Order: England and France in the later Middle Ages: something to the effect of the blood feud being characteristic of mostly stateless societies. It occurs to me that terrorists are placing themselves within that paradigm by existing in the fringes of the state or in countries where the state is a very weak institution. They couch their justifications for terrorist attacks in the language of Islam, but let’s think a bit about what this means. Muslim friends tell me that one of the attractive features of Islam is the way it possesses prescriptions for how to behave in almost every situation in daily life (rather like the state in some ways—but that’s an aside). The terrorists, in seeing the drive to attack those who have wronged them in the codes of Islam, are in a sense using Islam as the “institutional” basis for their blood feud. Many Muslims would no doubt say that they are perverting Islam, but that is not a debate I want to get into here. I’m interested in the intellectual issues raised by the blood feud. The Anglo-Saxons had something to say about this, notably in Beowulf. It’s too late now to write any more (and Camille is dragging me off the computer), but I may write further about this tomorrow.

The Da Vinci Code

2004-04-05T09:21:00.000-07:00

At some point I’ll be adding to the sidebar a list of the latest books I am reading/have read, following the practice of many other web loggers. In the mean time, I have just finished Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. Brown is a master plotter who knows how to combine conspiracy theories, short chapters, attractive locations, and quick action to keep you hooked. His writing style is pretty bad, but perhaps appropriate to his quick-read thriller medium. I’d reserve my criticism for his research, or at least his use thereof. Here he seems to rely more on the ignorance of his reader than his reader’s suspension of disbelief.

Brown likes to make his plots revolve around word games, and one example should suffice to illustrate my point. In The Da Vinci Code, the main characters are sent on a sort of treasure hunt for the Holy Grail, the clues for which are embedded in various works by Leonardo da Vinci, such as the Mona Lisa. One clue Brown constructs is an anagram of the Mona Lisa--AMON L’ISA—supposedly representing “the male god Amon” and “the female god, Isis, whose ancient pictogram was once called L’ISA.” Leaving aside da Vinci’s potential knowledge of Egyptian gods, the interpretation of “L’ISA” looks a bit suspicious to me. Regardless, the anagram of Mona as Amon is preposterous. Although Brown acknowledges that the French call the Mona Lisa La Joconde, he does not similarly tell us that the Italians call it La Gioconda. Further the name “Mona Lisa” was coined by Giorgio Vasari thirty-one years after da Vinci’s death. Furthermore, in Italian, it is “Monna Lisa”, from “Madonna Lisa Giocondo”, the wife of a wealthy Florentine, whom Vasari thought was the subject of the painting. Dan Brown weaves his conspiracy theory by taking such liberties with language and history.

His other technique reveals how he exploits ignorance. As with his earlier novel, Angels and Demons, Brown constructs his plot around the activities of secret societies who oppose the cultural hegemony of the Catholic Church. At the beginning of each novel he inserts a statement of factuality about the accuracy of his descriptions as well as of the existence of the secret society (the Priory of Sion in the case of The Da Vinci Code). Needless to say, he fails to acknowledge that the organisation is not represented factually in his novel; but the unwary reader may think it is. The history of the Priory of Sion hoax is well documented. I could provide other examples of Brown’s historical inaccuracies, but I think I have made my point sufficiently. At some later point, I may address his treatment of the history of the Holy Grail since, as a medievalist, I should have some input on that issue.

For now, I am content to ask a few questions about literary technique? Is historical inaccuracy for the sake of entertainment justified? If so, to what extent? More interestingly perhaps, what does Brown’s technique say about the nature of literary belief? I am tempted to see the technique as sleight of hand, or what Tolkien terms “magic”: the manipulation of language in order to influence someone’s belief about their own reality. Clearly, the spell (in both the older and newer senses of the word) is broken by a knowledge of language, history, and art, but, if the reader has no such knowledge, can a cheap thriller be induced to believe its alternate reality is their own?

As a side note, I am intrigued by the fact that The Da Vinci Code pits the Priory of Sion against Opus Dei, a conservative wing of the Catholic Church which (according to Brown) engages in “corporal mortification”. For further information, here’s a recent article on Opus Dei from the Catholic Weekly America magazine. The article includes some interesting discussion of Opus Dei’s refusal to make its constitutions available in any language but Latin, for which see my discussion of Harrius Potter. Along with Mel Gibson’s The Passion of Christ, the presence of Opus Dei in The Da Vinci Code may represent the growing importance of conservative Catholicism in America. This development is also documented in an article entitled “The New Catholic Orthodoxy” in today’s Chronicle of Higher Education. The article is subscription only (so no direct link), but here are some snippets:

“After a quarter century in which no new Catholic colleges were established, most of those being founded now are led by traditionalists who feel the majority of America's 230 Catholic colleges have strayed from the truth of the Catholic faith….

Dissatisfied with existing Catholic higher education, the new colleges aspire to train graduates who will raise a strong and orthodox Catholic intellectual voice in the debates over stem-cell research, gay marriage, and other social issues. They strive to maintain a conservative campus life, where students and faculty members attend Mass frequently, premarital sex is strictly forbidden, and gay support groups have no place.”

The significance of Catholicism in American society may well be changing in the coming years.

Mysterious Hand Injury

2004-04-03T10:44:00.001-08:00

I'm keeping things short today as a result of mysterious injury to my left hand. I have pain from my thumb to my wrist, and even the most miniscule of tasks--like opening a door knob--is extremely uncomfortable. I don't know what I did, or how I did it, but I reckon that avoid too much typing is a good way to give my hand a chance to heal.

Mysterious Hand Injury

2004-04-03T10:44:00.000-08:00

CEO Sabbaticals

2004-04-02T13:46:00.000-08:00

Matthew Lynn of Bloomberg.com (quoted in The Week) notes that many high-powered corporate CEOs have “borrowed from the more sedate world of academia, awarding themselves a sabbatical.” Lynn points out that these CEOs may be using the term sabbatical in its original, biblical sense, connected with the Sabbath. He quotes Leviticus 25:2-3: "Six years thou shalt sow thy field, and six years thou shalt prune thy vineyard, and gather in the fruit thereof; But in the seventh year shall be a sabbath of rest unto the land, a sabbath for the Lord: Thou shalt neither sow thy field, nor prune thy vineyard. If the agricultural practicality can be applied metaphorically, the implication is that the seventh year is one of rest and recovery. Lynn suggests that CEOs are increasingly seeking this rest to refresh their minds:

Running a company used to be about doing things. Now, it is as much about thinking about things.
Maybe that explains why businessmen are stealing a lesson from universities -- professors know all about the importance of thinking rather than doing.

To see issues clearly, a mind needs to be rested. A sabbatical helps professors do that. Who knows? Maybe it will help corporate leaders as well.

Executive sabbaticals are, however, a far cry from academic sabbaticals. For one thing, few professors have the luxury of year-long breaks, let alone of "awarding themselves sabbaticals". For another, the purpose of the academic sabbatical may have changed over the years. Originally the purpose of the sabbatical was to give university professors time for the purposes of study and travel (I'm quoting from the Oxford English Dictionary here), presumably because such enrichment would enhance their abilities to perform their duties when they returned. But, as the OED notes, the meaning has been transferred to imply "rest or absence from other occupations, professions, or activities". In other words, the sense of activity has been lost.

But this is surely not the case in academia. Sabbaticals are technically not awarded unless requested for the purpose of an active scholarly agenda, and many of us look forward to them not as a period of rest and recovery but as an opportunity for intensive work on scholarly activity for which we do not have time whilst performing our normal teaching and service duties.

I wonder if corporate CEOs really are taking their cue from academia. Or perhaps academia should now start taking a cue from corporate CEOs?

Faculty Workload at CSU

2004-04-02T12:57:00.000-08:00

Today I discovered a document entitled Findings and Recommendations of the Advisory Committee for the CSU and Comparable Faculty Workload Studies January 2003. The findings listed in this document are rather damning:

CSU faculty work hard. They put in more hours of work for the university and more hours outside the university than their counterparts across the nation.

CSU faculty not only work harder, their workload has changed. Faculty now are doing different things than they were ten years ago: to be effective they must respond to different learning styles and to different levels of student preparation, embrace service learning, manage complex academic programs, use new academic technologies to enhance student learning, and find time to maintain an active agenda of scholarly and creative work. It is noteworthy that with all these demands, faculty managed to maintain an active agenda of scholarly and creative activity and to increase the time spent on scholarship and creativity.

Lecturers (non-tenure track faculty) make substantial contributions to the high quality of learning environments across the system. They compare favorably to tenured and tenure-track faculty in terms of their commitment to students and to scholarly and creative activities.

Most faculty in the CSU want more time for creative and scholarly work.

Tenured and probationary faculty in the CSU teach, on average, one more course per academic year5 than their counterparts at other universities. On a weekly basis, CSU faculty spend, on average, about 4.4 more hours per week on teaching activities than their counterparts.

While new probationary faculty in the CSU are productive scholars and have the same career aspirations as faculty across the country, they are less likely to reach the same levels of scholarly and creative achievement, e.g., publications in refereed journals.

CSU tenured and probationary faculty are less positive than their counterparts about their working conditions and relationships at their institution.

One-third of tenured and probationary CSU faculty believe that effective teaching is not rewarded at their institution, suggesting a misalignment of rewards and expectations for CSU faculty.

CSU faculty are deeply committed to the success of their students and are more likely than their counterparts to engage in the kinds of educational practices that enhance student learning.

The last point (and point 3) demonstrates that, despite the fact that the odds are stacked against us, we continue to work hard to serve the needs of students. But the other points paint a damning picture of the conditions under which we work: longer hours, more varied tasks, and less time for scholarly achievement. We need to start working towards some institutional changes to change these conditions; otherwise we’ll go the way of the California secondary school system (i.e. from one best to one of the worst). And by we, I mean the (already overworked) faculty, because the taxpayers and their elected representatives do not have a clear enough vision of what the university must be to compete with other US institutions. Furthermore, I think the students are too easily satisfied with what they are getting. If they only knew what we could achieve--achieve for them--if we had better working conditions...

Bloody Referrer Scripts

2004-04-01T12:59:00.000-08:00

I had to remove my referrer script because it was registering the web pages for which I have links to this web log, including the online service I use to post. Not really what I want crowding my list of referrers. So now I have no idea who (besides me is accessing this blog). I'm not really sure what to do at this point. I could modify the script to solve this problem, but, since it is housed on another server, I don't have access. I could house a referrer script on my server, but that involves all sorts of complications -- I haven't had too much luck with server-side scripts from the CSUN server, and getting into a dialogue with mBlog about what cgi access they provide seems a lot of bother. I'll have to give this some more thought.

Alistair Cooke

2004-03-31T09:52:00.000-08:00

Today I want to take a moment to mourn the passing of Alistair Cooke, who died yesterday at the age of 95. Cooke was the host of Letter from America, broadcast weekly on BBC Radio 4, which ran for a staggering 58 years from 1946 until his retirement at the beginning of this month. Cooke began his broadcasts at a time when Britain and the United States were about to begin their most profound journeys along different cultural trajectories since American independence. Cooke served as a bridge between the two cultures, keeping his British listeners informed about the latest developments in the increasingly strange phenomenon that was America. (His very first broadcast included a translation of the American ‘corn’ to ‘maize’, a translation few Britons would require today.) Although Cooke eventually became an American citizen, he never lost his connexion with his British audience, and his unique dual perspective allowed him to speak with a voice that reflected both the shared and the divergent characters of the two cultures. Further, the sheer number of his broadcasts over such a great length of time makes Letter from America a profoundly valuable historical resource. Currently, you can hear and read samples (including his last letter) on the Radio 4 web site, but I sincerely hope that the BBC has plans to produce transcripts of all his broadcasts and make them available for scholars.

A Little Light Research

2004-03-30T13:43:00.000-08:00

I spent last night putting the finishing touches on an essay for Viator on Havelok the Dane and report for Teachers of Old English in Britain and Ireland (TOEBI) on the teaching of Old English in North America. That pretty much clears up my "pending" tray until Spring Break, when I have to write a paper for the International Medieval Congress in Kalamazoo (on the textual tradition of Havelok). That's nearly a week with nothing on the agenda (except the omnipresent paper grading). Something must be wrong! Perhaps I can get a head start on writing my paper for the International Conference on Layamon's Brut in August. It would be nice to have something substantial written by the end of the semester. Keeping up my research is pretty difficult when I'm teaching four classes (some of them with double the normal enrolments). I'm walking around in a haze much more than I really like. As for exercise--not normally possible. I think I'll make it a priority for the rest of the week.

On another note, I am excited to learn that one of my graduate students is to attend the conference in Kalamazoo. The prospect of steering my students into the academic world which I so happily joined (got sucked into?) is not one that I can normally look forward to at CSUN. The portion of our jobs known euphemistically as "Contribution to the Field of Study" (aka research) is shrinking due to lack of time, but the heavy teaching load which supposedly contributes that lack of time is not making up for the difference. The university's mission is all about access--access to the institution--not to scholarly activity. Encouraging students to attend conferences is one way to do thumb our noses at this misguided direction, but at several hundred dollars a conference, how many of our students can afford to follow in our footsteps?

Modifications, but maybe not improvements

2004-03-30T06:09:00.000-08:00

I just added a script to list referrers--not that anybody is reading my web log at this point. I'm not very happy with it, as it registers my web log publishing page and inserts an annoying horizontal bar above the text. There's got to be another way to do this.

A Few Words on Tolkien

2004-03-29T17:03:00.000-08:00

Today I'm buried under a mountain of essays for my senior seminar on The Lord of the Rings. My impressions of teaching such a course are for another time, except to complain about the unavailability of resources to help the students understand what they are reading. Although there is a wealth of publication out there, even the good stuff is not held in most university libraries. Thus I welcome the soon-to-be published journal Tolkien Studies. You can see the brochure here. I look forward to the presence of a readily available scholarly journal changing the way I teach Tolkien in the future.

I spent my little "blog time" today reading the web logs of other medievalists to find out what is out there and to start engaging in some of the dialogue features of blogging. I'll be putting up a few links in a day or two.

Hypothetically Speaking...

2004-03-28T10:10:00.000-08:00

On Thursday I tried for the first time to teach the subjunctive mood in English. For some years now I have noticed that colloquial English offers alternative constructions for the subjunctive forms used in educated writing, but I have never seen a grammar book that deals with this usage issue. But it came to my mind again last night when I heard on television the expression, ‘I didn’t think it would have been a church.’ Here the hypothetical scenario of ‘it’ (in this case, a building housing an emaciated dog) being a church would be expressed in writing with ‘was’. What is happening here?

The issue has to be deal with from several directions. First, the nice neat subjunctive forms of Old English ended in singular -e or plural -en. The present subjunctive of ‘be’ was singular sie, plural sien or singular beo, plural beon. The past subjunctive of ‘be’ was wære (singular and plural). In Middle English the sie forms dropped out of the language, and the singular/plural distinction was lost due the phonological erosion of the endings -e and -en. As a result, the subject forms going into Early Modern English were an invariant be in the present subjunctive and invariant were in the past subjunctive. Likewise, other the present and past subjunctives of other verbs became indistinguishable from the infinitives and past tenses. However, the present subjunctive resembled the present indicative in all cases but the third person singular, so that indicative forms appeared, perhaps from the very beginning. Hence:

If he see them, he’ll give a shout > If he sees them, he’ll give a shout.

It appears that a distinct subjunctive form was preserved only after certain ‘trigger words’ (particularly verbs or adjectives followed by ‘that’), with some variation in usage (e.g. ‘whether’ is a trigger word for some people in certain expressions). In a sense, then, the subjunctive mood is a grammatical category which is no longer active in Modern Standard English, like the distinction between singular and plural second person pronouns.

But now we come back to ‘I didn’t think it would have been a church.’ The modal auxiliary would normally translates the conditional mood of other languages, so the English construction would + verb could be considered a periphrastic conditional. Its meaning is very similar to the subjunctive implication of possible reality, rather than an actual one, and this may provide one clue to the development of what I think is a periphrastic subjunctive. It frequently occurs in parallel constructions with the periphrastic conditional:

If he would tell them what they need to know, they would leave him alone.

Here the periphrastic subjunctive would tell replaces the older told as a parallel to the periphrastic conditional would leave. Note the parallel past perfect equivalents:

Standard: If he had told them...they would have left...
Periphrastic: If he would have told them...they would have left...
Constructions like ‘I didn’t think it would have been a church’ appear to be extensions of this new periphrastic subjunctive into contexts where it is not parallel with a conditional. In other words the grammatical category subjunctive has become active again.

Is this really the correct analysis? I don’t know, since I’m merely speculating. I may adjust this if I find new information. One issue that I wonder about is the role of the expression of desire conveyed by would. Did this play any role in the growth of the periphrastic subjunctive?

Slave-Master Data

2004-03-27T16:07:00.000-08:00

And now we come to it. It’s Friday, and I’ve got no great revelations, epiphanies, or even fleeting musings. I’ve been working too hard. It’s days like this which will ultimate determine the shape of this log. Will it be anything more than an elaborate record of fragments of my life, the boring ephemera of my day-to-day activities? Or will it be a forum for something actually thought provoking? I am faced with coming up with a new entry topic. I could talk about yesterday’s activities, but do I want to?

Well, for the past two days I have been occupied with formatting a massive report on the effectiveness of the English major based on survey materials collected by the Assessment Committee. My role is simply to make it look like it was put together by someone who actually knows how to produce documents on a computer. I’m also integrating graphic pie charts because the report is filled with mind-numbing statistics. The task is so repetitive and detail-centred, that I haven’t even had a chance to take in the implications of the report. Perhaps that will be a topic for a future entry.

For now, I’ll simply ask the question that often comes to my mind when faced with such documents. How can we find ways to present data in a form where it will be easy to manipulate by many different hands in many different media? On the Web XML is the answer, but what happens when you are given a text that has to be converted into such a flexible medium? This is precisely what is happening in a number of projects in the literary world. For instance, medieval texts are being marked up with tags to help in Boolean searches for online access; they can then be printed out with the tags stripped away in forms that look much like the original print editions. But who is doing the tagging? Mostly graduate student slaves, I gather. Doing this kind of work requires intelligence, and I wonder if it can ever be automated. As our society comes to rely more and more on flexible forms of data, the type of clerical work that these graduate students do, or that I have been doing, will become a perpetual need. I suppose the factory-line workers of the industrial revolution will become the data management slaves of the information revolution. The tasks may be just as laborious. But will they be more intelligent?

Hell Day

2004-03-25T07:19:00.000-08:00

Today is Thursday, Hell day, the day I teach four courses and hold two hours of office hours. I arrive at work at 9 am and leave at 7 pm (arrive home at 7:30 to 8:00). I’m told we’re not technically allowed to teach four courses in a day, but it’s done regularly, probably because spreading out the teaching only means that we end up with no large chunks of time to do any work. In my case, I end up so exhausted that I need a day to recover, and the effect is the same. I wish I could do better for my students. The university wants to become more learning centred; what it really needs is for its teachers (and students) to be less overtaxed. Well, there’s time only for seven sentences; I’m off to the next task.

The Life of Brian

2004-03-24T09:04:00.000-08:00

By a curious coincidence, an item in today's news relates to my first two substantive entries, The Passion of Christ and Harrius Potter. Rainbow Pictures is to re-release Monty Python's The Life of Brian in honour of its twenty-fifth anniversary. An article in the BBC Web site quotes the distributor as expressing the hope that the film would "serve as an antidote to all the hysteria about Mel's movie". I can't help but hope that the famous "We are all individuals" scene will counteract the urge to interact with people based on generalised and stereotyped (and often ignorant) notions. Of course, the scene where Brian's attempt to write graffiti ('Romanes Eunt Domus') also highlights the dismal lack of training people get in Latin (and grammar) in this country.

This week has seen the first time that I have been separated from my wife Camille since we got married (she's on a business trip to the Bay Area). I miss her terribly. Being apart sucks. Well, I'll take a note from 'The Life of Brian: 'Always look on the bright side of life...'

The Passion of Christ

2004-03-23T07:36:00.000-08:00

This may not be the only entry concerning Mel Gibson’s film The Passion of Christ. I haven’t seen it and may not do so for a very long time for reasons detailed below. But I have certainly found the reviews thought provoking. I just read the review written by my cousin Geoff on DVDTalk.com, who, like most critics, accuses Gibson of a “myopic focus on the suffering of Jesus”. Elsewhere, he and other critics note Gibson’s emphasis on the violence of the Jews. Most suggest that the central flaw of the film is its failure to treat the broader context of Jesus’ life and to adequately examine the characters and their motivations. What has not been noticed is that Gibson’s film is not a story about Jesus but about Christ, and, as such, stands in a long tradition of depictions of the Christ-figure on its own. Comparison with historical portrayals of the crucifixion do not show the film in a good light.

The depiction I am most familiar with is the Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood, which portrays the Christ-figure as a warrior-hero valiantly embracing his fate by actively climbing the cross. It contrasts strongly with later depictions from the twelfth century which show Christ as a pathetic figure suffering as he hangs on the cross. Gibson’s film could be seen in this tradition, but the reviewers’ comments about Gibson’s emphasis on the violence of the other people involved suggests to me that The Passion is filtered through the lens of contemporary Hollywood film making where extreme and frequent violence is a means of conveying the visual spectacle enabled by the medium of film. The lesson here is that each account of the crucifixion is a reflection of the culture that produced it. However, the turn towards an emphasis on the violence of the Jews is not new nor restricted to film; Christine Chism discusses in Alliterative Revivals how precisely this shift away from pity for the Christ-figure towards accusation of the killers reflected and fuelled a desire for revenge against the Jews in fourteenth-century literature. Those who speculate on whether Gibson’s film will provoke anti-Semitic responses need not speculate in a vacuum; they have only to look at the lessons of history. For this reason, I won’t be contributing to the film’s income, if I can possibly help it.

Upper-Level Blogging?

2004-03-22T17:55:00.000-08:00

Have I reached the exalted levels of knowing how to get the most out of this new medium? Not really, but I'm starting to get the hang of it. The technical details are mind-boggling and the technical support minimal. Still I've had some success in getting all the necessary details up (links to my home page, short introduction, disclaimer, and the like). The number of entries is still minimal, but I think I am ready to go public.

So as of 22 March 2004, a permanent link to this web log will go on my CSUN web site. I hope favourable responses start pouring in soon. For now I'm leaving open the "Comment" link to anyone who wishes to leave their responses. However, I may have to shut it down later if I get inappropriate comments or if the spammers find the link. But for now I'll see what comes to pass.

Harrius Potter

2004-03-22T08:41:00.000-08:00

Whilst walking through the UCLA bookstore I chanced to come upon a copy of Harrius Potter et Philosophi Lapis. A glance at the price on the inside cover revealed that it was an American edition, so I was surprised to see the word “philosophi” from the original British title rather than some Latin equivalent to the “sorcerer’s” of the American edition. After all the hullabaloo about the original title being changed in the American edition because an American audience supposedly could not cope with such an intellectually challenging word as “philosophy”, I found it strangely intriguing that the American Latin-reading audience (all three of them, perhaps) presumably could. I am reminded of earlier periods in history (into the eighteenth century) when Latin was the language in which higher and more arcane concepts were expressed, whereas the vernacular was considered more “workaday” and unfit for literature of the higher sort.

Of course the analogy breaks down easily, since a children's book would hardly have been considered higher literature. On the other hand, what would the translator have chosen if he had wanted to render "sorcerer's" in Latin? Magus can imply a wise man, whereas veneficus is a poisoner, and by extension a worker of magic (so found in Cicero, Ovid, and Horace). The latter--even if it did not have the negative connotations--would hardly make a catchy title since it was not borrowed into English and would be unrecognisable today. However, would not magi nicely capture both the pursuer of knowledge and wisdom in "philosopher" and the worker of magic in "sorcerer"?