Here I am again

Apologies, folks, for the break in transmission. It's been an incredibly busy couple of months. Though as I always maintain, blogging really isn't about having the time, or not. It's something more to do with mental and social energies, which have been pushed and strained somewhat over the last year. I have now finally given my last talk for the year, though, and am starting to think about winding up at work. I'm taking a couple of weeks' leave from Monday week, so that's a week in which to attend a symposium, finish marking some late-submitted work, catch up with my graduate students, and finalise some budget stuff for the Centre.

I've moved in to my new office, which was then painted and re-carpeted around me. I've started looking at furniture catalogues for some comfy chairs, and will look forward to making it a beautiful place. Photos will follow next year when I've got stuff up on the walls, and all. The office is lovely: light, bright and big. It has fans, air-conditioning, and windows that open, as well as lots of cupboards and shelves.  Our first post-doc has arrived and has started work, and our second arrives in January, so the Melbourne hub of our Centre is feeling real, and populated, with two wonderful new appointments to help with (a) the administration and (b) the education and outreach aspects.

The last talk was at the International Medievalism and Popular Culture symposium in Perth, the last event of our four-year grant on Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory. And what a way to finish! One of those lovely events where no one is a keynote, and everyone is a plenary. About 45 folk listening to fifteen papers, none of which went over time. I'll write more about my own joint paper another time, perhaps. John Ganim, Nick Haydock and Eileen Joy braved the horrors of the half-world trip (and the spectacular Perth thunderstorms that messed up everyone's trip home), and Andrew Lynch held it all together with a light touch that put everyone at ease.

Even so, I am already planning a new year's resolution, which is to stop taking on too many things. Even though I cancelled two talks in September when I was just too sick to write them, let alone give them, I do still feel I took on too many things this year, with the result that I don't feel I did them all justice.

We are now being invited to submit the details of our publications to the dreaded research database. This is a pain in many ways. First, the system is incredibly unwieldy and time-consuming. Second, so many things follow from it: automatic calculations of one's teaching load, study-leave entitlements, etc.  Third, my two articles scheduled for this year haven't appeared yet. It is ridiculous for this to matter (they'll both appear in January, I think). One of them, at least, will have a 2011 publication date. But again, it's ridiculous that this is going to matter. Anyhoo, I have turned down a couple of things this year, and I have to keep doing that till I am back on top of things, and to make sure I leave enough time to do things well, not just meet the deadlines.

When we started all this bean-counting, and evaluation of journals, etc., a few years ago, I always swore I wouldn't let it get to me. But little by little, it has crept up on me, so that I do count the number of publications and "points" accruing to my CV.

Still, today was lovely. I made beetroot and raspberry borsht; and artichoke frittata for a birthday lunch; did a huge pile of ironing, straightening out the world; and had a sleep on the couch. Tomorrow I do the final check of the index of the book (proofs are already on the way to Philadelphia) and get to work on the next chapter of the next book.

So, hello again, blog: it's nice to be back.

Rumination, depression and other emotions

The first day of the ASSA/CMEMS/IAS/ARC CHE (etc. etc.) interdisciplinary workshop on the emotions was suitably intense. We met in the beautiful wood-lined original old building of the UWA, which was at one time used as a cricket pavilion (I mean: just look at it). We are a bunch of about 20 psychologists, historians, literary critics and classicists. The workshop is called "Understanding Emotions" but it's really turning out to be about how psychology and the history of emotions can talk to each other.

As you'd expect, we all speak a rather different language — and I think this discussion should ideally have the disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis here — but the format is great. It's mostly 15 minute papers with two ten minute responses and then the rest of the hour for discussion. 

Some amazing papers, but some stand-out moments, too.

A music psychologist described working with dementia patients. Singing provides an amazing restorative because music triggers various memory tracks in the brain — but the most moving thing was to think of the carers seeing their loved ones ... as they used to be. (OK, I shed a little tear here.

A psychologist's response to a paper on academic emotions described the difference between two kinds of thinking: one is the adaptive, perhaps process-driven one that helps surgeons and air-traffic controllers do their job; another is the ruminative, more open-ended kind of thinking that suits disciplines like literary studies. But it is the ruminative thinker who is apparently more likely to become depressed. (He also said there was clinical evidence to suggest that men lie "prolifically" about their emotions...)

The final session of the day was to be a 90-minute round table. We spent quite a while compiling a list of possible topics. A psychologist muttered good-naturedly, "why don't we just starting talking about one of these?" — to which I replied, "but we're ruminating..."

My paper — on various accounts of the Great Fire of London — is on today, just about as the AFL grand final is on. A dear friend is promising to stream the match in the background as I speak.

Since the poor old Bombers finished the season third from the bottom, I don't have much invested, really, in the outcome. But since Essendon is traditional rival with Collingwood, and since it is simply so much fun to have a team you hate —  Go Saints!!

Blogging, tweeting, conferencing and speaking with Chaucer

Once again, medieval studies demonstrates its technological magic-loving supremacy, with Eileen Joy's virtuosic tweeting of Jeffrey Cohen's plenary talk, "Between Christian and Jew," at the Leeds Congress of Medieval Studies. Of course, you have to read it backwards, unless you scroll down to the bit where Jeffrey appears at the lectern. Eileen says she had to tweet discreetly, but Jeffrey describes it as "finger magic."

If I had been giving a talk, and seen the formidable Eileen tapping into her phone in the front row, it would have made me very nervous, but I guess, as with the Hansard reporters, one could get used to it. Not that I personally am used to Hansard reporters, but you know what I mean. Actually, I get a little nervous when my students cite my lectures in the footnotes to their essays, but I try not to let that show.

Anyway, this feed (and I must admit I was following it last night as Jeffrey was speaking in Leeds on Monday morning), reminds me to prompt medievalist readers of this blog to send me a proposal for the New Chaucer Society Congress in Siena (Si, Siena!!) next July.

Jeffrey has already agreed to appear on this panel: hooray! I was also thinking if there was enough interest in this topic that I might even start a new blog a few months prior to the congress, devoted simply to the discussion of medieval blogs, so that the panel's deliberations could include those who weren't going to be at Siena, and those who wanted to remain anonymous, etc. But wait, there's more.... I have every reason to promise that such a pre-conference blog will feature occasional contributions from the ultra medieval blogger. So this is your great chance to speak with Chaucer.

Here's the call for papers: the deadline is officially tomorrow, but I'll accept offers for at least the next week.

SESSION 7 (PANEL): ROUNDTABLE BLOGGING, COMMUNITIES, AND MEDIEVAL STUDIES
Session organizer: Stephanie Trigg (sjtrigg@unimelb.edu.au)

For those scholars who are aware of them, the professional landscape of medieval studies has been changed, in recent years, through the advent of blogs and other online fora for the exchange of ideas. From the wildly engaging Chaucer blog to the collaborative scholarship of In the Middle, and a range of more or less anonymous blogs from individual medievalists, it seems that certain medievalists love to blog. But why? To what extent has blogging changed the way medievalists communicate with each other? In the idealised answer to this question, blogging makes it possible for isolated scholars, junior scholars, graduate scholars, disabled scholars and others to take part in a more democratic, more easily accessible exchange of ideas. But blogging can’t escape hierarchies or intellectual imprecision altogether, while the ease of anonymous or pseudonymous publication potentially threatens the accountability of more formal and more highly regulated mode of publication and intellectual engagement. Other questions arise, too. What are the copyright implications of sharing drafts or published material on blogs? How has blogging changed our understanding of medieval studies and its communities? Is there anything distinctive about medieval blogs? What is the future of medieval blogging? Papers are invited from bloggers, lurkers on blogs, and non-bloggers.

OK? So get to it and wing me a proposal.

Last days

I never really blogged properly about Kalamazoo. It was an odd conference for me, because I spent a lot of time at meetings of various kinds, rather than going to sessions all day, as I do at NCS. Moreover, many of the sessions I did go to, including the two where I spoke, were really meta-sessions, talking about the way we do scholarship, rather than the scholarship itself. Which it is very important, sometimes, to do, perhaps especially at times of crisis. But it’s also very pleasant to contemplate a return to my two book projects, and the larger research project that will soon start demanding my attention too. The meetings I had, with collaborators, editors and publishers, were all very productive. Ideas for books are becoming plans for books; book manuscripts now have proper deadlines for delivery, and one of the presses with which I work is re-thinking some of its conventional expectations about the kinds of work they will publish. So in that sense, the conference was a great success for me, though I came away still feeling pretty much as I did the day I arrived: overwhelmed at the sheer range and variety of medieval scholarship, and despairing of ever really feeling on top of it.

This is our last night in the US. The cable satellite is down, so after a game of Scrabble we are all at our laptops. Plenty of time, tomorrow, to start packing up for our 7.00 pm flight and the horrors of the journey. When we get home, we’ll head up to Ceres to let the chickens out (one day I’ll blog about these chickens, I promise), and in the afternoon head out to visit Jean, who’ll have some more health tests next week. Alas, Paul will be on a plane again first thing Monday morning, on his way to Port Moresby.

This afternoon Joel and I made a last, tired trip to the Met. We’d spent a good few hours there a few weeks ago, but wanted to see the Temple of Dendur again. When he was a boy of about five, we had shared a deep fascination with all things Egyptian, and today we meandered around, feeling weirdly at home with the mummies, the drawings and the carvings, the faces of sarcophagi so serene.

On the way home, I found the three piano showrooms I’d walked past last week. We went into the least intimidating-looking one, and got into a bit of a discussion with the piano-maker there, that was way over my head in terms of the technicalities. Still, we are thinking it’s time to start saving to buy Joel a new piano, and you may as well start at the top. I realise I know almost nothing about how to do this.

After a while, Joel asked if he could play, and the two brothers agreed. Joel sat down quietly at a big Steinway, and felt his way into a G major chord (as he told me later: wish I had perfect pitch, but I don't). I wondered what he’d do, but he just started to play a few gentle arpeggios, and then started improvising around them. He was not intimidated by his surroundings at all; just played gently but freely, working up confidence gradually, but still barely testing what this beautiful instrument could do; and I could tell he was happy. They were closing up, but they've invited him back tomorrow morning, and I'm sure he'll go. After a month away, his fingers are itching to play.

The other night we went to Carnegie Hall to hear Daniel Barenboim lead a program of works by Elliott Carter, an American modernist composer. The highlight was a sonata for piano and cello: when the bow first moved across the strings, I could feel Joel's intake of breath. Piano is his first love, but a month away from both instruments is starting to show. At the end of the concert, Carter, who is now 101, was helped up onto the stage and took a few curtain calls and bows to rapturous applause. As we were leaving, an old man said to Joel, "Well that's history in the making. You won't forget that!"

We also made our pilgrimage to the Cloisters museum on Tuesday, and on Wednesday got down to the opposite end of Manhattan Island too late to get the ferry out to Ellis Island, and instead walked across the Brooklyn Bridge in the sunshine. So many wonderful things to do. So little time. But time now to head home and pick up the threads of our real lives, our own beds, our garden, and our little cat. This time tomorrow, we'll be in the air, flying home.

The Blossom of Parting

Much to blog about from the last week, getting to the big Medieval Studies congress at Kalamazoo: over 3000 medievalists all doing their thing. It was my first time, and judging from last year's blogs, it's not unexpected to blog several times, as reflections and patterns emerge.

My first foray into Kalamazoo blogging is conditioned by what I did last night. I landed at La Guardia, jumped into a cab and dumped my bags at the apartment, and then we headed down to 27th street, the Jazz Standard, to hear the Branford Marsalis quartet. We queued early, so were sitting right down the front. We watched a young man emerge from the curtains and present bouquets of Mother's Day flowers to the women at a side table; and someone told us this was Marsalis's 18 year old drummer, Justin Faulkner, who, for legal reasons, has to have his parents in the room whenever he plays in clubs. (He's still a high school student in Philadelphia.) When the quartet appeared ten minutes later, everyone clapped and cheered, and Marsalis said, "how're you doing?" to Joel, who was sitting within three feet of the stage.

The music was extraordinary. They had played the club all week, two shows a night, and Marsalis sounded a bit tired as he introduced the band, but when they started to play, the fatigue dropped away. Most of us were mesmerised by Faulkner, in any case, who watched Marsalis and the others obsessively, while also putting out the most complicated rhythms imaginable, driving, fighting with, and fighting for the music, every step of the way. I watched his foot tapping the cymbal pedal in one rhythm, while his hands pounded and flew across the drums and cymbals, several other rhythms chasing each other around the kit. He would grin wildly, or concentrate with his tongue sticking out. His dialogues and flytings with Joey Calderazzo on the piano were utterly engrossing. Marsalis was great, too, but this review explains precisely my sense of the relation between the leader and the other players.

The most bittersweet thing they played was second on the list, a composition by Calderazzo called "The Blossom of Parting." Reminding me a little of the poignancy and complexity of a riff on "Autumn Leaves", the music is sweet and low, setting up the movement of loss and parting and reunion between drums and piano, with the sax sailing across like the movement of clouds over water on a sunny day. Many of us were in tears.

Not the second time for me that day. Tom dropped me at Detroit airport, and though I'd managed my other partings from dear friends (some of whom I had not seen since before I had had to face my own mortality through illness), this one, with the one I will probably see again soonest, threatened to dissolve me. The final blossom of parting.

The previous night I was seriously thinking of not going to the dance. I was exhausted, and feeling I could imagine the sweaty crush of scholars quite well from the peace of my hotel room. But in fact, it didn't take much persuading. The others in my dinner party were equally ambivalent and when various denizens of Babel threatened not to speak to us again, and when JJC said I would not be able to blog about Kalamazoo if I didn't go, then the decision was made.

We got there, and in five minutes were on the dance floor, throwing ourselves into the crush with abandon, as that's the only way to do it. I did observe that I was not among the 80% - or even the 90% - of the youngest on the dance floor, but didn't care, really, about that. I was even doing well enough in the high heels I was still wearing, and was able to twist down the ground and stay there a long time in "Shout". The fact that my knees then locked and that I had to be helped up to my feet by a former editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I record here for posterity and my own shame, just to get in before any camera or iphones that might have recorded this event. Shudder.

We left at the perfect moment for leaving - just after the call for last drinks - so I didn't get a chance to bid goodbye to Tiny. But he knows how I feel.

Conference blogging/Hobart/Three

Conference blogging. Meant to do this over the last week, but am now going to do it in several posts. This is the third. Scroll down for more.

When I was sitting about to get up and read my paper in Hobart, an odd thing happened. For once I was fully organised with pretty much a complete typescript of what I wanted to say. I had followed good conference practice and gone to find a box on which to prop my papers in the absence of a lectern. I wasn't too nervous, and was able to listen attentively to Clare and Louise. And then as my time to speak got closer, I realised I would not be able to stand up. I felt I might fall over (which, as Louise said later, would have been an unfortunate reprise of my Leeds theatrics). I felt quite odd, and a bit faint, so I stayed sitting down to read. And even then, once I started to read, found my voice shaking, and I had to suppress a sob, collect myself, and kind of start again. Once I got going, I was fine, but I think I was just exhausted, unable to muster any adrenaline, or whatever it takes to put oneself together in order to stand up in public to speak. I’m not the only one: we are all just staggering towards the end of a really difficult year in the School.

Anyway, I think I was pleased with the paper, and am going to take what for me is a very bold step and post it here. I know the folk over at In the Middle do this routinely, but it's a first for me. I'm not even going to work over it very much, so it'll sound a little raw, I'm sure, and quite odd without the papers of Clare Monagle and Louise D'Arcens, which grappled much more closely with the terms of the book's own inquiry. It might also sound as if I'm criticising Bruce Holsinger for not writing the book I'd like to read. I hope not. But if, as I hope, I get the chance to publish this, I'll expand it and slow it down a bit, so questions and comments will be welcome.

There was some very interesting discussion afterwards about what the book seemed to license, and about the always vexed relationship between "theory" and medieval studies.

I'm also trying to figure out how to abbreviate posts on blogger: it seems very complicated, so please bear with me as I try and sort this.

“Transgression, perversion, and fanaticism”: Postmodern Medieval Conditions

From a panel discussing Bruce Holsinger’s Premodern Condition

Word is out: something is happening to the Middle Ages. As a field of academic study, as a sequence of historical and cultural formations, and as an idea about the past, the Middle Ages is undergoing radical transformation. The Middle Ages have never looked so rich and complex as they do now; as a series of multi-disciplinary projects and imperatives brings the Middle Ages into productive dialogue with other disciplines and other periods; and as we re-think many of our inherited scholarly narratives and traditions of study. The question of periodisation is being re-visited, with the effect of re-making the boundaries between medieval and post-medieval. Similarly, a range of new histories of affect, some politically motivated, some less so, help us to “touch” the past, to bring it into closer dialogue with the present, in a way that used to be forbidden on strict historical grounds.

And if we add the field of popular culture and the imaginative revival of the Middle Ages in fiction, film, gaming, and on-line culture, for example, it is easy to see that interest in and general familiarity with the Middle Ages is stronger than ever before.

But this is nothing new. As soon as they were declared over, as soon as they became the matter of the past, something has always been happening to the Middle Ages. Sixteenth-century editors of Chaucer generated publicity for new editions of texts “never before imprinted”, while successive waves of twentieth-century critics have re-discovered a new feminist Middle Ages, or a heretical, sexually diverse or revolutionay one, or have rhapsodised about new critical modes and new perspectives. The titles of our book series and essay collections tell the story: The New Middle Ages (Palgrave); Making the Middle Ages; The New Medievalism. The imperative to find novelty in the Middle Ages, to renew our study of this distant era is powerful indeed.

And each time we renew, or re-visit the Middle Ages, it seems as if we are discovering them anew all over again.

My opening sentence, for example, reprises Alexandre Leupin’s words, in 1983:

Word is out: something is happening in French medieval literature. It’s beginning to be understood that far from being the province only of specialists medieval studies could play a crucial role in ongoing discussions of literary theory.

Writing in Diacritics twenty-five years ago, Leupin attempted to capture current excitement about the potential of medieval literature to play an active role in contemporary literary theory. It was not just that medieval literature could benefit from literary theory; but that it could make its own distinctive contribution to the field, especially in the study of semiotics and psychoanalysis. Leupin was writing principally about the Lacanian work of Roger Dragonetti, in La vie de la lettre au moyen Age: Le conte du Graal (1980) and Le gai savoir dans la rhetorique courtoise (1982).

This perpetual rediscovery and reinvention of the middle ages, and re-writing them anew for a new generation, or putting them to work in a different way is a structural condition of modernity. We know that modernity defines itself in opposition to the medieval: we might go further and say that modernity defines itself by its capacity, and indeed, its desire, to re-invent the medieval; and to declare, over and over again, the novelty and the newness of those re-inventions. If Lyotard talks of the post-modern condition, and Bruce Holsinger of the pre-modern condition, I suggest we might also diagnose a modern condition, at least in relation to the medieval past: a condition that perpetually desires to re-invent and to renew the medieval, and to foreground those acts of renewal as, themselves, novel.

Holsinger’s “discovery” of the importance of medieval philosophy and literature to the invention of “theory” is part of this formation, part of this modern condition.

It is interesting to speculate about this seemingly perpetual novelty of the Middle Ages. The “medievalism” of Holsinger’s sub-title, “Medievalism and the Making of Theory” refers to a somewhat narrow understanding of medievalism, as closely approximating medieval studies, and perhaps shading very slightly into that sense of the word which tries to encapsulate the cultural desire for the middle ages. But he is resolutely unconcerned with popular or imaginative medievalism, and so I thought it might be interesting to try and triangulate Holsinger’s work, to look at some of the relations not only between the Middle Ages and high theory, but also this broader understanding of medievalism.

The presiding figure here, of course, is Umberto Eco, and Holsinger does refer to his work a number of times.

In 1972, Umberto Eco inaugurated several decades of interventions into the relationship or more specifically, the affinities between modernity, postmodernity and the Middle Ages. In the first essay in this series, “Towards a New Middle Ages”, he sketches out the contemporary political, social and technological contexts in which the first world was heading into a new middle ages. He re-visited the essay in 1985, and then again in 1986, when he published his better known essay, “Dreaming of the Middle Ages”, in which he discusses the work of contemporary medieval studies, dismissing as tedious the iteration of “all the round tables and symposia that have recently been devoted to this problem, as the topic of ‘the return of the Middle Ages’ has become obsessive.”

The essays Eco wrote around this period are riddled with interesting contradictions. The new Middle Ages are both new, and yet not newsworthy. “Dreaming” of the Middle Ages risks the indulgence of “escapism à la Tolkien”, but is also a fundamental condition of modernity. The Middle Ages are the infancy of modernity, the primal scene of childhood that produces our present neuroses, but repressing the complex and unreliable hermeneutics of the primal scene, Eco insists on the importance of discovering a “reliable Middle Ages”.

There is another set of contradictions in Eco’s essays that similarly haunt Holsinger’s work: the question of the relationship between high theory and popular culture; and I’ll return to this in a moment.

Eco’s problem, about the new-oldness and the old new-ness of the new Middle Ages, and Holsinger’s book both suggest that we can, and should still usefully ask the question: what do the Middle Ages have to do with the twenty-first century?

Recent local events make the question imperative for us to consider, especially at this time, and in this place.

Medieval literary studies is a highly sophisticated critical field; and contemporary medievalism is ubiquitous, yet for all this novelty and all this re-making, we are all familiar, I’m sure, with the claim that the medieval has nothing to do with modernity, or with contemporaneity. The simplest way to answer this question is to appeal to the vast enterprise of popular medievalism, and the great extent to which our fantasy literature, our cinema, our game-playing, our unconscious fantasy life and dreams, our social models and aspirations are still to a large degree medievalist in both form and content.

This is not the place to develop a theory of how to read contemporary medievalism, but it is the place to probe the repression of popular medievalism in the work of both Holsinger and Eco.

In The Premodern Condition, Bruce Holsinger draws a contrast between contemporary culture, where “the Middle Ages represent a semiotically rich site of transgression, perversion, and fanaticism”, and the 1960s avant-garde, whose theorists disclose a medieval “archive of cultural and intellectual production”. This is clearly a value-laden contrast: Holsinger’s preferred Middle Ages offer deadly serious and high-browed meditations, fitting subjects for the heavy-weight theorising of Bataille, Lacan, Derrida, Bourdieu and Barthes. But even when they are more playful, as in the obscene poem by Arnaut Daniel, the message is serious.

Daniel’s poem dramatises a lover’s reluctance to fulfil the anal desires of Lady Ena, that he “blow in that funnel between spine and mount pubic, there where rust colored substances proceed. He could never have been certain that she would not piss all over his snout and eyebrows.” In Holsinger’s reading, Lacan reads this “as a kind of ethical mirror in which his auditors are to view the alterity of the medieval even while recognizing in this trashy bit of medievalism the lingering Thing at the core of modernity” (86).

It’s hard not to be struck by the term “trashy bit of medievalism”, cheek by jowl, as it were, with the “core of modernity”. It shows us that for Holsinger, medievalism is barely distinguished from the medieval, but we must also note his willingness to abject medievalism, and medieval popular culture, as trashy.

It’s a dynamic that threads through the whole book. As I said, Holsinger is not particularly concerned with medievalism in the sense that scholars who study the post-medieval invention of the Middle Ages use that term. He is frying a very different kind of fish altogether. But I am suggesting that the sense of novelty and innovation about this book is barely distinguishable from the sense of novelty that also characterises the work of medievalism. Medievalism is often described as the act of re-making or re-inventing the Middle Ages for present concerns. Medieval Studies and Medievalism have much more in common than is customarily believed, and I suggest they are part of the same productive enterprise, which we might define as making the Middle Ages new again, bringing them into dialectic with the present.

Let me quote Holsinger’s most specific remarks about popular medievalism, from his Epilogue, in which he writes:

If the Middle Ages represent a semiotically rich site of transgression, perversion, and fanaticism for contemporary popular culture, for the 1960s avant-garde, the medieval provided above all an archive of cultural and intellectual production that seemingly escaped the moral compass of the Enlightenment — and (in this reading) without the baggage of humanism, capitalism, colonialism, and triumphalist individualism represented by the Renaissance (p. 197).

Holsinger attempts to put some distance between himself and this redemptive view of the Middle Ages, which he goes on to describe as “idealized”, and conducive to “nostalgia”, but it is hard not to hear the enthusiasm in his characterisation of the way this version of the Middle Ages “provided postwar critical thought with an almost inexhaustible source of intellectual sustenance in its assault on post-medieval legacies to the Western tradition”. If anything, this resolutely muscular version of the Middle Ages is a powerful antithesis to the nostalgia of popular medievalism. And it is not just a historical account, either: Holsinger suggests that “the avant-garde pre-modern might perform a considerable corrective function in relation to other modes of critical neomedievalism that have gained some currency in recent decades” (198).

Holsinger doesn’t give much content to the “transgression, perversion and fanaticism” of the Middle Ages in contemporary popular culture, but it’s not difficult to see how the stakes are stacked against popular culture in favour of intellectual history: the latter will “correct” the former.

Tom Prendergast and I have suggested elsewhere that much of the resistance to contemporary or nineteenth- or eighteenth-century medievalism by medieval scholars actually masks a resistance to popular culture, and I think it’s not difficult to see a similar dynamic in Holsinger’s work.

And yet he is, in spite of himself, drawn to popular culture, and to the energetic and frankly exciting dynamic it can bring to academic work. In discussing the Daniel poem, for example, Holsinger comments that it is perhaps the only occasion in which Lacan — “the master” is how he describes him in this sentence — “recited an entire literary text, from beginning to end, before his Parisian audience” (86). It is also the only literary text Holsinger quotes in full. He admits that he is following Lacan in doing so, but it’s hard not to read his characterisation of this “spectacularly gynephobic poem” as an invitation to thrill at an example of the “transgression, perversion, and fanaticism” he associates with popular medievalism.

A similar thrill ran through me when I realised Holsinger was describing the workings of modern avant-garde intellectual culture as a subculture. Perhaps this is an attempt to dramatise his own work of recovering its widespread interest in the Middle Ages; but from many perspectives now, the idea that the work of these influential theorists represents a subculture seems to suggest a very special kind of subculture — certainly not one that’s related to popular culture.

Umberto Eco is similarly conflicted on the question of the relations between the Middle Ages, medievalism and popular culture.

When measuring the extent of interest in the Middle Ages, he remarks, “If one does not trust ‘literature,’ one should at least trust pop culture.” Eco, after all, is one of the founding figures of modern cultural studies, and its valorisation of popular culture, and the argument for respecting the enthusiasm and knowledge about popular culture and its consumers. But two pages after this, he writes:

Thus we are at present witnessing, both in Europe and America, a period of renewed interest in the Middle Ages, with a curious oscillation between fantastic neomedievalism and responsible philological examination. Undoubtedly what counts is the second aspect of the phenomenon. (‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages,’ 63).

Similarly, in his famous taxonomy of the ten little Middle Ages of which we dream, he privileges the eighth, the Middle Ages of “philological reconstruction” as a kind of uber Middle Ages:

Not fully free from the curiosity of the mass media these Middle Ages help us, nevertheless, to criticize all the other Middle Ages that at one time or another arouse our enthusiasm. These Middle Ages lack sublimity, thank God, and thus look more “human” (71).

This privileging of the position by which expert medieval scholars can criticize all the others, those manifestations of what Eco calls “enthusiasm”, and which Holsinger calls “transgression, perversion and fanaticism”, is buried deep within Eco’s taxonomy, and is rarely foregrounded by those who simply use this list to classify the particular example of medievalism they are describing. But it sets up a crucial hierarchy between the work of scholarship (“responsible philological examination”) and the work of the imagination, between the Middle Ages and medievalism, between medieval scholars, and scholars of popular culture and popular medievalism. It also gives force — thank God, he says — to the idea that we can retreat into the safety of academic research, without the risks of the sublime, to criticise the work of popular enthusiasts.

Holsinger’s book is a wonderful archaeology that demonstrates the mutual imbrication of medieval literature, philosophy and theology with some of the most influential movements associated with high theory. Commendably, in my view, it eschews anything so crude as a critique of modern scholars’ understanding of the Middle Ages: it is not so much concerned to correct their scholarship as it is to correct some aspects of the trend towards popular medievalism. But in its abjection of medieval popular culture as the salacious or fantastic, and its absolute separation between intellectual work of and about the Middle Ages, and the work of the popular imagination, Holsinger’s book, it seems to me, revisits the dynamics of Umberto Eco’s work.

In Holsinger’s epilogue, he emphasizes the sacramental character of the avant garde’s relation to the medieval past.

Modes of critique, habits of mind, and means of subjection are not simply inherited from the medieval past, nor patiently reconstructed out of its ruins; rather, they are invoked, called into being, summoned from another place, translated from isolated fragments into whole systems of thought that maintain the dialectic of belief and doubt that characterized the sacramental culture of the Middle Ages.

I like very much this dialectic model. But I suggest the dialectic could be fruitfully expanded to consider not just the dialectic of the Middle Ages, and the dialectic between the Middle Ages and modern intellectual culture, but also the dialectic between intellectual and popular culture.

Conference blogging/Hobart/Two

Conference blogging. Meant to do this over the last week, but am now going to do it in several posts. This is the second. Scroll up and down for more.

One of the conference receptions was held at Government House, a beautiful example of colonial gothic in golden sandstone, high up in the Domain, overlooking the city. We had to pre-register for this in order to receive our gold-embossed invitations; and had to dress up a little; and practice saying "Your Excellency" in case we got introduced.

It was a beautiful afternoon.

We all lined up to be introduced:
And did a little Garter research as we waited:
We were then shown into this rather odd hall:

The decorations were suitably vice-regal:















And the guests suitably elegant:

This is my favourite photo:

And here is The Dress:


But after all this finery, here is one of the prettiest images: a little cottage in the grounds, which I have made my computer's desktop for a while....

Conference blogging/Hobart/One

Conference blogging. Meant to do this over the last week, but am now going to do it in several posts. This is the first. Scroll up for more.

Someone said to me over coffee during this recent ANZAMEMS (Aust and NZ assoc. for med. and early mod. studies) conference that it was becoming the third in the series of the big three. How does that sound? Leeds/Kalamazoo/ANZAMEMS?

A couple of riders, though. This analogy would work only for medievalists: ANZAMEMS has a much broader historical range, though is similarly multi-disciplinary. Second, ANZAMEMS is much smaller: about 190 papers over nearly five days. Third, as a society, not a place, ANZAMEMS offers a range of great locations in Australia and New Zealand. This is absolutely a plus, of course. I'm on my way back from Hobart, and am sitting in the Qantas club, having come out to the airport early with Paul and Joel, who came down for the weekend, and were booked on an early flight so Joel could get to school on time (though having got up at 4.15, he didn't look, 30 minutes ago, as if it was going to be his most productive day).

But it used to be that the only international visitors to ANZAMEMS were the plenary speakers we fly in. This is no longer the case. ANZAMEMS is also wonderfully friendly to postgrads, and reminds me of NCS in its mixture of absolute seriousness and its collegiality. It is also truly interdisciplinary, and over the years, the sometimes brusque encounters between historians and literary critics have given way to much more respectful engagements. Sometimes it isn't even possible to tell.

Like NCS, too, ANZAMEMS now has a respectable medievalism thread. A highlight this time was hearing Kim Wilkins, well-known fantasy and horror writer, who is also Dr Kim Wilkins, lecturer at UQ, give a wonderfully reasoned account of Australian adult medievalist fantasy writing.

My own paper was a discussion of Bruce Holsinger's The Premodern Condition. Perhaps I'll post that paper here too.

Plenary speakers of greatest interest to this blog were probably Ruth Evans and Mary Carruthers. Ruth spoke about Freud and Lacan and Chaucer's dream theory, and Mary developed more of her work on the arts of memory. Both were model conference participants, giving tightly argued, original papers, and attending session after session, valiantly fighting jetlag and contributing to debates.

It is also a great occasion for catching up with friends and colleagues, though given the threat to medieval studies at the University of Tasmania, and the threat to the job of another medieval scholar at the University of Melbourne, the overall mood was less than joyous.

I'm also heading back to a meeting where we will have to discuss the way we teach Old English in the new Melbourne model. More curriculum reform. Sigh.

Such is Life

Amongst the things we Australians remember on November 11 are Remembrance Day, and the dismissal of the Whitlam ("Well may we say 'God Save the Queen', because nothing will save the Governor-General") Government.

Here's the ABC broadcast of that fateful day: my act of cultural and political homage:

Letter from America

We’d been in the air just a few hours on Wednesday when the pilot came on to announce that McCain had just made his concession speech. There was a scattering of applause through the cabin, though it was pretty muted: we Australians are a surprisingly modest and discreet bunch, on occasions.

When I hit the ground at LAX, I’m not sure what I was expecting in terms of waves of euphoria. Probably if I’d been still at home, at the Obama party, or watching the speeches and reports on TV, I might have had a stronger sense of occasion. Trouble was, I didn’t really have anything to measure it by. But it seemed to me to be business as usual.

I got the shuttle to Riverside and after a shower and a bit of a nap, went walking to see what I could see. Almost nothing. We are staying in this — literally — fabulous place (complete with spiral staircases, secret roof gardens, medieval chapels, chiming clocks, arcades, arched corridors leading to thick wooden doors, paved courtyards, Escher-style arches, little fountains, and dark wood fittings throughout). Also, an enormous heated pool in which you can do proper laps. They are decorating for Christmas, and so this morning when I was swimming, there were little stars and pieces of glitter in the bottom of the pool.

But when I went for my walk, the streets were deserted. There are lots of antique shops around here, but not much in the way of tourist traffic, and if you set out to walk in any direction, you very quickly become the only pedestrian. It’s one of those American cities where no one walks. Everyone travels by car, and so you don’t really feel comfortable walking more than two blocks down the street. In fact when I did start to walk, I could never get very far without encountering a freeway entrance. I guess everyone gets their exercise at the gym, or in the pool. If I lived here (yes, of course one fantasises) I would miss the creek, and my morning walks, and my bike rides to work.

Once I met up with my friends, I started to feel the jubilation, though, and they explained that Riverside has suffered badly in the declining Californian economy; and a lot of folk had lost their houses. So perhaps that’s why it’s quiet on the streets, though Riverside had, against expectations, also voted for Obama.

Last night at the conference dinner, people were rhapsodising about the new president. Someone said he would finish the work that Abraham Lincoln had begun. Another remarked that even Iowa, which has only a 2% black population, had turned out for Obama. But in California, this brave new day has been marred by demonstrations about Proposition 8, which seeks to bar gay marriages. The Australians couldn’t understand how the US could elect a black president but overturn the right to gay marriage, until we were reminded that the Civil Rights movement, which helped Obama to power, is a Christian movement, and so perhaps not sympathetic to gay marriage. I’m sure these are shocking generalisations, though.

Our conference has been wonderful: one of those great symposia where everyone speaks for between 25 and 45 minutes, and where there is time for discussion, and where everyone attends the same papers, so there develops that lovely continuity and community of shared interests.

Some of our papers followed quite closely the theme of Medievalism, Colonialism, Nationalism (and Andrew, Louise and I worked with Australian material), while others traversed the idea of the medieval in dance, dream, psychoanalysis, fantasy, and so forth. There was very little that was simply descriptive (one of the presiding weaknesses of the field), and enormous amounts that were stimulating, engaging and intellectually generous. Everyone got along very well, and we were beautifully fed and watered. Truly, a model conference, with lots of connections and friendships made.

I’m off to Wooster (near Cleveland) tomorrow, but there’s time for one last hurrah over brunch with a group from the conference.

Medievalism in California

Ooh er... Look what I'll be doing in November!



University of California, Riverside Events
Medievalism, Colonialism, Nationalism:A Symposium

Friday, November 7, and Saturday, November 8, 2008
9:00 a.m. - 5:00 p.m.

In cooperation with the Australian Research Council, this conference will bring together leading international and University of California scholars on how the European pre-modern past has played a role in shaping colonial and national identities and how our view of that past have been changed as a result. Panels will discuss King Arthur as a national symbol, medieval chivalry in World War I, the psychological significance of reviving the past, Beowulf on the page and on the screen, the Middle Ages in ballet, medieval crime fiction, the origins of blasphemy and the politics of reconstruction and rebuilding.
Open to: Public
Admission: Free
Sponsor: Center for Ideas & Society

Contact Information:
Laura Lozon
951-827-1555
laura.lozon@ucr.edu

And look at this list of speakers; Elizabeth Allen, Seeta Chaganti, Louise D'Arcens, Aranye Fradenburg, John Ganim, David Lawton, Andrew Lynch, David Marshall, Anne McKendry, Maura Nolan, Thomas Prendergast, Brenda Deen Schildgen, Carol Symes...

This symposium is the brainchild of the wonderful John Ganim, and is part of our Medievalism in Australian Cultural Memory project. My paper is going to be on Ned Kelly as a Robin Hood figure. Watch this space...

Face-blindness

Pavlov's Cat directs us to a great page where you can make your own manga. This is mine.

I cheated, though, since I got Joel to make it for me. As PC remarks, it has options for making you look "too young", as Joel said, or completely shrivelled. He found by putting my reading glasses on he could get a better image, but he was disadvantaged as it allowed you to put only one spot on.... (He used to practise counting, when a small child, by counting the moles on my face.) I did try having a go at doing my own, but couldn't work out how to translate the image in my mirror into the graphic possibilities listed. As a Wii player, though, who at one point made Wii avatars of most of the cast of the West Wing, he was my resident expert.

I find the question of facial recognition very interesting. I am not very good at it at all, and am one of those people who can't always follow the plots of TV or films because I can't always tell the actors apart. There is a lovely name for the serious end of this spectrum: prosopagnosia, or face-blindness. It can be acquired (after trauma or degenerative illness), or developmental (it can take hold before your growing brain learns how to distinguish faces).

There is a terrific website about this condition, from the Prosopagnosia research centres at Harvard and University College, London, where you can take a couple of online tests. On the first one, where you are asked to memorise then recognise faces, I scored 49/72, which translates to 68%, where if you score less than 65% you probably have face-blindness. On the second test, where you are asked to recognise famous faces without their hair, etc. I scored 18/30, which was 60%, where an average score is 85%.

This is not a particularly big problem for me, though I do tend to use things like hair and voice and clothes and emotional affect to help me in the movies. On the other hand, I have had a couple of truly awful moments in my life when I have not recognised someone I really should have, or where I have confused a perfect stranger with someone I know. I have told these stories to a select few, and they are kind of funny; but it can be a little tricky — and in the extreme cases, where people can't recognise their nearest and dearest, it must be quite debilitating. For me, it's mostly just a case of being amazed when people I'm watching TV with can recognise actors from other shows. I've never had any trouble remembering my students' faces, for example, though I'd be absolutely hopeless if I ever had to sit down with the police and the Identikit.

Dame Eleanor has recently blogged about the fatigue of being at a conference and feeling a bit shy and catching herself looking past the person you're with for another familiar face. And I'm sure we've all been there. At the same conference, I found myself often over-compensating for my fear of not being able to recognise people I had already met (I hate the embarrassment when someone I think I've just met for the first time tells me when we last met), by greeting a number of folk rather more effusively than they had reason to expect. So if that was you, this was why. In addition to my being overcome by enthusiasm for your writerly and scholarly brilliance, of course.

Later.... Wanna take the test and post your results as a comment? Or send me your avatar in an email? We could put up a gallery. This seems to be the meme of the moment, judging from the (Australian) (women's) blogs I've dropped in on tonight...

Chaucer Conference Blogging (1a)

I will blog about the content of the conference, but starting at the end first, this is an account of the practically perfect day that got me back from Swansea to London. There is no doubt that this last week of my trip away has been a thousand times more pleasant and instructive than the first.

The day began with a brisk hour-long walk around the rocky cliffs from Langland to Caswell bay, shared with a few other walkers, dogs, and joggers, and with a taste of Welsh sea water on the beach before I headed back up the cliff face. We had promised our landlady we would have a cooked breakfast on the last day — there had been unmissable sessions at 9.00 each morning — though Christine didn't think my order of egg, tomato and mushrooms was "full" until I added a piece of bacon. My companion, of course, had the sausages.

We packed up in leisurely fashion, then set off. I navigated us most of the way to Caerleon before setting us on the wrong path which sent us driving north towards Birmingham, but we cut across and made it to our second destination through luscious valleys and woods. Tintern Abbey sits on the banks of the Wye, and though the tour guide said it got oppressively busy in the middle of the day, there were only a handful of people wandering through its lovely bare ruin'd choirs. The sun was gentle; the grass was soft; the workers shoring up the fragments of the west face were having lunch; and the swallows swept and dived through the arches. We marvelled at the one room that would have been warmed; and had a debate with the guide book that said the chapter house was so named because there the monks would have had a chapter of St Benedict's Rule read to them. That can't be right, can it? Surely the chapter refers to the part of the church (i.e. the body of people), rather than the part of the book.

We lunched at the pub, on pickles, salad, bread, and three Hereford cheeses (one yellow, one pink, one green) and I was able to phone home. My phone's coverage hadn't been very good up in the hills, and during the day at the conference was often a bad time to talk to Australia, and it was great to talk to Paul. (I've just now talked to Joel, too: yay!!!.) We then abandoned the idea of nipping back to Caerleon, and hit the road.

I drove straight into London and all went well. Though we were surprised to realise Tom's hotel was on the way. We thought about dropping him off, but he thought it might be better to have a navigator, and he was right. It was when we drove past Harrods I realised we had come in a different way from the route we had taken out of London, and had to get from Knightsbridge to Bloomsbury. It was 5.15, and we had to get the car back by 6.00. Undeterred (and I am used to driving in cities), Tom navigated us across the end of Oxford St, and north and east, and we made it to Hertz with about ten minutes to spare, only narrowly missing clipping a tour bus. That was exciting. It was only when we got into the car park that I lost my nerve, and got Tom to drive this quite big car into the quite small car parking space.

We then separated and I checked into my very nice hotel over on Gower St, with sheets of crisp white Egyptian cotton. But the day was not done! I showered off the road, and then met Tom again for dinner at this gorgeous Moroccan restaurant in Kensington, that looked like a set from an Indiana Jones movie, complete with belly dancers — though here again I lost my nerve and refused the invitation to join in; oh well. But wait, there's more: we then nipped over to the Albert Hall for a 10.00 p.m. session at the BBC Proms: the Tallis scholars singing two C15 masses, one by Josquin des Prez. The Hall was only two-thirds full, but to hear these unaccompanied voices, at night, after our trip to the Abbey, was just about perfect.

Of course, all day we had been dissecting the conference, and talking about our friends, and making plans for the next phase of our book: first thing is to make some revisions to an essay for a collection. Next post, I'll try and think about the ideas the conference raised for me. But in the meantime, in lieu of the Friday garter blogging I've fallen behind on, is a bit of Wordsworth...

    And so I dare to hope,
     Though changed, no doubt, from what I was when first
     I came among these hills; when like a roe
     I bounded o'er the mountains, by the sides
     Of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams,
     Wherever nature led: more like a man                            70
     Flying from something that he dreads, than one
     Who sought the thing he loved. For nature then
     (The coarser pleasures of my boyish days,
     And their glad animal movements all gone by)
     To me was all in all.--I cannot paint
     What then I was. The sounding cataract
     Haunted me like a passion: the tall rock,
     The mountain, and the deep and gloomy wood,
     Their colours and their forms, were then to me
     An appetite; a feeling and a love,                              80
     That had no need of a remoter charm,
     By thought supplied, nor any interest
     Unborrowed from the eye.--That time is past,
     And all its aching joys are now no more,
     And all its dizzy raptures. Not for this
     Faint I, nor mourn nor murmur, other gifts
     Have followed; for such loss, I would believe,
     Abundant recompence. For I have learned
     To look on nature, not as in the hour
     Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes                    90
     The still, sad music of humanity,
     Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
     To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
     A presence that disturbs me with the joy
     Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
     Of something far more deeply interfused,
     Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
     And the round ocean and the living air,
     And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
     A motion and a spirit, that impels                             100
     All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
     And rolls through all things. Therefore am I still
     A lover of the meadows and the woods,
     And mountains; and of all that we behold
     From this green earth; of all the mighty world
     Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create,
     And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
     In nature and the language of the sense,
     The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
     The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul                  110
     Of all my moral being.

Conference blogging

It was just a two-day conference: the fifteenth annual symposium of the Perth Medieval and Renaissance Group. This is a group that is part of the excellent core of medieval and renaissance studies in Perth that put together the successful bid for the Australian Research Council Network for Early European Research. Perth, and more particularly, the University of Western Australia, has an unusually strong concentration of scholars in these fields, across a range of disciplines. They are energetic and original scholars, and also lovely people. This group has always had a number of members in the broader Perth community beyond the university, and this gives it a wonderful atmosphere of engagement.

Now that they are linked to the Network, they, like many such groups around Australia, are able to draw on additional resources to fund symposia and conferences: this one featured a number of local, interstate and international speakers, with about seventy people attending.

The theme was "reading religious change in medieval and early modern europe". I might not have gone, but it was a good chance to meet up with the other Australian members of my grant team, and talk with the people who are going to set up our online database for Australian medievalism in WA. My work isn't really about religious change, but I gave a paper on Edward VI's changes to what he saw as the overly catholic/medieval Statutes of the Order of the Garter.

The conference featured three wonderful plenaries: Juanita Feros Ruys from Sydney spoke about Heloise's fourth letter to Abelard, and showed how her discussion of bodily desire was a deliberate reworking of monastic discourse on temptation to take account of the female monastic body. James Simpson gave another brilliant paper from his new work on iconoclasm. In Melbourne he had spoken of abstract expressionism: in Perth he talked about Reformation images as "containers of the past", and offered a very moving reading of the poet's encounter with the image in Hoccleve's Lerne to Die. And Brian Cummings offered a wonderful reading of Thomas More's understanding of Conscience.

James and Brian both moved effortlessly backwards and forwards between the medieval and the early modern in a way that is still pretty unusual. I found all three plenaries completely compelling and inspiring; and I did some careful work on my own book today; and left this blog entry till the evening.

I also took a tour of the WA Parliament, as part of our Australian medievalism project. This image of the Parliament's emblem shows the state's distinctive black swan, above the medieval mace and black rod. One wonderful moment on the tour. We had been in the upper house and admired its fancy carpet which included the crown, but before we went to the lower house our guide warned us that the carpet had recently been replaced, and did not feature the crown design. "Tsk", clucked the person next to me. The Education Office then explained that if Australia became a republic, many of the carpets, windows and carvings might have to be replaced; and a shocked silence descended on the group, as these dire implications sank in.

Later that afternoon Louise and I went to St Georges Cathedral, where Sir Paul Hasluck's Garter banner and heraldic crest have been hung. Sir Paul's helmet features a stylised version of the wonderful xanthorrea, or grass tree, its green spikes sprouting triumphantly from the helmet. No picture, alas, but here's a lovely two-headed specimen:


Such fun to think about the incorporation of native plants and animals into these medieval heraldic formations.

I ate breakfast, my three mornings, up in the cafe at the top of King's Park: first alone, then with one, then with three companions. Each morning the city was washed with fresh rain; the mist drifted across the river; the lorikeets and wattlebirds sang; and the xanthorreas sent up their spikes and flowers in the soft morning light. Beautiful.

Brisbane distractions

Back from Brisbane on Saturday night, after attending the symposium of the Australian Humanities Academy. Brisbane was gorgeous, though I took my customary approach to a conference — fly in at the last minute and leave early — so I didn't see that much of the city. Why do I do it this way? To fend off that awful feeling on the first day away, of wondering why in the world one would want to leave one's home, and hang around airports and burn up greenhouse gases, and sleep in a hotel. So I try and minimise the pain by not really committing to the city. Paul and I never seem to manage to go on such trips together, so that's another reason not to hang around.

I did manage to get in a couple of walks, though, along the boardwalk along Southbank. Restaurants, cafes, a Nepalese pagoda, and the little sandy beach built into the riverbank (where I swam, 11 years ago), though it was closed for renovation, with all the sand piled up under tarpaulins, while they sealed the base. It was mild for Brisbane, I think; a balmy 26, which made sitting outside in the evening extremely pleasant. The first evening saw me and two companions sharing a bowl of succulent mussels in a rich tomato and chili broth, sopped up with an excellent sourdough.

The theme of the conference was the nature of e-research in the humanities. There were some terrific papers showcasing wonderful projects and resources; and also some reflections on the nature of this work, too, so it wasn't just "show-and-tell".

One remark struck me, though, when a prominent Vice-Chancellor commented that the era of the lecture was dead; that students simply wouldn't tolerate being lectured to in the old way. I guess that's true, that our attention span has been horribly reduced. My companion at the conference dinner on the second night told me how Pascale had anticipated the "distractions", like email, that break up our concentration span into bits and pieces. But it was odd to speculate on the irony that the symposium was presented in a conventional lecture theatre, that had been adapted to take powerpoint, etc. So when speakers presented their sites and applications, they were in darkness at the side of the stage, while the screen was lit up. Most of these applications were text-intensive, too, so if you were sitting up the back, it was pretty hard to see what was on the screen, much of the time. Nor were the speakers miked up, so that when they were answering questions, you couldn't always hear very well. No wonder some of the academicians were seen nodding off. And in truth, it is hard to concentrate for a day of such presentations. It might have been an idea for the conference to be held in a lab, where we could have interacted with these resources ourselves.

In fact, the organisers had made several laptops available, and I got used to seeing people surfing around sites that were being discussed in front of them. Some were also checking their email, too... But if that's the best way of presenting this material, either to a conference, or to a class, then it's no wonder that the connection between audience and presenter is diluted. I'm not a luddite in such things: I do use powerpoint when I teach, for example, and I have offered minimal online sites for larger subjects; but I do also love the human connection it's possible to make in a lecture, and the way that quite unexpectedly, sometimes, the group goes completely quiet and you realise that something has struck them, collectively, and you had no way of anticipating what it would be. The symposium wasn't really concerned with teaching, though.

Oddly, it's the idea of the "distraction" that has stayed with me. I'm determined to try and exert some discipline over my own. I wonder if reading Pascale would help. Or is that just another distraction?

"Connecting to International Academic Communities"

A fun gig today, addressing the PhD Colloquium at the School of Graduate Studies. My topic? Connecting to International Academic Communities.

Easy, then, to talk about the need and desirability of attending conferences, hosting conferences, asking questions, meeting folk, writing to them and such. Blogging, of course, featured prominently in my remarks, and I talked about the generosity of Jeffrey Cohen in encouraging his blog to become such an excellent exercise in collaborative work and community-building.

I talked a bit about how things had changed since an eminent US medievalist visiting Sydney, many years ago, said to me, "you've got to get on the map." She meant it kindly, I'm sure, but it was pretty devastating to think how far off the map I might be, not just as a very junior scholar, but as an Australian. These days, I am more likely to hear and use the phrase "being part of the conversation", and this is something that blogging makes so much easier.

I also talked about the difference between networking as a way of treating people instrumentally and competitively, and networking as community-building. I have very little time for the practice of brown-nosing academic celebrities (or star-f———ing, as we call it in Australia) or gratuitously attacking scholars of a different generation just for being of a different generation. But I am all in favour of graduate students and early career researchers building bridges with each other (rather than competing, all the time, for every little bit of symbolic capital the academy has to distribute), and making connections with other scholars in their field in different countries.

The ARC Network for Early European Research maintains the Confluence website, where you can look up the profiles of over 300 medieval and early modern scholars, and post comments on their sites. It is a lovely example of an online structure that democratically enables networking between postgraduates, early career and established researchers, and it is here. Hmm; perhaps you have to register with the Network to be able to comment? not sure about that.

The wonderful Angela Woods, who would be my inspiration if I were just starting a PhD, tells me the recording of my talk will be available on line. I certainly won't be listening to it (who needs to hear their own garbled sentences and scattered paragraphs preserved for posterity?), but in the interests of general community-building, here's a link to the SGS Colloquia page, where a link to the talk will shortly appear.

But here's a question: is it true, as I was suggesting today, that most folks of eminence (whether academics, writers, or famous people in your own sphere of cheese-making or frog-watching) don't mind being approached by folks who are just starting out in the field? What's been your experience? And... is the star/celebrity analogy a bit too far-fetched for the academic sphere? Aren't we just fooling ourselves??

And... I've just realised I've set up the label "univerisites". That's rather a nice typo, I think.

Calling all medievalists...

Get ready to run, fly, swim to Hobart for a pre-Christmas treat. Seriously, Carolyn Dinshaw is simply one of the most exciting medievalists going around at the moment. She's a brilliant speaker and this will be a rare opportunity to spend a day or two with her in beautiful Hobart (place of my birth: ahem). As you can see from this outline (click to enlarge), her current work engages a "queer history" of temporalities, and I think this will be a conference Not to Be Missed. You'll have made your Christmas pudding well before then, anyway.

Conference Blogging

I might have had an ambitious plan to blog about the Perth conference daily, but that was while I was still in Melbourne, and undergoing the between-conference amnesia that makes you forget the sheer exhaustion of conference-going. It's not as if I was out partying every night, either. I must be getting older, as I quite liked getting back to the hotel at a reasonable hour, crashing to sleep and waking up early for a decent walk before breakfast. Perhaps the young things were out raging? I like to think so.

My hotel was opposite Kings' Park, a huge expanse of parkland between the university and the city. I'd be up and walking along its roads by 7.30, though I never dared to venture into the bushland on either side of the road. There were just not enough people around to feel that would be safe, though it was good to think there was that kind of terrain in the city. The first two mornings I headed up along this more formal direction —


and had breakfast at the big cafe overlooking the city and the river.

The second two mornings I headed to the Zamia cafe. On Friday I couldn't identify this fantastically pungent aroma: what kind of tree or blossom could give off such a strong scent? But it was coming from several huge piles of mulched eucalypts. I don't really know my trees, but from the colour of the bark I would guess a red gum or the characteristic West Australian jarrah. The morning was chill, and the piles were sending up clouds of aromatic steam. The silly camera on the phone barely catches it. I think you have to be an Australian to sense the way this fragrance can fill the lungs with either deep contentment or desperate longing:


The conference was the first big gathering of the ARC Network for Early European Research. I've written about this Network elsewhere. A few comments here, though. "Early Europe" extends, for the purposes of this conference, from 400-1850; and our work is resolutely interdisciplinary. The theme of this conference was "Networks, Communities, Continuities" and it was terrific to see medieval and early modern scholars thinking in these broader terms. My paper was in a session called "Theorizing Medievalism Today", and Jenna Mead, Louise D'Arcens, Helen Dell and I were disciplined in only speaking to our pre-circulated papers so we had plenty of time for some great discussion. Louise had asked us all to think about Brian Helgeland's A Knight's Tale and so we did, from four perspectives drawing on deconstruction, film theory, psychoanalysis and my own vaguely Bourdieuian ideas about the circulation of knowledge about the medieval. We've been asked to submit the papers to Parergon so with any luck they'll appear in print before too long...

However, there weren't all that many sessions dedicated to medieval literature or medievalism. Or even early modern literature, for that matter. I suspect the historians have been faster to realise the network's purview extends as late as the mid-nineteenth century.

All the papers were supposed to have been put up on the conference website, so that we would only talk to them briefly and allow enough time in the 75 minute sessions for discussion. But when people insist on reading their papers, this is of course intensely frustrating; and really limits the possibilities for interdisciplinary exchange.

The organisers also experimented with poster displays for postgraduates, with only mixed success. I wonder if this ever works well in the humanities? New Chaucer Society pondered this at one meeting, but decided not to go ahead.

Three wonderful moments of affect, though. Constant Mews gave a brilliant paper on the nature of university communities and networks in the thirteenth century, and at one point had occasion to refer to Aquinas, who died before he was 50, said Constant, putting his hand on his heart and sighing. What did it signify? The tragedy of a life cut short? or comparisons with his own productivity? not that Constant needs to worry. But I suddenly realised the comparison might also apply to me in about nine months, and I was less sanguine. It reminded me of the William Hamilton New Yorker cartoon Frank described to me: a man standing disconsolately against the mantlepiece and his wife saying, "Of course you're going to be depressed if you keep comparing yourself with successful people."

Second was Dale Kent showing images of a sculpture of a child by Desiderio. People in the room were already making little murmuring noises at the sight, softening their bodies and leaning in toward each other when Dale showed an image of the back of the child's neck and said, "don't you just want to go 'num num num' into his neck?". And yes, indeed, we did.

Third was Hal Cook (this trio of names gives you an idea of the quality of the conference) describing the "republic of letters" circulating amongst natural historians, doctors and other scholars, and especially Jacobus Bontius, a Dutch doctor in Jakarta in the seventeenth century who researched local plants and animals. This correspondence, said Hal, "floated on a sea of lost conversations".

I'm not the only one who thinks the campus of the University of Western Australia is one of the prettiest in Australia. Again, the little telephone can barely do justice to it, but this is a most spectacular salmon gum outside the library:


And a glimpse of the green lawns:


The weather was cold for the first few days, bearing out the organisers' warnings about bringing warm clothes. But by Friday, and our jaunt to Fremantle and the Maritime museum, it was warm and sunny. Here are my delightful companions on our afternoon off:


The future is in good hands!