Stéphanie la deuxième

One of the great joys of the Centre of Excellence has been the appointment of nine fabulous post-doctoral fellows in various hubs of the Centre around the country. We have two at Melbourne: Sarah and Stephanie. Both are fabulous young women who are throwing themselves into the work of the Centre with such enthusiasm it is quite inspiring. They have their own projects to work on; they are establishing networks with other post-docs; they are going to conferences; they are helping us organise conferences; they will be doing a little graduate teaching; they are setting up reading groups; they are exchanging work for commentary and discussion; they are making our little suite of rooms feel like a very active and buzzing little hub.

Today was the first meeting of the Old French reading group Stephanie had organised, with the assistance of Véronique in the French department. There were a dozen people in the room, reading Marie de France's Laüstic, learning not to do eighteenth-century "r"s, counting octosyllabic lines, and looking at photocopies of the sole Harley ms., which also features the music and lyrics of "Sumer is i-cumen in."

Staff, post-docs, doctoral students, honours students, retired folk, all just concentrating together. A very happy hour, reminding me of the best things a university can be.

Chuntering on...

In my Middle English reading group we are reading bits of Piers Plowman. We read the Prologue and Passus I, then skipped over the whole Mede episode (I know: it's a scandal), and marvelled at the author's apologia for his life (newly introduced in the C-text).

Today we read the conclusion to this passage, where Reason and Conscience send Will off to the church. "Wepyng and waylyng," he falls asleep and has another vision. He tells us,

Of this mater Y myhte mamele ful longe...

Our intrepid editor, Derek Pearsall, glosses "mamele" as "chunter." Pearsall's glosses, in this and in other editions are mostly helpful and accurate and are often engagingly inventive. This one is simply terrific: we explain one rare and imitative verb with another equally rare and equally imitative verb, though "chunter" is coined somewhat later than "mamele". Both seem to mean to "mutter", or "murmur," while "mamele" seems to be formed on analogy with the Dutch lollen, which gives rise to the contentious noun, "lollard," in the fourteenth century, with all its freight of heresy, etc. So speaking and muttering and mumbling and rambling on, in this period, is risky business, indeed.

"Chuntering" is one of those words that blazed into the language at the end of the sixteenth century, and isn't recorded after the 1870s. In addition to the muttering, mumbling senses, OED also lists "to grumble, find fault with, complain." The OED's last example is from 1870: E. Peacock, Rolf skirl, II. 117 Th' capt'n went away chunterin'. 

Sometimes a word just comes back into the language, even by means of a slightly odd gloss. A bit like a song that gets into your head, the word "chuntering" has got into mine, and under my skin today. I keep thinking so much of our lives — reading, writing, emailing, blogging — could be described as "chuntering". Perhaps it's the buried suggestion of trains "shunting" along; perhaps it's the Led Zeppelin song, "Rambling on"? Either way, today at least, as I go about my tasks this afternoon, when I describe myself to myself, it'll be as "chuntering on."

Long Service Leave

Now that I am officially on long service leave, I have really stepped up the pace on my book. Yes, I know it's meant to be a holiday; and yes, there is something quite grand in that line coming up quite soon, but I am just happy to feel able to work all day, and quite productively, on the ms. I keep going over and over the various chapters, smoothing, co-ordinating, filling in gaps, and writing footnotes, even though I still have one entire chapter to write from scratch, and still a few little clumps of paragraphs to add in here and there. I have a couple of tough readers lined up, and I want to get a bunch of chapters ready for them to read. I am supposed to get all but the last chapter to the press by September. That's going to be a close call.

But it is my leave; and so I am doing some of the things I have been thinking about doing for a while. I have been cooking a little, and two Saturdays in a row, now, I have made a big rum baba in a wonderful heavy ring tin my mother gave me. The cake just fell out of the tin both times. The second time I tripled the amount of syrup, and it was sodden and succulent as it's supposed to be.

I have started learning Italian, and now when I'm in the car I listen to the Italian radio station (even if I can only pick up things like identifying the weather, the soccer reports and the ads for Piedimonte's, my local supermercato). I also bought Il Globo, the Australian Italian newspaper, and so I get to look at (I can hardly call it reading yet), national and local news in Italian. Seems odd to see the Queensland premier being called "la Bligh", but there you go.

I have also joined a gym. I swore for many years I would never darken the doors of such an establishment, preferring to get my exercise for free and on my own. But the idea came to me in Philadelphia [ed. and DC (see comments box)], when I realised how fit and lithe were some of the medievalists I admire most, and now I am utterly hooked. I have no idea what to do when I'm there, so I've booked in for a sequence of sessions with Miss Sophie, and we have a hilarious time, as she shows me how to use machines I had no idea were possible, and exercises I had no idea I could do. The time goes very quickly. Today I was lifting a few little weights, and she swapped the dumbbells for a big round plate, so I could feel "more manly", she said, as we fell about laughing. I come home and demonstrate to the others what I've been doing, and bounce around the house for a bit until the endorphins subside and my arms and legs start to ache. I now know why weightlifters get those trembling legs.

Anyway, it is deeply fun to do something completely different with the body and mind. I have also started playing the piano again, too, in anticipation of a Great Event and a Big Black New Arrival tomorrow.

I guess in a different world, you'd go and spend the entirety of your long service leave in Sardinia, or somewhere, and write a novel or read poetry. That's not the world I live in, though; and so I'm happy enough with this new balance of things. I'm especially happy that work is going so well. Perhaps I should have joined the gym years ago...

Ci siamo!

It's been a quiet week on Lake Humanities Researcher (apologies to Garrison Keilor).

Every morning this week I hop on my bike and ride into Carlton for an intensive Italian language course. My long service leave starts in a few weeks, and I've always thought long service leave was a good time to learn something new. And because we have booked a few weeks holiday in Italy in September, and because I'll be in Siena for the Chaucer congress in 2010, and because Joel is learning, and because I love opera, and because I want to read Dante e Boccaccio in Italiana, there I am!

There are eleven in our group: they include an opthalmic surgeon who is taking up a job in Forli next year; a group of middle aged women like me who are going to Italy on holiday; a New Zealand vulcanologist, also going to do some research in Italy; and three teenagers from two different Italian families whose fathers speak Italian, but who have never learned.

Everything they say about studying more languages making the next one easier is absolutely true. My Latin and French aren't particularly strong (especially my Latin); and my French is much more readerly than conversational, but this background in romance languages certainly makes Italian feel familiar. I could hear it spoken every day in Melbourne if I walked down the right streets and went to the right cafes. These classes really put the emphasis on conversation, though, so it's a very different world from medieval languages.

When we are doing grammatical work, I feel perfectly at home, so that spending a lot of time on the difference between masculine and feminine definite and indefinite articles sometimes drives me crazy. Just learn the forms and move on, I think to myself! But repeating and repeating, in tiny fragments of conversation in groups does eventually help me put sentences together. And here's the thing: there are people in the class who've never learned the difference between first and third person, or who have never had to grapple with gendered nouns and adjectives, but whose ear is far better than mine, and whose confidence in conversation outstrips mine, too.

But I am keen to keep going, and have arranged to share a small group lesson with Kay, my fellow student. I'm going to practise writing a bit. And can I just say: I'm doing this without checking my books. I'll correct my mistakes in bold type...

Ciao, mi chiamo Stephania. Sto molto bene, grazie. Ho un gatto bruno; lei si chiama Mima. Lei ha diciotto anni, e ho cinquante-uno anni, e sono sempre contenta... cioe, noi siamo sempre contente. Amiamo mangiare il pesce.

E voi? Come state?

Synecdoche, cricket and colonialism

Joel has just come back from seeing the movie Synecdoche. Highly recommended, apparently.

But in an attempt to resolve a family disagreement on the pronunciation of this word, I reached for my Concise Oxford Dictionary. (I was right, of course, lest you were worried.) But get this: the example for naming the part but understanding the whole is 50 sail for 50 ships, while the example given for naming the whole but understanding the part is England beat Australia at cricket.

Oh they do find it hard to let go of their colonial grandeur, don't they? And oh yes, I'm aware of irony, in that I use the Oxford dictionary, and don't have the Macquarie here. Wonder what their example for synecdoche is?

But it's only a few weeks till the Ashes series begins. Just three words, England: Bring. It. On.