tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-278843342024-03-13T14:25:05.776-04:00Jardinière¶ A female gardener ¶ An ornamental receptacle for the display of growing flowers ¶ An online prose compostGwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.comBlogger112125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-9567328733211118002007-09-08T12:00:00.000-04:002007-09-08T19:35:57.748-04:00Turning Over a New Leaf<p><br />For various reasons, some spoken, some unspoken, it seemed time to make a fresh start. So, if you're interested, <a href="http://dujardin.wordpress.com/">I'm over here now</a>. Come on over.<br /><br />My thanks to Blogger for providing me my first online plot. I will be pruning out this site to remove the dead wood and to retain what (I hope) will perennially endure (besides my fondness for variations on the word <span style="font-style: italic;">perennial</span>).<br /><br />Thank you, too, for visiting. I hope to see you over at <a href="http://dujardin.wordpress.com/">Jardiniere, part deux</a>.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">On y va</span>. . .Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-57726600919339599972007-06-29T16:20:00.000-04:002007-06-29T17:04:14.444-04:00Garden Spot: Oxford Edition<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujh5BlUI/AAAAAAAAAJY/30VzoX6xXnY/s1600-h/Christ+church.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujh5BlUI/AAAAAAAAAJY/30VzoX6xXnY/s400/Christ+church.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5081589311229498690" /></a><br /><p><br />Unlike my colleagues who have spent their time productively transcribing, taking care not to inspire the wrath of special collections librarians, my time here in England has been spent taking care of children, as we visit with their British relatives. <br /><br />In a comment for the last post, Muse offered her favourite pub in Oxford, the Royal Oak on Woodstock Road. Thinking about her post, I realized I'm hard pressed to identify my own favourite, as many pubs have either changed hands or gone corporate (a sad development), and my criteria have shifted over the years, from quality of atmosphere -- and of the lager -- to the pub's capacity to accommodate my children (. . . so I can enjoy the atmosphere and the lager. Cue the Underworld, "Born Slippy": "Shouting <span style="font-style: italic;">lager, lager, lager, lager</span>. . ."). In that respect, I suppose I do favour the Fishes -- off the beaten path, indeed off the Isis tow path, but with a super garden, climbing frame, and Aunt Sally pitch for the kids. A good time can be had by all.<br /><br />Where children and an aging liver make pub crawls impracticable, garden tours are still in the offing. Though funny, showing Stroke around today, we did actually hit a couple of high-profile pubs: the King's Arms, across from the Bod and the Sheldonian Theatre (the pub where British academics go to see and be seen), and the Turf (known for its Bill Clinton apocrypha), with a quick stop in ye olde Bear as well. I trusted her to find the Eagle and Child herself (and thus the "famous pubs of Oxford" tour is about complete).<br /><br />But as I haven't posted from my own garden for a while -- I reckon that bleeding heart has about petered out by now -- I submit to you some shots from today's meandering. Above you can see the garden outside Christ Church, as you head into the meadows. Below we have a magnificent row of lavender: <br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp1.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujR5BlTI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/5_3oyBRgA40/s1600-h/Lavender.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp1.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujR5BlTI/AAAAAAAAAJQ/5_3oyBRgA40/s400/Lavender.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5081589306934531378" /></a><br /><p><br />This last shot, taken in the private garden behind Christ Church, put me in mind of Andrew Marvell, so I follow it with "The Mower, Against Gardens." <br /><p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujh5BlVI/AAAAAAAAAJg/pS3vPaXWqrQ/s1600-h/Mower+.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoVujh5BlVI/AAAAAAAAAJg/pS3vPaXWqrQ/s400/Mower+.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5081589311229498706" /></a><br /><p><br />LUXURIOUS man, to bring his vice in use,<br /> Did after him the world seduce,<br />And from the fields the flowers and plants allure,<br /> Where Nature was most plain and pure.<br />He first inclosed within the gardens square<br /> A dead and standing pool of air,<br />And a more luscious earth for them did knead,<br /> Which stupefied them while it fed.<br />The pink grew then as double as his mind ;<br /> The nutriment did change the kind. <br />With strange perfumes he did the roses taint ;<br /> And flowers themselves were taught to paint.<br />The tulip white did for complexion seek,<br /> And learned to interline its cheek ;<br />Its onion root they then so high did hold,<br /> That one was for a meadow sold :<br />Another world was searched through oceans new,<br /> To find the marvel of Peru ;<br />And yet these rarities might be allowed<br /> To man, that sovereign thing and proud, <br />Had he not dealt between the bark and tree,<br /> Forbidden mixtures there to see.<br />No plant now knew the stock from which it came ;<br /> He grafts upon the wild the tame,<br />That the uncertain and adulterate fruit<br /> Might put the palate in dispute.<br />His green seraglio has its eunuchs too,<br /> Lest any tyrant him outdo ;<br />And in the cherry he does Nature vex,<br /> To procreate without a sex. <br />'Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot,<br /> While the sweet fields do lie forgot,<br />Where willing Nature does to all dispense<br /> A wild and fragrant innocence ;<br />And fauns and fairies do the meadows till<br /> More by their presence than their skill.<br />Their statues polished by some ancient hand,<br /> May to adorn the gardens stand ;<br />But, howsoe'er the figures do excel,<br /> The Gods themselves with us do dwell. <br /><br />Source: <a href="http://www.luminarium.org/sevenlit/marvell/mowagainst.htm">Luminarium. </a> <br /><br />If you don't hear from me, it means I am in Italy and without internet. <span style="font-style:italic;">Arrivederci!</span>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-60183583534095819282007-06-26T06:35:00.001-04:002007-06-26T06:37:35.766-04:00Oxford Times<p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoDsLPNej7I/AAAAAAAAAJI/NhYcczsZAkc/s1600-h/spires.1.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RoDsLPNej7I/AAAAAAAAAJI/NhYcczsZAkc/s400/spires.1.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5080320057479696306" /></a><br /><p><br />Ordinarily when I come to England we stay with my mother-in-law, in Iffley Village, Oxford (right above the Iffley locks, it's a short run down the Isis tow path to the Abingdon Road, at the Head of the River, then up to town). Beautiful.<br /><br />This time, however, we're staying with brother-in-law somewhere in Cowley (having spent the day yesterday disoriented from jet lag -- minding the children seems to intensify it -- I'm not entirely sure of my coordinates yet). Said bro-in-law and wife are scads of fun, and have wifi (I think mum-in-law still has only BBC1 and 2 on the old "wireless": bless). So here I am, gumming up the interwebs up the road from where Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. I'll be showing Stroke that ring a little later (it's yer basic track; you gotta mentally cue the Chariots of Fire to get any gestalt from the experience). <br /><br />But I realized that some early mod online greats are in the vicinity. Flavia? Muse? Anyone fancy a pint?Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-83902454795677524202007-06-15T09:23:00.000-04:002007-06-15T11:52:23.137-04:00Sod it<p><br />Meet my magnificent bleeding heart:<br /><p><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RnKTGPNei3I/AAAAAAAAAAs/p2rpKJpEW2g/s1600-h/Bleeding+heart.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RnKTGPNei3I/AAAAAAAAAAs/p2rpKJpEW2g/s400/Bleeding+heart.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5076281465371528050" /></a><br /><p><br />Beauty, eh? At its peak it measured more than five feet across. Since then the blooms have fallen, and I'm waiting to see what happens once it goes dormant (i.e., bleeding hearts, like astilbe and other plants, wholly retire once they've bloomed). What will I do with that five-foot-square plot?<br /><br />It’s odd, playing adoptive parent to someone else’s garden. That garden is mine now, of course, but I didn’t plant what is now finally emerging with confidence (from a soil less alkaline than my last patch of clay, though still far from acidic; which is to say, big blue hydrangeas? don’t count on it). Plants — and insects — are cropping up that I don’t recognize, and I’m having a hard time telling friend from foe at this point. Are those hardy geraniums I’m seeing in patches? Lovely; I hope so. Those fire engine-red beetles? The kids like them, but they don’t look too friendly, at least not to those asiatic lilies. And lo: asparagus! (That’s how it grows!? You don’t say.) And so forth. I’m resolved to play wait and see for some time, which is exciting, though I’m impatient: I’m ready to get busy and mix it up, make it mine.<br /><br />I do find myself missing my old garden, wondering how it’s getting on, and what the new owners are doing with it. Did they cut back the butterfly bush? Are they training the clematis? Yes, I have even thought of driving past to see, were I to return (though that Chicago trip has now been deferred to December, as my MLA panel has been accepted).<br /><br />For those who have been here for a while, you’ll remember that my old Garden Spot ran in a column in the sidebar, and featured photos from the Chicago garden. Much like moving from the US to Canada, the translation from Old Blogger to New initially did not go well: the move altered (irrevocably) much that I liked about my old template; I've had ongoing formatting problems; and, ironically, the new sidebar options (meant to simplify formatting for users) made doing the G-Spot column (which I used to work in, old-fashioned-like, inserting HTML into the template) more difficult. Somewhere in there there's a metaphor for emigrating.<br /><br />I started scouting out new turf for Jardiniere, but since the bee and other recent developments, I've decided it's probably best to stay put and work through all of the transplant shock (a term for when plants experience a "growth check" upon being transplanted, but I trust you're with me here on the symbolism). This means that my garden posts will now be incorporated into the main frame: if you don't care about gardening, hopefully you'll find some digital respite resting your eye on the photos. <br /><br />If you were reading last autumn, you know that I moved everything (which wasn’t much) from the two front east-facing beds to the side of the house — to clear that palette, as it were. I had intended to bury a blast of bulbs, but . . . well, if you were reading at all last autumn (there wasn’t much to read), you know not much happened other than emigrating, parenting, teaching, and dissertating, and I was fortunate to have accomplished any of that. (I just discovered the bulbs in a box in the garage.)<br /><br />But this past spring, amid grading, road trips to Toronto and Montreal, remaining talks to give at Queen’s and some dreadful illness it took weeks to kick, I managed to make the rounds of a couple area nurseries and get started in the front beds. Measuring roughly 5′ x 20,' they border the front of our limestone house, so I’ve decided to work the grays and blues, accented with muted pinks and whites: delphinium (let’s hope they come back for me here!); foxglove; globe thistle; Russian sage; artimisia; campanula; phlox; salvia; iris; stonecrop (I love the variegated variety); perennial baby’s breath and miniature mums; and other assorted plants to make for a cool-themed herbaceous border. The plants are young (i.e., immature, aka relatively inexpensive), but they should fill in nicely in the years to come.<br /><br />What is wood on our house is gray with white trim, so I potted all white annuals for the front porch: big chunky pansies (I find the small ones too mincing, and too unforgiving if you get behind on the deadheading); african daisies (the vanilla ones with the deep eggplant centres); creamy snapdragons; verbena; etc. As you can see, the annuals are fairly prosaic (again, aka affordable) — but all white and grouped together, they make a lovely soft statement against the gray.<br /><br />Indeed it’s the first time that I’ve gardened white (and I’m pleased with it). My last house, in Illinois, was mustard brick, one of those midwest split-levels designed to look like the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. While there were a dozen such houses in our neighborhood (i.e., hardly one of a kind!), I worked the faux-prairie style as much as possible, and white didn’t work. I suppose it's only apt that it works so well here in the Great White North.<br /><br />Here's my handiwork so far:<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RnKcLvNei4I/AAAAAAAAAA0/Nk8xoGqZQyE/s1600-h/front+border.jpg"><img style="display:block; margin:0px auto 10px; text-align:center;cursor:pointer; cursor:hand;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/RnKcLvNei4I/AAAAAAAAAA0/Nk8xoGqZQyE/s400/front+border.jpg" border="0" alt=""id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5076291455465458562" /></a><br /><br />Beauty, eh? <br /><br />By the way, they say that "summers in Kingston are the best." And they're right.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-14586022037871691202007-06-12T20:43:00.000-04:002007-06-13T01:03:13.502-04:00My Tale of Two Cities<p><br />I've come to realize that, living where I do, I've inadvertently returned to the cartography of my childhood. Don't get me wrong: I live in another country (yet another post that's been on the potting bench for a while. . . I'll get to that request about "Canadianizing my vehicle," I promise). But just as I grew up in the exurbs of a small, prestigious university city, I now reside in a rural township east of Kingston and Queen's. Hop on I-95 in Connecticut, and you could head for Boston or New York City. Two hours either direction on 401, and I can be in Toronto or Montreal. I finally hit both in the past month or so, to two strikingly, and surprisingly, dissimilar experiences.<br /><br />Sure, Toronto has the non-threatening, prosaic feel of a midwest American city, and Montreal is just so . . . <span style="font-style: italic;">French</span>. In Toronto, I attended the annual meeting of the Canada Milton Seminar. In Montreal, I saw Arcade Fire in concert.<br /><br />At one venue, the atmosphere was hot, the audience was on its feet, and you couldn't hear yourself for all the commotion. At the other, the attendees sat in stern and solemn silence, cool and reflective throughout the event.<br /><br />You probably think the latter was the Milton conference, right?<br /><br />Nooooo,<span style="font-style: italic;"> mes amis</span>, that seventeenth-century indie rocker John Milton has one serious, and spirited, fanbase.<br /><br />While I "do early modern," I am not a "Miltonist"; I attended the Seminar to become more conversant in Milton studies, and to meet my new colleagues at the University of Toronto. I was nervous going in, as this gathering is a relatively intimate affair, and the in-jokes and asides traded over morning coffee confirmed that the Milton community is a pretty tight group. By the end of the day, however, these Renaissance scholars were dressing each other down in ways that would've made the fiercest Roman orator blanch.<br /><br />Of course it's tempting to summon anti-academic truisms about battles fierce and stakes small, but it was captivating to see celebrated scholars so passionate about their subject that professorial politesse went the way of the Tudor bonnet. Given the way initial hugs and "how are you's" degenerated to finger-pointing and loud shouting across tables, I have come to call the event the "Milton Family Thanksgiving." (Which, as a staunch Puritan, Uncle John couldn't really mind, right? Of course, let's see if I'm ever invited back! Once a black sheep . . .).<br /><br />As for the Arcade Fire show, I've never been so infuriated by a concert audience. While I feel critics did the band a disservice by overhyping them in ways that invited a backlash -- and I do think that <span style="font-style: italic;">Funeral</span> is superior to <span style="font-style: italic;">Neon Bible</span> -- the somber demeanour of this hometown, "<span style="font-style: italic;">neighborhood</span>" crowd -- why I was determined to see this **particular show -- was, well, mystifying, verging on maddening. I confess that I abandoned all professorial politesse, trying to rouse at least a couple rows of Quebecois to their feet. (Maybe they sniffed out that I was American: they viewed me with cool and utter disdain.) Thankfully, my companion, though Canadian, was fully game and in good form: Stroke and I danced like fools to a tight and predictably talented set, as well as its -- <span style="font-style: italic;">sniff sniff</span>, I'm still whimpering in disappointment -- <span style="font-style:italic;">sole</span> encore.<br /><br />Win, if you're listening: I don't blame you. I would've shoved that drumstick up 'is bleedin' arse. And the next time I make the drive (where "No Cars Go")? <br /><br />I'm bringing some Miltonists.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-917068696348540882007-06-10T09:52:00.000-04:002007-06-13T12:30:27.245-04:00Final round<p><br />Flavia has been busy being fabulous this past weekend, but I wanted to follow through on her comment about the spelling bee protesters, to remark how the protests held yearly at the national bee relate to disputes about spelling in early modern England.<br /><br />The demonstrators outside the Washington Grand Hyatt represent the <a href="http://www.spellingsociety.org/">Simplified Spelling Society</a>, which campaigns to replace our current orthography (or "right writing") with a strict phonetically-based spelling system (gotta luv the placards: "Enuf is enuf!" "Spelling shuud be lojical"). Promoting what it calls "the <a href="http://www.spellingsociety.org/aboutsss/aims.php">alphabetic principle</a>," the society echoes several sixteenth-century humanists, such as Thomas Smith, John Hart, and William Bullokar, who sought either to amend or to replace the Roman alphabet we use with an alphabet in which each letter designates one, and only one, English speech sound.<br /></p><p>(Everytime I write that last phrase I think of Monty Python's <span style="font-style: italic;">Life of Brian</span>: "How much do you hate the Romans?" "<span style="font-style: italic;">A lot.</span>" Humanists in England didn't hate the Romans; to the contrary, they wanted to be just like them. As the Romans adapted the Greek alphabet to Latin, spelling reformers attempted to adapt the Roman alphabet to English.)<br /><br />Here's a portion of Thomas Smith's reformed English alphabet (from <span style="font-style: italic;">De recta et emendata linguae anglicae scriptione, dialogus</span> [1568]; from EEBO):<br /><br /><a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/Rm1gs_Nei1I/AAAAAAAAAAc/rA2YHvGUgBg/s1600-h/Smith+image.jpg"><img style="margin: 0px auto 10px; display: block; text-align: center; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp0.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/Rm1gs_Nei1I/AAAAAAAAAAc/rA2YHvGUgBg/s320/Smith+image.jpg" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5074818681114889042" border="0" /></a><br /><br />Far out, huh? Suffice to say that these early spelling protesters were unsuccessful, at least in reforming a scheme defined by systemic variation (i.e., we still spell some words phonetically, some according to etymology, some language of origin, etc.).<br /><br />Where these reformers <span style="font-style: italic;">were</span> successful, however, and why we owe to them the present-day spelling bee -- where their phonic-hooked descendants get their annual fix -- was in promoting the idea that everyone should conform to the same spelling. I have written how a spelling bee is only competitive, or suspenseful, when systemic irregularity is the rule, not the exception. Even more fundamentally, however, a spelling bee requires consensus that there are "correct" and "incorrect" spellings, and that correct spelling -- being a "good speller" -- is admirable and worthy of public reward. As these humanists sought for their crude and unruly language the rule and regularity of classical Latin and Greek, they saw an opportunity to distinguish themselves by making a contest out of correct spelling.<br /></p><p>Somewhere along the line, though -- well, the lines got crossed, as reciting the letters of orthographically complex, even dubious, words became the index of mastery in the mother tongue, and parrotting the standard spelling of obscure terms became a mark of distinction and exceptionality. (It's a paradox, no doubt, though one we rarely think about; rather, we tend to displace our discomfiture at this sociolinguistic oddity on to the spelling bee contestants themselves . . . ) Historically speaking, the ends of humanist spelling reform, to advance to higher rounds of social status via language, far outlived its initial phonetic means, indeed "the alphabetic principle" (ding!).<br /><br />Instead, as the reformers' newfangled alphabets gave way to other innovations, spelling reform inadvertently generated the texts we now regard (and admire) as the repositories of standard English. Realizing that noone would use his reformed orthography unless taught, John Hart writes what is arguably the first English textbook, <span style="font-style: italic;">A methode, or comfortable beginning for all unlearned, whereby they may bee taught to read English</span> (1570; still, noone really buys it, except for one fabulous exception, Thomas Whythorne, who writes his autobiography in Hart's orthography; now there's a read!). <a onblur="try {parent.deselectBloggerImageGracefully();} catch(e) {}" href="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/Rm1g5fNei2I/AAAAAAAAAAk/85hRBV1y73M/s1600-h/Hart.gif"><img style="margin: 0pt 0pt 10px 10px; float: right; cursor: pointer;" src="http://bp2.blogger.com/_iLP7VZDW4RA/Rm1g5fNei2I/AAAAAAAAAAk/85hRBV1y73M/s200/Hart.gif" alt="" id="BLOGGER_PHOTO_ID_5074818895863253858" border="0" /></a> Other schoolmasters object to the prospect of a new English alphabet, but see in English pedagogy -- that is, in the process of teaching English <span style="font-style: italic;">as a subject of learning</span> (it had been known chiefly as a "mother" tongue, learned at home) -- a means to teach "uniform," or correct, English, indeed (chiefly) English spelling.<br /><br />Writing his <span style="font-style: italic;">Elementarie</span> (1582), Richard Mulcaster additionally proposes a book in which extant spellings could be "fixed," both corrected and stabilized, in print. Reprinted this year (yep, that's 2007!) by U of Chicago P, and reviewed <a href="http://www.insidehighered.com/views/2007/04/04/mclemee">here</a> in <span style="font-style: italic;">Inside Higher Ed</span>, Robert Cawdrey's <span style="font-style: italic;">A Table Alphabeticall</span> (1604)<span style="font-style: italic;"> </span>usually gets the credit as the "first English dictionary," but this title is misleading. First, foreign language dictionaries -- i.e., Latin-English, French-English, etc. -- had been in print for some time, for the benefit of enterprising humanists and courtiers traveling abroad to the continent. Attempting to "define" "hard wordes in plaine English," Cawdrey's volume takes the model of the foreign language dictionaries, but applies it to the vernacular -- i.e., yielding an English-English dictionary -- effectively suggesting through <span style="font-style: italic;">translation </span>how "learned" English comprises a second, or foreign, language. More than 20 years earlier, however, Mulcaster had printed a list of words expressly for the purpose of establishing the correct, or standard, spelling. Having printed what amounts to a "reference text," Mulcaster and his <span style="font-style: italic;">Elementarie </span>get my humble nod for the "first dictionary."<br /><br />Of course, some early modern dictionaries aspired to deviate from emergent standards in English. Appearing to flout the very process of language standardization, so-called "cant dictionaries" compiled terms in use by "rogues and vagabonds," the criminal underclass. You'd think that humanists would have applauded this exercise, having stomped out scholasticism by conceiving language not as divine dictation (the "word(s) of God"), but as the product of human, or social, consent. To the contrary, spelling reformers were among the most vocal in their contempt for cant "standards" and "reference texts." In <span style="font-style: italic;">Logonomia Anglica</span> (1621), Alexander Gill writes:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Regarding that venomous and disgusting ulcer of our nation I am embarrassed to say anything at all. For that detestable scum of wandering vagabonds speak no proper dialect but a cant jargon which no punishment by law will ever repress, until its proponents are crucified by the magistrates, acting under a public edict. But since this entire jargon, together with the filthy language of criminals, has been described in a strange book, and because it offers no benefit to foreigners, I shall exclude it from my discussion. . .</span> (104)<br /><br />Feel "crucified" by English spelling? You should, if you're not mixing with the right crowd. (Again, with the <span style="font-style: italic;">Life of Brian:</span> "Crucifixion or pardon?" "Pardon. . . nah, just kidding, crucifixion!") For Gill and other early English language zealots, the criminality of these "wandering vagabonds" lies as much in their deviation from legal codes as in their presumption to devise their own code of language. Make no mistake, Gill protests how "that detestable scum," in developing their own argot, filch humanists’ (newly acquired) jurisdiction in English.<br /></p><p>With dictionaries now in print on everything from <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Coders-Dictionary-2007-Ingenix/dp/1563378655/ref=pd_ecc_rvi_1/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&qid=1181578738&sr=8-43">unix code</a> to <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Rock-Snobs-Dictionary-Essential-Rockological/dp/0767918738/ref=pd_bbs_2/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181574482&sr=8-2">classic rock</a>, we are accustomed to the idea that dictionaries translate arcane jargon into "other words" used more commonly in English. (See <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2164806/">Bryan Curtis's piece in <span style="font-style: italic;">Slate</span></a> on a recent variation of the "cant dictionary," Randy Kearse's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Street-Talk-Official-Hip-Hop-Slanguage/dp/156980320X/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181572843&sr=8-1"><span style="font-style: italic;">Street Talk</span></a> (2007), which Kearse wrote while in prison.) What endures in this conceit is the notion that there are "correct" and "incorrect" usages, that there's such a thing as right and wrong, and that there are stakes in choosing to conform and/or deviate (interestingly, I just learned that <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2007/06/09/richard-rorty/">Richard Rorty has died</a>: RIP, great pragmatist, and condolences to his friends, family, and followers).<br /></p><p>What also endures is the competition among social groups to determine what qualifies as "correct" -- indeed, dems be da stakes, and it's in this light that we might view the Simplified Spelling Society (which bears the most unfortunate of acronyms; were ya thinkin about the letters there?). That is, by privileging their spelling system over that now in use, the, er, SSS proposes to challenge not only the ortho-lexicographic powers that be(e) -- aka Merriam-Webster, McGraw-Hill, etc. -- but also a society that, having deferred to humanist innovation in language, has publicly consented to the importance of correct spelling, enough to yearly, if often satirically, admire and reward it.<br /></p><p>Guud luk!<br /><br /></p><p>With that offhand gesture, I conclude this year's series of posts related to this year's bee. (See you next year? Dunno.) I welcome the new readers who have come here as a result of this year's competition, and especially welcome their forthright expertise; by all means, stick around, keep me honest! (If my blog were a bee, I wouldn't have made it into the second round . . . ding! ding! ding!).<br /></p><p>I would be lying, however, if I did not confess some distress, and not a little hand-wringing, over the considerable traffic (we're talking thousands at this point) generated by searches for Evan O'Dorney and autism. At first I was mystified, as the number of inquiries (and visitors) progressively increased while the bee itself began to recede. Conducting a few searches of my own, however, I realized that Evan's post-bee appearances (on CNN, the Today Show, the Jimmy Kimmel Show, etc.) prompted the surge.<br /><br />I've been dismayed by the tenor of discussion on some of the online message boards. The venomous ignorance, about everything from spelling to autism to home schooling to, well, basic facts about adolescence, is enough to make you want to ferry your kids to a deserted island, far far <span style="font-style: italic;">far</span> from the madding crowd. I'm grateful that none of that intemperance has appeared here, though, just as I was concerned about the propriety of my initial remarks, I have since worried that what I wrote functioned to fan the flames, by making a further spectacle of this impressive, though vulnerable (and who isn't at 13?), young man.<br /><br />Now as ever, I wish Evan O'Dorney and his family all the best for the future, and, without getting too preachy (believe me, I know I tend to the ponderous!), I hope that this site has offered those searching, whether "neurotypical" or somewhere "on the spectrum," some resources for further research and reflection.<br /><br />Next up (in no particular order): Horace's compendium of advice for grad students; my tales of Toronto and Montreal; decisions about Jardiniere (ach, I think I'll just do my gardening bit here); and I suppose I should say something about <span style="font-style: italic;">Sgt. Pepper</span> . . .<br /></p>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-89134994207125541202007-06-05T08:58:00.001-04:002007-06-05T12:45:55.726-04:00A New Start<p><br />This post is for the many readers who have been coming to this blog on a search for "Evan O'Dorney and autism" (or suchlike). As I wrote in both my conclusion to my live bee blog post as well as in the comment section, I am neither professionally qualified to diagnose Evan nor personally willing to render the kind of assessment (on the basis of a few minutes' observation, in exceptional circumstances) that Evan and his loving family may not be prepared to hear. (And for all we know, they're fully on board, and merely choosing not to lead with that information -- to which I say, fair play.)<br /><br />Rather, I, like you (and all for our various reasons), need to learn more. No doubt our concern for and about Evan prompted these searches. But wherever his journey leads him -- to math camp, hours spent "expressing himself" at the piano, and hopefully time well-spent with family and friends -- we can all benefit from a little more understanding.<br /></p><p>So here are some resources on Autistic Spectrum Disorder, sometimes known as Pervasive Developmental Disorder. As I confessed in a comment, I have not read all of these exhaustively (and again, am not professionally qualified to rank them). In selecting what to put here, I have prioritized those sites and resources that contain information related to the identification and diagnosis of autism as well as its treatment and other forms of support.<br /></p><p>Given the context in which we're approaching this issue, it seems appropriate to start with some definitions. Here are links to the (US) <a href="http://www.nimh.nih.gov/publicat/autism.cfm">National Institutes of Health</a>, the (UK) <a href="http://www.mind.org.uk/Information/Booklets/Understanding/Understanding+autism+in+children+and+adolescents.htm">National Association of Mental Health</a>, and the <a href="http://www.autismsocietycanada.ca/index_e.html">Autism Society Canada</a>, each of which give fairly comprehensive overviews of the condition (and its related conditions) as well as information on resources in each country.<br /></p><p>As for books, I can recommend <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Quirky-Kids-Understanding-Helping-Doesnt/dp/0345451430/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181050698&sr=8-1">Quirky Kids</a> (suggested by our neurologist back in Chicago), and a pamphlet called "Talkability: People Skills for Verbal Children on the Autism Spectrum," available through <a href="http://www.hanen.org/">The Hanen Centre</a> (and which came recommended by the speech therapist on my son's "team"). The former speaks more generally about kids with developmental disorders, and the latter gives practical advice for helping kids with autism "connect" in a day-to-day setting.<br /></p><p>I have not read, but am interested in reading, the following: <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-Every-Child-Autism-Wishes/dp/1932565302/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1181053936&sr=1-1">Ten Things Every Child With Autism Wishes You Knew</a>, and <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-Your-Student-Autism-Wishes/dp/1932565361/ref=pd_sim_b_5/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&qid=1181053936&sr=1-1">Ten Things Your Student With Autism Wishes You Knew</a>; <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1932565191/sr/ref=pd_cp_b_2/002-2716521-8745616?ie=UTF8&qid=1181053936&sr=1-1&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-41&pf_rd_r=1CJ0C5KJVY3Z02H69JT9&amp;amp;amp;amp;pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_p=252362401&pf_rd_i=1932565302">1001 Great Ideas for Teaching and Raising Children With Autism Spectrum Disorders</a> (which seems overwhelming, but would appear to appeal to Evan's interests in math!); and the work of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_ss_b/002-2716521-8745616?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=Temple+Grandin&amp;amp;amp;amp;Go.x=0&Go.y=0&Go=Go">Temple Grandin</a>.<br /></p><p>Resources online include <a href="http://www.autisminspiration.com/?gclid=CKWH_ZGxwIwCFQ0BPgod6VN0aA">Autism Inspiration</a> and <a href="https://www.abachild.com/Abachild/ecomm.nsf">ABA Child</a> (clearinghouses for information, materials, and strategies), <a href="http://www.taaproject.com/">The Autism Acceptance Project</a> (which promotes public awareness about autism), and <a href="http://www.autisticadvocacy.org/">The Autistic Self-Advocacy Project</a> (which provides resources and support for adults with autism).<br /></p><p>If you live in Kingston or Ontario (I've got to help out my neighbours; after all, it's been plenty hard for us to learn the system here), there is the Autism Intervention Program at <a href="http://www.ontarioearlyyears.ca/oeyc/en/Location/Kingston/Kingston/Services/ChildrensHealth/Pathways+for+Children+and+Youth.htm">Pathways</a>; the Play-Talk Program at the <a href="http://www.hoteldieu.com/cdcopen.html">Child Development Centre at the Hotel Dieu</a>; and if you have young children in need of pre-school or child care, <a href="http://www.kdacl.on.ca/">Community Living Kingston</a> will help support the program you select, and has an excellent resource handbook for "Services for Children with Special Needs." I have yet to check out <a href="http://www.autismontario.com/">Autism Ontario</a>, and a new program called <a href="http://www.leapsandboundsservices.com/">Leaps and Bounds.</a><br /><br />Finally, it wouldn't be right for me not to point all of you to blogs, which, as with blogs generally, provide the salve of recognition and understanding (dare I say connection?) that professional sources may not supply. The <a href="http://www.autism-hub.co.uk/">Autism Hub</a> claims to collect "the best of autism blogging" (though I have yet to spend decent time with it, to make the match that's right for me). I do hope to follow the recently launched <a href="http://www.zone38.net/aut/">Normal is Overrated</a>, written by "Cody" (who also blogs at <a href="http://codeman38.livejournal.com/">Cody's Journal</a>), and as I noted, I am starting my own, but writing it anonymously (so get in touch -- there's an email link in the Profile -- if you'd like to follow it).<br /></p><p>This list is just a start, but I hope it is helpful to you. I am grateful to any of you who write in with other resources, and grateful to Evan O'Dorney, too, for inspiring us all to learn a little bit more about ourselves and one another, indeed the many different ways we all learn and communicate.<br /></p><p>Coming up: a post-bee wrap-up relating today's competition to debates about spelling in early modern England; and my contribution to Horace's compilation (at <a href="http://delightandinstruct.blogspot.com/">To Delight and Instruct</a>) of advice posts to those either starting or considering grad school. He's collected a worthy crop so far, and to be commended to undertaking the task. It seems only apt for me to discuss (and I think I can say I am qualified here) grad school, academia, and family concerns (i.e., bearing and raising children). Even more apt? That I can't write that post right now . . . the kids are screaming!<br /></p><p>More soon.<br /></p>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-33552976988086097532007-05-02T09:33:00.000-04:002007-05-02T09:49:38.388-04:00What is the main idea of this paragraph?<p><br />And how does it relate to your thesis? <br /><br />Sentence fragment. Nice choice of quote, but explicate it further: your reader won't understand it the way you do. This is a claim that requires analysis and evidence. Comma splice. Put your end-quote after the period. Nicely put. Put the page number in parentheses before the period. It's = it is. Very original idea. How does this paragraph relate to the last one? Don't add ideas: relate them. Unclear. Pair vivid subjects with active verbs. Omit needless words. Shrewd and astute. <br /><br /><i>Zzzzzzzzzzzzz........</i><br /><br />Yes, <a href="http://bloggingtherenaissance.blogspot.com/2007/04/womb-of-ones-own.html">we're</a> <a href="http://bardiac.blogspot.com/2007/04/cycles.html#links">all</a> <a href="http://feruleandfescue.blogspot.com/2007/04/unanswerable-mysteries-of-grading-and.html">doing</a> <a href="http://thefreudianpetticoat.blogspot.com/2007/04/that-time-of-year-thou-mayst-in-me.html">it</a>. <br /><br />Back soon.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-66219025669780111612007-04-18T16:22:00.000-04:002007-04-18T19:54:20.122-04:00More from the Virginia Tech English Department<p><br />I am reprinting from <a href="http://chronicle.com/news/article/2052/english-department-tries-to-help-instructors-and-students-get-their-bearings">The Chronicle</a>.<br /><br /><i><b>English Department Tries to Help Instructors and Students 'Get Their Bearings'</b><br /><br />Blacksburg, Va. — Last semester, when Ross A. Alameddine came into Edward A. Weathers’s professional-writing class at Virginia Tech, Mr. Alameddine issued a challenge: “I’m going to be either an English major, business minor, or a French major, business minor,” he wrote in a note to the instructor the first day of class. “That decision depends on this class. No pressure.”<br /><br />Mr. Alameddine liked the course enough to declare English his major earlier this semester. But when classes resume next week, he won’t be here to pursue that path. He was one of the 32 victims of Monday’s massacre.<br /><br />Mr. Alameddine sat in the center of 12 students taking Kelly A. Pender’s technical-editing class this semester. Ms. Pender, an assistant professor of English, talked Wednesday morning about what would happen when her class resumes next Tuesday at 9:30 a.m.<br /><br />“Ross was the kind of student who you wanted to be there every day because he made the class work,” said Ms. Pender, 32, sitting in her office in Shanks Hall. “I’ve dealt with grief in my life, but I don’t know how the class will proceed.”<br /><br />Nick J. Kocz, a graduate teaching assistant in the English department, also lost a student, Emily Hilscher, in one of the classes he teaches. She died in West Ambler Johnston Hall on Monday morning.<br /><br />Carolyn Rude, chair of the department, is trying to help young professors and graduate teaching assistants deal with the final weeks of classes. She has asked the university to send a counselor to talk to them.<br /><br />“We teach 6,000 students in any semester,” she says. “That’s why it matters what English does. We have 33 dead, but we have 26,000 or more trying to get their bearings and reclaim their lives.”<br /><br />Some English professors have decided to leave it up to students whether to take the grade they have earned thus far or finish their last assignments.<br /><br />“My students had their final paper due on the 22nd,” said Carlos Evia, an assistant professor of English. “That’s not going to happen. I can’t push them.”<br /><br />Mr. Weathers, the instructor who taught Mr. Alameddine’s professional-writing course, feels the same way: “I don’t know how after all of this I can ask someone to do a paper on the history of the American penny, or the role of peanut butter in the American diet.”<br /><br />Mr. Weathers feels a particular loss, since it was his class that persuaded Mr. Alameddine to major in English. Mr. Weathers plans to send the note Mr. Alameddine wrote him on that first day of class, and all of his other writings, back to his parents. — Robin Wilson</i><br /><br />Other links related to the English faculty:<br /><br /><a href="http://filebox.vt.edu/users/news/convocation_giovanni.mp3">Chronicle forum: "The English department should have done more to prevent the VT massacre"</a><br /><br /><a href="http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/04/18/vatech.professor/index.html">CNN: Cho's [Playwriting] Professor to Classmates: Don't Feel Guilty</a><br /><a href="http://filebox.vt.edu/users/news/convocation_giovanni.mp3"><br />Chronicle: Poet Nikki Giovanni's Address (audio)</a><br /><br />Meanwhile, let's not forget engineering:<br /><br /><a href="http://chronicle.com/news/article/2058/questions-abound-for-a-homeless-engineering-department">Chronicle: Questions Abound for a Homeless Engineering Department</a>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-4005082946438789232007-04-17T12:58:00.000-04:002007-04-18T17:34:49.555-04:00The Mourning After<p><br />I am still too stunned by yesterday's events to offer any insight into them. I think we are all waiting for more information to help us make sense of the tragedy -- realizing what little sense there is to "make" of it (i.e., no matter what details might emerge).<br /><br />I respond to the event on many levels, and through several different lenses -- as a parent, as a prof, and, naturally, as a citizen on this planet where violence is all too common, everyday.<br /><br />It's as a prof that I write this particular post, in that I have been wondering what support the faculty community might give to the community at Virginia Tech. The fingerpointing is already well underway, and we can only hope that the blame game leads to insight, and not mere calumny. What role can and should faculty play here? I wonder.<br /><br />I was mulling over this question (i.e., what can *I do?), when I went to the <i>Chronicle</i> and discovered <a href="http://chronicle.com/news/index.php?id=2011">this item</a>, which I reprint below. It is *not how I answer my own question, not at all, though it does narrow the "role of faculty" generally down to English professors in particular, and the relationship we have with our students viz. their writing. <br /><br /><i><b>Student Was 'Troubled,' Says English Department Chair</b><br /><br />Blacksburg, Va. — Cho Seung-Hui, the student responsible for yesterday’s mass killing at Virginia Tech, was a “troubled” student, said Carolyn Rude, chair of the university’s English department, today.<br /><br />Within the past two years, she said, faculty members repeatedly reported their concern about things the 23-year-old student had written in his creative-writing courses.<br /><br />The chair of the English department at the time, Lucinda Roy, passed those concerns along to administrators, Ms. Rude said.<br /><br />“Enough faculty called it to the attention of the then-chair,” Ms. Rude said. She would not elaborate about what Mr. Cho had written, nor would she describe his behavior, saying she did not know him. —Robin Wilson</i><br /><br /><br />Many "troubling" questions here -- no answers, certainly. Your thoughts are welcome, on any of the above, but certainly on the question of what faculty might do.<br /><br />Post-script, April 18: I understand that there are sites on Facebook to pay one's respects. I created a site, but found that while people visited, they were not posting, which I wholly understand; it did not feel right to leave the site up, though. We're all responding in our own ways.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-83141570385122639932007-04-16T13:52:00.000-04:002007-04-16T14:18:46.342-04:00Monday Mourning<p><br />Immense sadness at <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/16/us/16cnd-shooting.html?hp">what has occurred at Virginia Tech</a> today. Warmest thoughts to all of those affected by this grievous tragedy. <br /><br />I am inescapably alarmed at how our nation's students are under perpetual attack. <br /><br />April is the <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F60613F9395C0C768EDDAD0894DD494D81">cruelest</a> <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/search/restricted/article?res=F00612F83A5E0C778EDDAD0894D1494D81">month</a>.<br /><br />Peace.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-51897019641025325492007-04-06T13:25:00.000-04:002007-04-06T16:52:36.539-04:00"Tony" Scott, Renaissance Scholar<p><br />Perusing the news a little more leisurely this morning (see below), I had to chuckle at <a href="http://movies2.nytimes.com/2007/04/06/movies/06grin.html">A.O. Scott's review </a>of the Robert Rodriguez-Quentin Tarantino double feature <i>Grindhouse</i>, in which Scott purrs that "I could listen to Sydney Tamiia Poitier and Tracie Thoms, two of the movie’s motor-mouthed heroines, talk through the whole three hours of 'Grindhouse,' read the phone book or recite 'The Faerie Queene' on tape in my Volvo in the middle of a traffic jam."<br /><br />I trust you're familiar with the phone book. But if you don't know Edmund Spenser's epic <i> The Faerie Queene </i>(1590, 1596), and would like to be in on the joke, allow me to introduce you to the Red Crosse Knight . . .<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And dead as liuing euer him ador'd:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Vpon his shield the like was also scor'd,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> For soueraine hope, which in his helpe he had:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Yet nothing did he dread, but euer was ydrad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Vpon a great aduenture he was bond,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> That greatest Gloriana to him gaue,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> That greatest Glorious Queene of Faerie lond,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> To winne him worship, and her grace to haue,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Which of all earthly things he most did craue;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And euer as he rode, his hart did earne</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> To proue his puissance in battell braue</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Vpon his foe, and his new force to learne;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Vpon his foe, a Dragon horrible and stearne.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">A louely Ladie rode him faire beside,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Vpon a lowly Asse more white then snow,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Yet she much whiter, but the same did hide</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Vnder a vele, that wimpled was full low,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And ouer all a blacke stole she did throw,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> As one that inly mournd: so was she sad,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And heauie sat vpon her palfrey slow:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Seemed in heart some hidden care she had,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And by her in a line a milke white lambe she lad.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">So pure and innocent, as that same lambe,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> She was in life and euery vertuous lore,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And by descent from Royall lynage came</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Of ancient Kings and Queenes, that had of yore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Their scepters stretcht from East to Westerne shore,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And all the world in their subiection held;</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Till that infernall feend with foule vprore</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Forwasted all their land, and them expeld:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Whom to auenge, she had this Knight from far compeld.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">Behind her farre away a Dwarfe did lag,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> That lasie seemd in being euer last,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Or wearied with bearing of her bag</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Of needments at his backe. Thus as they past,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The day with cloudes was suddeine ouercast,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> And angry Ioue an hideous storme of raine</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Did poure into his Lemans lap so fast,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> That euery wight to shrowd it did constrain,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">And this faire couple eke to shroud themselues were fain.</span><br /></p><p> . . .</p><p>Dead sexy.<br /></p><p>To follow the RCK, Una, and the lowly Dwarfe on their adventures through Faerie lond, <a href="http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/queene1.html#Canto%20I.">click here</a>. . .<br /><br />Rodriguez-Tarantino double-feature gore-fest?<span style="font-style: italic;"> Pfft.</span> Wander ahead to <span style="font-style: italic;">Errour's den</span>, a couple of stanzas away, and you'll be reaching for the popcorn.</p>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-28247558414065304032007-04-06T09:26:00.000-04:002007-04-06T14:05:40.839-04:00One for the Record Books, One from the Archives<p><br />Yesterday I delivered the last lecture of my first year as a tenure-track professor in Renaissance Poetry and Prose at Queen's University in Kingston, Ontario.<br /><br />My metaphor for teaching the past couple of weeks has been the Wolfe Island ferry, the vessel that takes passengers and vehicles from Kingston to Wolfe Island, one of the many residential islets in the Thousand Island region. Every day -- indeed the <span style="font-style: italic;">highlight </span>of my day, every day -- I drive over the Rideau Canal across the Lasalle Causeway, the low-lying bridge connecting the "east side" of Kingston, the rural district on the St. Lawrence where I live, to the city's historic downtown. As Kingston Harbor lies next to the Causeway, I frequently witness the ferry making its way into the docks.<br /><br />Heading into the final weeks of the course, I knew my job was to bring the ferry in, both squarely (i.e., coherently) and on time (i.e., having effectively covered <span style="font-style: italic;">Paradise Lost</span>). <span style="font-style: italic;">Loading</span> the single passengers (all those lyric poems and individual prose texts spanning the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries), the passenger vehicles (e.g., the sonnet sequences, epyllia), and the heavy-lifting equipment (the epics, <span style="font-style: italic;">The Faerie Queene</span>, <span style="font-style: italic;">Paradise Lost</span>) on to the vessel -- the syllabus -- is relatively easy compared to the day-to-day work of navigating the craft.<br /><br />As I told <a href="http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2007/01/2007010801c/careers.html">Jim Lang at the <span style="font-style: italic;">Chronicle</span></a> at the <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2007/01/new-term-resolutions.html">end of fall term</a>, I fell behind schedule often enough to worry about my credibility when it came to the syllabus, even though I felt we typically fell behind for good reason -- that is, to pursue ideas that helped advance and fulfill the intellectual objectives of the course. This term (my courses are year-long), I knew I had to stay on schedule <span style="font-style: italic;">and</span> help students hunt down those ideas ("since in a net I seek to hold the wind" -- Thomas Wyatt), and captain the ship a little more firmly.<br /><br />I delivered, as best I could; a little shaky, but we pulled in. There was one more point I wanted to make about Adam, but come 12:50 yesterday, I knew where we had to be, with Adam and Eve, exiting Paradise:<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The World was all before them, where to choose</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Thir place of rest, and Providence thir guide:</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> They hand in hand with wandring steps and slow,</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Through EDEN took thir solitarie way.</span><br /><br />At the end, I thanked the students for their attention, for their hard work, and, most of all, for their ideas. They applauded -- loudly, vehemently, for some time.<br /><br />I confess I felt unworthy, even embarrassed.<br /><br />At this point, it's true that all I can see now are ideas for classroom activities that I didn't follow through on; the fact that I didn't stay up-to-date on my course website, as I'd hoped (and promised); the points I should have made in class, and didn't, or feel I didn't make well enough. Sure, I'm writing it all down, so as to revise for next year -- and yes, I am now wedded to the idea of syllabus as thesis, not contract.<br /></p><p>And I'm also trying my best to take in my students' appreciation and acclaim, which was genuine and heartfelt, and which I would be a fool to disrespect. Queen's students are Canada's brightest, and they work damn hard, harder than I ever worked as an undergrad.<br /><br />Rising this morning -- after little sleep tending to my feverish daughter all night -- I nonetheless had the leisure to spend a little more time reading the headlines than I usually would. Plugging through my "news and mags" bookmarks, I usually skip over the link to <i>Harper's</i>, which, until recently, has been a mere shell of a site, barely an ad for the current issue on newsstands.<br /><br />Digital shell no more: <a href="http://www.harpers.org/">the new online <i>Harper's</i> is </a><span style="font-weight: bold;"><a href="http://www.harpers.org/">fantastic</a>,</span> with links and archives going back to 1850, and I've been whiling away the morning hopping back and forth arbitrarily on the absurdly complete and user-friendly time line.<br /><br />One of my first finds? The following piece, from February 1965, from the editor's column -- "The Editor's Easy Chair"; John Fischer then seated -- titled "Is there a teacher on the faculty?" As it speaks not only to the assessment of teaching in higher education (what I've been musing on for the past day, if not the past twenty-four weeks in my classroom), but also to concepts of academic labor and measures of our work (related to the academic blog discussion, recently reprised), I present an excerpt from Fischer's column here. . .<br /><br />. . .<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> First, however, it may be useful to take a look at the reasons why so much college teaching is so poor.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> The main reason, I am persuaded, is that we do not now have any objective, impersonal method to measure the quality of teaching. It is true that nearly everybody on the campus knows who are the good teachers and who the bad ones; but this information is acquired by a process of hearsay, student gossip, and osmosis. There is no solid, safe yardstick that a dean or department head can use to justify raising the pay of a good instructor, or firing a poor one. He dares not depend on his personal judgment, however sound it may be. That way lie recriminations, accusations of favoritism and injustice, and probably a fight with the American Association of University Professors, one of the most powerful of trade unions.</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Consequently, in doling out rewards and punishments the administrator falls back on something that <u>can</u> be measured: research and publication. The number of column inches in learned journals, the pounds of books published, the foundation grants awarded, the prizes won -- Nobel, Bancroft, Guggenheim, or a dozen others -- these are tangible, indisputable tokens of some kind of academic achievement. (The <u>quality</u> of the research is hardly relevant. After all, an administrator isn't expected to be able to judge whether a finding in biochemistry is really significant, or whether yet another critical evaluation of Henry James adds anything to those already on the shelf.)</span><br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> Now everybody will agree that research ought to be an important part of academic life. Ideally, we are told, research and teaching go hand-in-hand; the good professor adds to the store of knowledge at the same time he is dispensing it. In practice, alas, things seldom work out that way. So long as research alone pays off, in cash and fame, the temptation to scamp on teaching is almost irresistible. Hence the lectures delivered year after year from notes compiled a generation ago . . . the section men who conduct their classes with unconcealed distaste, begrudging every minute stolen from the lab. . . the perfunctory seminar, the brushed-off questions, the impatient stifling of a student's bothersome zeal. Indeed, human nature being what it is, we should be amazed that so many academics do sweat to teach the very best they can, ignoring self-interest for the sake of the young and their own sense of mission. These rare souls are the saving leaven which can make the college experience worthwhile (sometimes) in spite of everything. But they are bound to dwindle like the whooping crane if (in Dr. Logan Wilson's words) "the faculty itself regards <u>relief from teaching</u> as the chief reward for accomplishment, or as the highest status symbol."</span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> </span><br /><span style="font-style: italic;"> It is idle, however, to rail against the publish-or-perish syndrome, with all its baleful effects, so long as publication itself is the only acceptable measure of achievement. A healthy balance between scholarship and teaching probably can never be restored until a reasonably objective yardstick is devised for testing -- and rewarding -- performance as a teacher. The difficulties are obvious; but, as we shall see, they may not be insuperable.</span><br /><br />. . .<br /><br />February 1965. . . <span style="font-style: italic;">plus ça change?</span></p>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-7474187941268416002007-03-28T17:02:00.000-04:002007-03-28T17:24:46.988-04:00Let me redirect you<p><br />. . . if you're coming to this blog from <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/idea_for_discussion_an_academic_blog_review/">this post</a> on the Valve: I made plain <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2007/01/getting-dose-from-doctor-but-then.html">here</a> what I meant by my question at the MLA. <br /><br />But let me make it clear, one more time: I do not in any way wish for THIS PARTICULAR blog to "count" in any way on MY PARTICULAR tenure file. Just so's you know. (Thanks.)<br /><br />And if I sound defensive, it's surely because I'd like to be known as something other than "that woman Berube swatted at that MLA blog panel." Ironic, isn't it? That a question related to blogging and the construction of academic reputation would, through its summarial rejection, construct my academic reputation? <br /><br />Indeed, it's ended up motivating me to get my journal submissions and book proposals in -- at the expense of this blog, of course -- so that I also can be known as, say, that early modern scholar who does interesting work on early English pedagogy and English letters. Who also happened to be swatted down by Michael Berube, for sure. But I'd like to change the lede.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com12tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-59615697367837736412007-03-02T20:45:00.000-05:002007-03-04T09:39:19.597-05:00Meet my son, the hot doctor<p><br />Last week was Queen's "reading week," a week off from classes during which, I was assured by my students, little reading is actually done. I did little reading myself and, I admit (for those who are still hanging around here), no writing (truth be told, I'm in a bit of a muddle, as Forster would say. But perhaps more on that another day).<br /><br />We went to Mont Tremblant, in Quebec, for my first bona fide vacation (i.e., non-family-related travel) in seven years. I had learned to ski at a small hill near Tremblant -- called Gray Rocks -- when I was six years old, and looked forward to teaching my own children. My daughter, now six (I was pregnant with her during my last vacation), took to the slopes like a duck to water: smooth and determined. My four-year-old son, otherwise exceptionally athletic, presented something of a challenge. <br /><br />When placed on a slippery incline bolted to two sleek boards, most humans will tend to, well . . . <i>tense up.</i> Not my boy. Ready to go. Loose as spaghetti. Built for speed. In development-speak, Oliver has "low danger awareness." <br /><br />This means he has no fear.<br /> <br />Oliver also has a language disorder that makes it difficult for him to process speech -- in particular, to comprehend what is said to him and to respond appropriately, either through speech or behavior. Otherwise known as "listen to directions." <br /><br />No matter how often I flanked my own skis in a snow plow (as a model), or got down on the ground and placed Ollie's skis in the same position, or put my verbal instructions in the most concrete terms possible, nothing was going to prevent that boy from going down the mountain as fast -- and potentially out of control -- as possible. Needless to say, I did not relish the prospect of peeling Ollie's dairy-soft skin from the bark of a mountain pine.<br /><br />In a moment of inspiration (otherwise known as frustration), I physically engulfed my son from behind: I planted my skis outside his (his tips were linked by a "ski bra"), gripping his hips with my knees; fastened my poles as a horizontal bar in front of his chest; reached under his shoulders to grasp the poles in front of him, thus bracing him with my arms; and told Ollie to hang on to my poles. We skied together, as one, for the rest of the week. <br /><br />Delightful. <br /><br />Those who know Ollie know how naturally exuberant he is: the combination of the ongoing warmth and closeness of our two bodies and his unvarnished exhilaration at the free-sweeping movement downhill, well. . . where was Master Card to capture it? It <i>was</i> priceless (though admittedly facilitated by copious amounts of ibuprofen and apres-ski hot-tubbing).<br /><br />Not surprisingly, my little thrill-seeker sought any opportunity to "take air." We skied on broad flat green runs the whole week, but even those trails have ravines on the edges where the adventuresome might divert briefly before popping back up, with a jump, back onto the main slope. Ollie took it upon himself to scan the trails for every such opportunity. <br /><br />"So, you're a hotdogger, eh?" I chided him initially. "Ok, hotdogger, let's have fun." The squeals of delight when I would lift him up (most concerned to maintain total control, I was actually lifting him out of the jumps) were exquisite -- indescribable -- and I admit I indulged his (what I called) hotdogging. <br /> <br />At the end of the day, waiting for the shuttle van, we ran into someone we had met from the hotel, who was kind enough to strike up a conversation with my tyrolean tyro. <br /><br />"So, Ollie, did you enjoy skiing today? Are you a good skier?"<br /><br />"No, I'm not a good skier. I'm a hot doctor."<br /><br />Work it out.<br /><br /><i>Priceless.</i>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-2237687125169607902007-02-06T18:54:00.000-05:002007-03-26T22:41:19.764-04:00Campaign rhetoric<p><br /><i>Note: Obama has now officially pronounced his candidacy, and the Times has posted <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/10/us/politics/11obama-text.html?_r=1&oref=slogin">the text of Obama's campaign announcement</a>. I'll let it speak for itself, save for noting the "humbling" early on, and the "battle" cries that make up the peroration, near the end. The guy's done his homework, and knows what he's doing on the stump.</i><br /><br />Senator Biden’s characterization of rival Presidential candidate Barack Obama has received a thorough fourth-estate workout. I don’t have much to add to the current discussion – that is, on how Biden’s words code in contemporary American society – but thought I’d point out some connections in early modern culture, or to Shakespeare in particular, as they speak to enduring assumptions about race and rhetoric.<br /><br />In a piece in Sunday’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Times </span>on “<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/weekinreview/04clemetson.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin">The Racial Politics of Speaking Well</a>,” Lynette Clemetson records the discomfiture blacks experience when they are praised for being “articulate.” Rounding up quotes from Anna Perez, Michael Eric Dyson, and D.L. Hughley, among others, Clemetson notes that “when whites use the word [“articulate”] in reference to blacks, it often carries a subtext of amazement, even bewilderment. It is similar to praising a female executive or politician by calling her ‘tough’ or ‘a rational decision-maker.’”<br /><br />As Clemetson’s piece implies, the “amazement” springs from a racism that assumes that blacks are not capable, essentially speaking, of eloquence. The astonishment also stems, I think, from overlapping expectations about race, class, and education in America. That is, white eloquence satisfies expectations that whites are well-schooled, having been raised in the right school districts and availed themselves of opportunities for higher education. By contrast, despite a thriving black middle class, any black public figure perceived as eloquent is presumed to have overcome “poor” schooling. Having not been “left behind,” as expected, “articulate” blacks instead stand out, to unspeak (<a href="http://unspeak.net/">to use Steven Poole’s term</a>) both racist assumptions and economic inequities.<br /><br />As Clemetson also goes on to point out, “such distinctions discount as inarticulate historically black patterns of speech,” as a “black rhetorical tradition” developed independently of a “white” one. Clemetson quotes Tricia Rose, professor of Africana Studies at Brown, as noting, “Al Sharpton is incredibly articulate . . . But because he speaks with a cadence and style that is firmly rooted in black rhetorical tradition, you will rarely hear white people refer to him as articulate.”<br /><br />Bill Clinton was known for his facility in the latter tradition, and for shifting register as the rhetorical occasion demanded – that is, for adapting his “cadence and style” to his audience. For some, this verbal dexterity marked Clinton as empathic, as his ability to speak to diverse audiences suggested the possibility that he could relate to their problems (<span style="font-style: italic;">"feel their pain"</span>). For others, Clinton’s verbal dexterity marked him as politically opportunistic, if not craven (Slick Willie unleashing the gift of gab). Yet as Clinton’s rhetorical minstrelsy could be seen as another instance of whites coopting black modes of expression (cf., rock n roll), its politics went relatively unchallenged by critics left or right.<br /><br />Shakespeare himself was famously damned with faint praise when fellow playwright Ben Jonson praised him in spite of his “small Latine and Lesse Greeke.” Compared to Jonson's abundant classicism, Shakespeare’s allusions to Cicero and Horace are relatively (and one might say, gratefully) few.<br /><br />Shakespeare’s debts to the "white rhetorical tradition" he studied at his Stratford Grammar School are nonetheless evident in other forms of verbal dexterity. Students in humanist grammar schools would learn to write, and then orate, by imitating the style of their classical exemplars. In particular, students were taught to cultivate their own rhetorical style by putting the ancients’ ideas <span style="font-style: italic;">in their own words</span>; the more copious – which is to say, the more faithful <span style="font-style: italic;">and prolific</span> -- the imitation, the more distinctive the student. When we laud Shakespeare for his ability to “see all sides” of an issue, we are marking his skill in “varying the phrase,” his ability to articulate any given idea in other (indeed many other) words.<br /><br />In fact, I (personally) believe Shakespeare has endured as an icon because we cannot pin him down, with exact certainty, to any one position. Where Ben Jonson is relentlessly didactic, to the point of closing off discussion, “ambiguity” in Shakespeare enables us to keep talking about him, and to continue to discover contrasting points of view. Harold Bloom has thus described, and lauded, Shakespeare as “bottomless.” For a U.S. Presidential candidate, however, it's known as “wishy-washy,” or “flip-flopping” (Slick Willie indeed).<br /><br />As he frequently links oratorical prowess with battle strength, Shakespeare gives us much to talk about with regards to the politics of campaign rhetoric.<br /><br />In <span style="font-style: italic;">Troilus and Cressida</span>, Ulysses delivers his show-stopping speech “on degree” as the Greeks deliberate how best to thrash the Trojans. Scholars have debated to what extent Ulysses’s distinctly measured oration squares with his own covert calculations (it doesn’t), and the extent to which this speech on social order fits in this rhetorically and politically disjointed play (ditto). As with so many Shakespearean quotations, however -- that is, lines typically quoted out of context -- the speech is credited to Shakespeare as having articulated – articulately – some universal truth.<br /><br />Moving on to the epyllion (or mini-epic) <span style="font-style: italic;">The Rape of Lucrece</span>, Shakespeare equates rhetorical power more squarely with physical might. Prompted by Collatine’s loose-lipped boasts of his wife’s beauty, the tyrant Tarquin abandons the Roman war camp to wage a campaign on Lucrece’s virtue.<br /><br />The conflict is expressly rhetorical. First, “set” to conquer Lucrece by Collatine’s speech, Tarquin “disputes” with himself whether and how he should proceed, and, twisting his own words to suit his ends, finds ways to interpret Lucrece’s chaste gestures as come-ons. Far from silent, Lucrece responds by imploring the tyrant to withdraw, to exercise discretion in both word and action. As she has no real voice in Roman society, however, her words carry no weight: rendered in few words, Tarquin’s physical overpowering of Lucrece is the tragic and perversely logical conclusion of his brutal manipulation of language.<br /><br />In the end, Lucrece’s speechless, self-mutilated body becomes a Roman dumb show, indeed the bloody foundations for the Roman republic. That is, as the Tarquins and monarchy are banished in favor of Senators and consuls, an abuse of speech by a white male public figure precipitates the founding of a government based on the speech of white male public figures. Some tradition. We're still living it.<br /><br /><span style="font-style: italic;">The Tragedy of Othello</span>, however, presents the most germane analysis of race, education, and rhetoric. Like <span style="font-style: italic;">The Rape of Lucrece</span>, the tragedy relates facility in speech to martial strength. When, in the play’s opening scenes, Othello is called upon to account for his seduction of Desdemona, Othello initially responds, “Rude am I in my speech,/And little blessed with the soft phrase of peace” – before he proceeds to describe, with great eloquence, how the Venetian maid was swayed by his tales of battle.<br /><br />When Othello humbles himself before his Venetian prosecutors, he exercises rhetorical and political decorum. That is, were Othello not a Moor, his initial apology for his “speech” would read as a standard <span style="font-style: italic;">humilitas</span> maneuver, as orators in the “white rhetorical tradition” conventionally humbled themselves before their audiences (stooping to conquer, as it were). Here, however, Othello’s “rude”-ness speaks to his race, and vice versa, as a gesture that places the speaker before his audience reminds the audience of Othello's alien status in Venice.<br /><br />Demonstrating rhetorical facility that Shakespeare relates, as with Tarquin, to military might, Othello overcomes the challenge to his marriage, subduing those leaders who would sentence him for "stealing" Desdemona. When Othello concludes his speech, the Duke of Venice pronounces: “I think this tale would win my daughter too” (1.2.171).<br /><br />"Amazement"? That's only the half of it.<br /><br />For what is ethically straightforward in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Rape of Lucrece</span> is abundantly complicated in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Tragedy of Othello</span>. That is, there is nothing to commend Tarquin, as Shakespeare depicts his rhetorical abuse in ways that flesh out the king's storied perchant for violence (that is, as Shakespeare read him in his Livy). Othello, however, has been vital to the Venetians' rule of the Adriatic. Swayed, as Desdemona was, by Othello's considerable rhetorical brawn, the Duke elects not to punish Othello for his conquest, but to enlist him in the Venetians' war against the Turks. Othello may be a "savage," but he is the Venetians’ savage for hire. (In this respect, it is hard not to connect this play to Venetian hypocrisy in <span style="font-style: italic;">The Merchant of Venice</span>: the Christians may condemn Shylock's practice of usury, but use him, they do.)<br /><br />Othello is eventually undone by professional jealousy, as, envious of the Moor’s military advancement, and assuming Othello’s essential animalism, Iago conjures Othello's sexual jealousy by counterfeiting visual scenes of theatre (involving Desdemona’s handkerchief, for example), to render him “rude” and in-articulate: “O Desdemon! dead, Desdemon! dead!/O, O!" Iago is apprehended for his misdeeds, but readings of Iago as "evil incarnate" vastly oversimplify matters by discounting the ways the character has been scripted to carry out the culture's dirty work -- to <span style="font-style: italic;">reduce</span> the Moor, ultimately, to silence.<br /><br />As I spent a dozen years in Illinois, I have seen Barack Obama in person, and can speak to the inspiring effect he has on an audience. His promise extends beyond Illinois and the Beltway, however. A year ago, when I was weighing the move to Canada, I visited the Kingston area and met with various faculty and Ontario residents. Discussing the then-recent US elections, I was humbled by the Canadians' extensive knowledge of American politics. (It's always humbling to discover how better informed other citizens are of our nations' business; then again, those citizens have a considerable stake in the effects of our policies. It's so easy for us to forget that.) My dinner companions especially enthused about Obama and the hope he seemed to offer -- and this was a year ago, when he had only been elected Senator -- to the extent of voicing <span style="font-style: italic;">concerns about his safety</span>. Humbled even more intensely by our nation's history (some might call it a tradition) of silencing its most inspiring figures, I observe the Obama campaign with the interest and concern of my (new) fellow country folk.<br /><br />And hope that being called "articulate" is the worst he'll have to combat.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-12562459961816533162007-01-28T09:10:00.000-05:002007-02-04T12:30:40.220-05:00NYT Sunday (Academic) Book Review; or, Thomas Mallon, we Hardy knew ye<p><br />My apologies to those who kept checking in this past week only to see my ursine shout out to friends back in Chicago. It was a busy week here at the Kingston office: in addition to teaching (my students and I read Francis Bacon this week), I had job talks to go to (our department is hiring); and on Friday, I subbed in a graduate seminar on the topic of "close reading." <br /><br />While the weekend couldn't come fast enough, how dismaying it was to turn to this Sunday's <span style="font-style:italic;">Times Book Review</span>, to read yet another surge of anti-academic sentiment in the Gray Lady. <br /><br />In this week's prefatory editorial column, titled "<a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Upfront.t-2.html?ref=review">Up Front"</a>, the Editors introduce, indeed valorize, the critic Thomas Mallon in the following terms:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">“The only really bold thing I’ve ever done,” Thomas Mallon insisted in a recent telephone conversation, “was to give up tenure at Vassar and start trying, in my mid-30s, to live the kind of life I might have had in my 20s.” Although his aim was to be a novelist (his first, “Arts and Sciences,” was published in 1988; his seventh, “Fellow Travelers,” is due in May), it was literary journalism, not novel-writing, that set him free from the constraints of academic prose. Mallon’s informed but accessible style, evident in his cover review of Claire Tomalin’s biography of Thomas Hardy, has been a feature of his contributions to the Book Review, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly and other publications for the past 20 years — and in “Doubting Thomas,” the column he wrote for GQ magazine through much of the 1990s.</span><br /><br />Because, you know, we literary scholars are just a bunch of uninformed, inaccessible cowards, cleaving to the "constraints of academic prose," if not the shackles of tenure, and living unfree, unfulfilled lives. So much for liberal education, eh?<br /><br />But you know who's really bold and free? Claire Tomalin. In <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2007/01/28/books/review/Mallon.t.html">Mallon's review of Tomalin's biography of Thomas Hardy</a>, Tomalin receives the following ringing endorsement: <br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Tomalin herself examines the novels with the confident judgments of a critic, not the hedged and sometimes overawed appraisals of a scholar. Appreciative of Hardy’s genius, she still finds his body of fiction “exceptionally uneven.” “Tess,” the novel that made him rich, remains by Tomalin’s measure an awkward production in spots, and yet it “glows with the intensity” of Hardy’s imagination. In a fine example of biography’s usefulness to criticism, Tomalin notes that what Hardy called Tess’s “invincible instinct towards self-delight” was a quality the novelist “himself possessed in very small measure,” and thus, perhaps, judged all the more laudable in his heroine. “Jude the Obscure,” written when he was in his mid-50s, reprised Hardy’s earliest “theme of a penniless young man with ambitions and radical ideas.” But so inexhaustible were his feelings on the subject that even today, as Tomalin puts it, “reading ‘Jude’ is like being hit in the face over and over again. ... It was Job retold for a godless world that offers no final consolation or redress.” </span><br /><br />Mallon concludes his review on the following note:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">[Tomalin] has visited each important locale of Hardy’s life, noticing the large and seemingly simple things academic scholars often miss: “Most of his characters are prodigious walkers. Tess and Jude both walk themselves through the crises in their lives, and Jude effectively kills himself by walking in the rain.” This is an observation that helps readers to square the circle of recognitions, to remember Hardy as a writer whose books they would once finish with the sudden need to get up from the chair and out of the house, to walk, alone, filled with the ancient surefire feelings of pity and fear.</span><br /><br />Those of you who followed the post-MLA "academic blog" debates may recall that <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2007/01/getting-dose-from-doctor-but-then.html">I had mused</a> whether blogging might help intervene in discourses such as these. I'm still thinking about that topic, as Carrie Shanafelt awaits a long-overdue response from me <a href="http://www.thevalve.org/go/valve/article/from_metablogging_to_rhetorical_theory/#comments">over at the Valve</a>; and I have much to say here, about Mallon's claims here, and the <span style="font-style:italic;">Times'</span> claims for him, and what they imply and assume about our work.<br /><br />For once, I am going to resist the urge to be overly didactic, however, or to perform a "close reading" of these passages, and instead put the questions the <span style="font-style:italic;">Book Review</span> raises out to my readers. . . is there no such thing as bad press, when the press misrepresents scholarly work to the general readership, indeed our own consumer base? What do you think of Mallon's claims and assumptions here -- in what ways are they valid, in what ways unmerited? Do we turn the other cheek, take it lying down?Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-20627070117097887212007-01-20T16:39:00.000-05:002007-01-20T16:45:43.942-05:00Interplanetary Orthography<p><br />I watch precious little TV these days, but am working on the laptop in the same room with my son, who is watching Christopher Reeve's first <i>Superman</i> movie (Ollie was Superman for Halloween). <br /><br />Remember the scene when Lois Lane (Margot Kidder) “interviews” Superman on her balcony – in her negligee? She inquires what planet he’s from; he responds.<br /><br />Lois Lane, taking notes: “So that’s Cripton, with a c, r, i . . . ?”<br /><br />Superman: “No, actually, it’s Krypton, with a k, r, y. . .”<br /><br />Because of course superheroes from other planets use the same romanic alphabet we do.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-26881966680820354722007-01-20T12:07:00.000-05:002007-01-20T16:01:42.348-05:00Spousal Limitations on the Campaign Trail: Or, is X the new Y?<p><br />Hillary Clinton's official announcement, that she is entering the race to become U.S. President number 44, has journalists trying out all sorts of ways to represent her relationship to number 42 -- or more specifically, deciding what facts about her marriage are relevant to reporting the campaign. <br /><br />For numbers 41 and 43, the relationship was technically straightforward -- father-son -- though, as Maureen Dowd likes to remind us, psychologically fraught, having eventually played an untoward, if not grotesque, role in shaping U.S. foreign policy. For x-chromosome Clinton (née Rodham) and y-chromosome Clinton (né Blythe), the journalistic options are thorny from the outset: at what point in any given article does one note her marital status and mate? Must Monica Lewinsky appear in every item? Would it not be perverse, in these years when U.S. and Iraqi citizens are dying to settle the Shrub's old scores with Dad, if the 2008 campaign became a replay of Bill Clinton's impeachment trial? <br /><br />Seeing in every weighty public matter its funhouse mirror image in pop culture, I present yet another link to <i>The Onion</i>: "<a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/node/56632">Kevin Federline, Wife Divorce</a>." My favorite bit? The part where the unnamed "spouse" is defined as "a 24-year-old entertainer who worked as a singer and foreground dancer at Federline performances." Foreground dancer! Priceless.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-32626147255757682602007-01-16T18:26:00.000-05:002007-01-17T13:40:19.915-05:00Superfluous Letters<p><br />Because my work concerns alphabetical letters, I must post this link to <a href="http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/004050.html#more">Bill Poser's post on Language Log</a>, on Saudi Arabia's ban on the letter <span style="font-style:italic;">x</span>. <br /><br />English has its own checkered history of attempts to expunge particular characters from the alphabet. The first aspect of the language humanists attempt to reform, spelling forms the grounds of the sixteenth-century English standardization movement. In 1568, Sir Thomas Smith writes the following on the letter <span style="font-style:italic;">c</span>:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">Now tell me what you make of it. Does not this letter seem to be an Hermaphrodite, neither male nor female, and yet both and neuter, a monster among letters, not a letter; an example of ignorance, not art? For art is founded on certain rules and on the constancy of nature. But this c which we use, or rather abuse, in our common pronunciation of Latin, I know not what letter it is, nor what it is. For if s is a letter, and k is a letter, as the Latin alphabet (which you wish me to follow), shows; what force or power is left for this vagabond c, but to be a sort of monster or Hobgoblin, appearing now make, now female, now a serpent, now a crow? And by such willful impostures it is driving out both s and K from their houses and lands. So that these two letters might lawfully sue it under the edict Unde Vi, and I doubt not that if the Praetor be just, c will be easily convicted. What do you think?</span><br /><br />And on the letter <span style="font-style:italic;">q</span>:<br /><br /><span style="font-style:italic;">I cannot understand what this letter means. For if we take k for the sound which when joined to a makes ka, and when joined to u makes ku, what is q doing, or what purpose does it serve? If I were the Prince of Grammarians, with authority to make eternal laws, valid throughout the whole world of Romans and Germans, I should cast out q as beggarly and intruding, and wrongfully and unnecessarily occupying the space of a real letter, and should command its exile far away; as Sarah did to Hagar and Ishmael as soon as Isaac began to grow strong. Q is really a slavish letter, deformed and decrepit, powerless without us as its staff, and with it no better than k. Do you think I am speaking my mind clearly? . . . I shall therefore soon make an end of this and other letters, and you shall at last be released and purged. So listen. Whatever q is like, we have it, always walking before its u like a proud maidservant.</span> <br /><br />Linguistically, or in principle, Smith objects to "superfluous letters," letters that represent sounds designated by other letters. As you can see here, however, Smith depicts superfluous letters' transgressions by way of the Old Testament (Saudi Arabia's ban is religious in basis) as well as other violations of social rule, be it gender (<span style="font-style:italic;">c</span> is a hermaphrodite), status (the letters usurp others' rank), or property (they displace other letters from their rightful place). <br /><br />Smith proposes a new English alphabet, one in which each individual letter corresponds to each and every individual sound, or phoneme, in English speech. Needless to say, Smith and the subsequent spelling reformers are unsuccessful in their bid to regulate English writing in this way. As we spell some words phonetically, some according to etymology or language of derivation, systemic variation remains a feature of English ortho-graphy, or "right writing."<br /><br />We nonetheless owe to this footnote in the history of the English language -- a footnote I converted into a dissertation, and coming soon, a book! -- the first pedagogy developed to teach English (schoolmasters such as Richard Mulcaster propose teaching English as a subject of learning, versus rewriting the alphabet), the first dictionaries ("hard word lists" are initially published as spelling guides, to fix extant spellings in print), and the enduring notion that "spelling counts" -- not only as a (dubious) measure of language ability (my daughter has just started taking "spelling tests") but also a mark of one's advanced literacy, or place in lettered society. To be a "good" or a "bad speller" says something about you, something that may or may not square with how "well read" you are or your general facility with language.<br /><br />In early modern English lit, the most explicit reference to the movement appears in <span style="font-style:italic;">King Lear</span>, at the end of Kent's harangue to the impertinent servant Oswald, or one banished figure wishing to banish another: "Thou whoreson zed, thou unnecessary letter!" (2.2.64).<br /> <br />For those who are interested (what, you don't find it fascinating?! I know, I am the *closest of close readers), I've written at length on the recent bumper crop of spelling bee entertainments, and how they gesture to this peculiar chapter in English language history: <a href="http://www.hotreview.org/articles/singingstand.htm">here, in an online review</a> of <span style="font-style:italic;">The 21st Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee</span>, which supplies more of the history of the American spelling bee; and <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/05/strange-brew-how-starbucks-spelled.html">here</a>, on <span style="font-style:italic;">Akeelah and the Bee</span>, which asks why spelling, why now, in this era of standardized tests and No Child Left Behind.<br /><br />And I am repeating myself utterly here, but must follow up that Language Log link with <a href="http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29765">one</a> to the <span style="font-style:italic;">Onion</span>'s report on the letter D, who pulls his sponsorship of <i>Sesame Street</i> when a new gay muppet, "Roger," joins the cast. It still cracks me up.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-57665194880393602642007-01-14T12:50:00.000-05:002007-01-17T19:42:43.608-05:00Early Modern Surges<p><br />After so many posts related in some way to my own self-fashioning (via blogs, nametags, Facebook, etc.), it was liberating to bang out a fairly straightforward and relatively inconsequential post on sports.<br /><br />That said, I admit to burying the day’s highly consequential lede. The Beckham signing was announced the day <a href="http://www.salon.com/politics/war_room/2007/01/11/lost/index.html">Congress took aim</a> at the U.S. President’s “surges,” also known, though little recognized, as the 21,000 flesh and blood men and women who will put their lives on the line for a war unsupported by two-thirds of the citizens who front the monies that fund those soldiers’ salaries as well as said unsupported and tragically mismanaged war. Whew. Also the same day I taught “new world narratives” by Walter Raleigh (about Guiana), Francis Drake (<span style="font-style: italic;">Nova Albion</span>, or San Francisco), and Thomas Hariot (Virginia).<br /><br />Welcome, then, to this term’s edition of “What century is it?”<br /><br />Last term’s game was played the week I was teaching Thomas More’s <span style="font-style: italic;">Utopia</span> (1516) and Bob Woodward’s <span style="font-style: italic;">State of Denial</span> (2006) came out. <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/10/pop-quiz.html">As I noted then</a>, Woodward’s portrayal of Bush among the flatterers echoed Raphael Hythloday’s observation that sixteenth-century foreign policy gets perverted by courtier self-interest.<br /><br />This week, Raleigh’s tract administered the most potent dose of <span style="font-style: italic;">das Heimliche</span>. When I prepared my students for the reading, I called attention to the two contradictory gestures framing the title: “The Discovery of the large, rich, and beautiful Empire of Guiana, with a relation of the great and golden city of Manoa (which the Spaniards call El Dorado).”<br /><br />“Discovery” suggests dibs -- that is, that Raleigh and his fellow journeymen “discovered” the region in such a way they can lay claim to it. Of course, we all know Europeans didn’t unearth territory that had already been there, indeed inhabited and civilized. But what’s amusing about Raleigh’s title is that it initially purports to report the discovery of Guiana, only to acknowledge, eventually and parenthetically, that the Spanish got there first – and already named the place. The subsequent tract will call on Queen Elizabeth I to send “surges” of British troops to reclaim – and one would imagine, rename -- the territory for England.<br /><br />Raleigh does not begin the treatise so transparently, however [btw, I’m working with the excerpt in the Norton Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Volume, eighth edition]. Rather, the tract begins rather innocuously as a personal eyewitness account of the region. Raleigh waxes poetic that “we beheld that wonderful breach of waters which ran down Caroni; and might from that mountain see the river how it ran in three parts, about twenty miles off, and there appeared some ten or twelve overfalls in sight. . ." Sounds luverly, dunnit?<br /><br />Only further in does Raleigh's survey of the landscape begin to take on a whiff of <span style="font-style: italic;">recon</span>. Amid references to "hills so raised here and there over the valleys, the plains adjoining without bush or stubble, all fair green grass," Raleigh notes "the ground of hard sand <span style="font-style: italic;">easy to march on either for horse or foot</span>." What begins as pastoral reverie becomes increasingly military in outlook.<br /><br />Indeed: sand . . . uranium, WMDs. Far from a comprehensive and objective assessment of the region, the evidence is hand-picked to support Raleigh's proposed mission for England to colonize Guiana. Writing “I never saw more beautiful country nor more lively prospects,” Raleigh's choice of <span style="font-style: italic;">prospects</span> is significant, for it reads doubly, to refer both to peaks in the landscape, and to <span style="font-style: italic;">prospects</span> for England, were British troops to set foot there.<br /><br />Raleigh proposes the Guiana mission in particular because he claims the gold found there will fund the operation. He launches a new paragraph, “I will promise these things that follow, which I know to be true,” and proceeds to report that “The common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself, instead of pence, with plates of half a foot broad, whereas he breaketh his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honor and abundance shall find there more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchers filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico, or Pizarro in Peru.”<br /><br />Gold, oil. You do the math.<br /><br />The narrative progressively surges to where Raleigh assures the Queen that, “if there were but a small army afoot in Guiana, marching towards Manoa the chief city of Inca, he would yield to her Majesty <span style="font-style: italic;">by composition</span> [or by voluntary contract; my italics] so many hundred thousand pounds yearly, as should both defend all armies abroad and defray all expenses at home.”<br /><br />Small army. “Greeted as liberators.” Pay for itself. ‘Nuff said.<br /><br />While most of these narratives were written in the sixteenth century, I chose to use these texts to launch the second, seventeenth-century-based term of my year-long survey of Renaissance Prose and Poetry, not only to work the “new term,” “new world” angle, but also to flag nuances in the term “empire,” a word central to Raleigh’s title and mission, and etymologically and conceptually related to <span style="font-style: italic;">empiricism</span>, a concept our class will discover in seventeenth-century prose authors such as Francis Bacon.<br /><br />When Bacon proposes new territories (e.g., the “New Atlantis”) for learning, he works the “new learning,” “new world” angles himself. The so-called “father of modern science,” Bacon is concerned to “discover” and rename modes of knowledge previously claimed, indeed cornered, by the humanists viz. classical rhetoric. Bacon writes: "men began to hunt more after words than matter; more after the choiceness of the phrase, and the round and clean composition of the sentence, and the sweet falling of the clauses, and the varying and illustration of their works with tropes and figures, than after the weight of matter, worth of subject, soundness of argument, life of invention or depth of judgment." Substituting "things" for "words," Bacon demands that learned men redirect their attention from the study of language and devote their study to "things" and "matter."<br /><br />As I asked my students in my first-day-of-term overview, what role will language nonetheless play in advancing this new brand of “learning”? After all, <span style="font-style: italic;"><a href="http://www.uoregon.edu/%7Erbear/adv1.htm">The Advancement of Learning</a></span> (1605), the treatise Bacon writes to introduce this new mode of knowledge, is written to King James I, specifically to implore the king to direct his “magnanimitie,” aka reach for his cheque-book, to fund Bacon's new mission (the groundwork, in fact, for the Royal Societies).<br /><br />But as we see in Raleigh’s treatise, as well as the <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/05/its-not-just-about-jesus-friends-its.html">obfuscations of the neo-cons</a>, facts aren’t facts, strictly defined, when summoned in the service of a fundamentally rhetorical exercise. Traced to the Latin <span style="font-style: italic;">imperium</span>, and thus to <span style="font-style: italic;">imperre</span>, or to command, both <span style="font-style: italic;">empire</span> and <span style="font-style: italic;">empiricism</span> presuppose the use of language to survey the available data -- and then summon the troops.<br /><br />In this light<span style="font-style: italic;"></span>, there is something more to take from the report of Sir Walter Raleigh, “<a href="http://www.lyricsbox.com/beatles-lyrics-im-so-tired-vn58g9d.html">stupid get</a>.” For, far from proposing neo-con notions that the arrival of the British military will result in a healthy restructuring of the region (a "domino effect"), Raleigh is eventually quite blunt (after his cagily worded title) that the purpose of the mission is to fortify British rule: “For whatsoever prince shall possess [Guiana] shall be greatest, and if the king of Spain enjoy it, he will become irresistible. Her Majesty hereby shall confirm and strengthen the opinions of all nations as touching her great and princely actions.”<br /><br />“The opinions of all nations” confirmed, that the U.S. cannot be trusted to act in the world's interests, can someone please tell the President to lay down his Camus and pick up a couple of these Renaissance strangers?<br /></p><p><br />Words and things. <a href="http://www.hoover.org/publications/policyreview/4884276.html">Liberal education</a> indeed.<br /></p><br /><br /><u>Post Post-script, Jan. 15:</u> Two things. First, I haven't blocked out those long quotes (MLA style) because I'm having an issue with block quotes in Blogger (the subsequent text gets misformatted for no reason). More important, I suppose I should note that I did not teach these texts through the lens of the Iraq war, but through the lens I described when referring here to my teaching. I teach modes of analysis (<i>how</i> to think -- the *many ways -- versus <i>what</i> to think), and my primary allegiance is to the (course) material. I clarify that because, after all, I was the one who made a big stink about how blogging represents our work. In that respect, I concede that the blog -- and here I actually mean *this blog, versus blogging in general -- remains extra-curricular, in that it offers the opportunity to settle any unfinished business I may have with a text, business that's relevant, and hopefully compelling, to a general readership. It's all a work in progress, when you think about it.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-86069175991945759792007-01-11T16:37:00.000-05:002007-01-13T11:45:10.444-05:00Going Hollywood (or, from the MLA to the MLS)<p><br />Long before I got tongue-tied at the MLA and was featured in the <span style="font-style:italic;">Chronicle</span> for beginner's mistakes, the most popular (i.e., visited) series of posts in <i>la Jardiniere</i> concerned English football and the 2006 World Cup. It is for those readers who've hung around since then (and who must be wondering what all the fuss is about "academic bloggers" and "academics who blog" -- what, is that like shirts and skins?), that I post the following -- to me, utterly unsurprising -- news: David Beckham -- Soccer Spice -- has <a href="http://home.skysports.com/list.aspx?hlid=441040&CPID=23&clid=186&lid=4161&title=Becks+ready+for+new+challenge">signed with the L.A. Galaxy.</a><br /><br />I don't watch a lot of TV these days, but with my significant other being not only English but also a former professional footballer, "GolTV" is on a lot in our house. The other day I walked through when the channel was running a Biography-type special on Becks -- at the point when he signed with Real Madrid, after a brutal locker room bust-up (for which Posh Spice was blamed, Yoko Ono style) with Alex Ferguson at Man U. I looked at the clock and saw time remained in the show -- but noted to whomever was in the room (perhaps to myself), "Well, nothing more to show. That's the peak. It all goes downhill from there."<br /><br />Afforded precious little playing time on a star-studded Spanish side, and limping home from Germany this summer after a <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/06/ole-ole-ole-ole.html">piss-poor performance as England captain</a> (only to be asked "not to return" <i>ouch</i> to the national side), pretty boy Becks has seen better days. <br /><br />I have a certain fondness for the skirted one. First, it took guts to apply himself, as he did, to proving his service to England after that boot of Diego Simeone at the 1998 World Cup (a match-turning red card that should have <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/07/1121-am-cdt-61-in-england-v-portugal.html">taught Rooney</a> to keep his cool in the pretty, but malevolent, face of Ronaldo). In addition, as my son's "special needs" became more and more apparent, said spouse and I would black humor ourselves by musing, "well, maybe he's the next Beckham" (where Becks hath not the gift of gab, my son has a language disorder and is also exceptionally athletic). <br /><br />On the matter of Beckham's MLS signing, I will repost here what I wrote about the league shortly after the U.S. team's dismal sending off from the World Cup. Responding to Robert Weintraub's <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2144414/">post-mortem in Slate</a>, I wrote:<br /><br /><i>Finally, a sound assessment of the state of affairs. Weintraub doesn't trace the problem back to AYSO, <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2006/06/between-posts-thinking-womans-guide-to.html">as I did</a>, but gives a credible account of how MLS contributes to U.S. disappointments abroad. He points out that, if we are going to build a truly competitive national team, US players should not be pressured to support the MLS (by playing in it), but instead be encouraged to play in the European leagues, in which the competition is stiffer -- and faster, as I have pointed out (i.e., watching the MLS is like watching the European leagues play in slow motion). What he also could have pointed out is that European players look at the MLS as we do Florida: the place to wind out their (slower, less agile) golden years. If I had a dollar for every time I heard a European player say he looks forward to moving to America (with his riches) to "retire" in the MLS . . .</i><br /><br />I was thinking of Becks here when I wrote that last line, and toyed with the idea of predicting outright that he would follow such a course. No matter. That the most image conscious football star of the modern era would end up in Hollywood has been long written in the stars. <br /><br />Which doesn’t mean that such a move -- from the top of the English Premiership to the top of Serie A to . . . the bottom of the Western Conference of the MLS – isn’t bittersweet, and to European football fans, fairly galling. (I spent a dozen years in Chicago, from the year Jordan, that other number 23, returned and triumphed, to win the Bulls three more titles, through his second retirement and less than enchanting reappearance as . . . a Wizard. At least Chicago is finally rebounding, slowly but surely, after those long post-Krause travesty years. Thanks, Pax.) <br /><br />But let's also look at the Beckham deal from the perspective of the MLS. The MLS will only pay $400K of Beckham's salary, the maximum for the league. A.E.G. (a major sports conglomerate based in L.A.) and Adidas ("impossible is nothing") are ponying up the rest of the dosh. Still, the numbers they're talking are staggering for a (<span style="font-style:italic;">cough cough</span>) U.S. soccer player. Can the league really afford him, even with such backing?<p>I know many would say that the league cannot afford *not to have such a star signing. The most immediate comparison, of course, is to Pele and the New York Cosmos. But while Pele helped boost attendance at professional soccer games by 80% between 1975 and 1977 (source: <a href="http://espn.go.com/classic/biography/s/Pele.html">ESPN</a>), even the King couldn't save the North American Soccer League.<p>"Impossible is nothing?" For U.S. soccer? It remains to be seen.<p>It also remains to be seen whether Beckham's star will shine as bright in a city where just about everyone lives to see and be seen. The Ono myth a hard one to quell, of course Posh is being pegged for the choice of destination (kinda hard to see the Beckhams in Kansas City). Ever so "euro" in fashion and outlook, it will be interesting to see how the family takes to life in America -- and if and how America takes to them.<p>Were Beckham's star power to fade like his famous crosses, might the signing end up crippling the league?<br /><br /><u>Post post-script, Jan. 12.</u> Weintraub has <a href="http://www.slate.com/id/2157553/">since written</a>, and skeptically, on the signing as well.Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-41773361315615309312007-01-10T19:53:00.000-05:002007-01-10T21:31:08.999-05:00I Have a Cunning Plan<p><br />I admit that I'm repeating myself here, by turning into a post a reply I gave to a comment on my <a href="http://dujardin.blogspot.com/2007/01/close-readers-at-mla.html">MLA nametag bit</a> below.<br /><br />See, it's only the MLA where I haven't worn my nametag. I do at other, smaller conferences, especially those in my field. There, where the groove tends to be more casual and the feeling more "we're all in this together," I see the nametag as functioning more aptly to generate conversation. I'm thinking of GEMCS (Group for Early Modern Cultural Studies?) here (not the RSA, which is pretty formal), where a tag-sight is more likely to prompt an introduction -- precisely because there is a more palpable *context for such an overture. <br /><br />Anyways, the last GEMCS I attended was in Orlando, and naturally I took the kids (to that most unnatural of family destinations). Back in the hotel room, my daughter, who sees in every flat white surface an opportunity to "tag" herself, took the initiative to decorate my nametag. Colorful marker. Flowers. Stars. A couple princesses, no doubt. <br /><br />I didn't wear the nametag afterwards, but wouldn't it be a hoot to customize one's MLA nametag -- you know, pimp my ride?<br /><br />Imagine the looks!<br /><br />Looks that would show up the very phenomenon of MLA nametag decorum.<br /><br />It's a plan. And I invite you to join me. (See you in Chicago . . .)Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-72085698655313787972007-01-10T09:19:00.000-05:002007-01-10T23:49:54.990-05:00Getting a Dose from the Doctor (but then feeling better about it)<p><br />Turns out the audience members at that MLA blog panel thought my post-panel question was as lame as I did. Dr. Crazy, over at Reassigned Time, blogged my query <a href="http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/2007/01/how-do-i-make-this-count-post-about.html">thus </a>. <br /><br />Feeling (as I've written) as though I misrepresented myself and my interests, I tried to post a comment, but Dr. Crazy's comment function is on the fritz, so I corresponded with the Doc via e-mail instead. We've since had a very positive exchange (noted <a href="http://reassignedtime.blogspot.com/2007/01/tonights-post-dream-activities-rboc.html#links">here</a> by the Crazy One), and I, for one, am glad to have made the connection. <br /><br />Here's what I wrote: <br /><br /><blockquote>This is going to sound like splitting hairs, but I never used the word "count" in my question. What I did say was "how do I get my blog on my tenure file?" It was a cheesy, misworded way to end what I felt was going on too long (i.e., my own question; I should've thought about it more, but took the opportunity I thought I otherwise wouldn't get. L'esprit de l'escalier. It happens.).<br /><br />In all honesty, I couldn't care less about getting my particular blog on my particular tenure file. The holy trinity (research, teaching, and service) is going perfectly well for me thus far.<br /><br />Rather, what I'm really interested in -- long term, in the big picture -- are "surges" (if I may use such a loaded term) of anti-academic sentiment that see the tenure system itself as the root of all evil (especially in the humanities). Academic freedom is a pretty hard sell to parents ponying up 50K a year, or to corporations funding new football stadiums and research facilities, in a political climate where sneering at "tenured radicals" has become increasingly acceptable, if not <i>de rigeur</i>.<br /><br />It's in this light that I do believe blogs perform a valuable service (as I wrote) in demystifying academic labor for the general public, and I'm all for the idea of blogging as service.<br /><br />I also fully respect any academic's wish to sort out his or her blog from his/her academic persona. By all means, post anonymously, and raise a "Don't Tread on Me" flag in the banner. Up until I started working here [at my university], I saw my own blog in just such terms -- as an escape pod, if anything.<br /><br />But in speculating whether blogging might have something to offer us _as scholars_, I am wondering whether the technology might be used -- and yes, valued -- to generate form(s) of "publication" other than those we typically produce, ones which would perform the "service" of rehabilitating the humanities in the public eye, while *also serving as an additional outlet for research. Something for us, and to get the NEH off our backs (or at least on our side).<br /><br />I make no secret of the fact that I really don't know what that could possibly look like (which is probably why I fudged my MLA question). As Flavia points out to me -- and I agree (again, something I was going to get to) -- the "group blog" seems to be the going thing where "scholarly conversation" is concerned (and how hilarious was it when David Greenberg claimed to have "invented" it for TNR??). <br /><br />I'd like to get a group blog going, for sure. Or I think. But I also like to post on idiosyncratic things, like the relationship of the Beatles to humanist imitatio or J.K. Rowling's deaf ear.<br /><br />So, no, I don't have any answers, just questions. But my questions are more thoughtful and less crass than I represented them in Philadelphia. No, I don't care about "counting" -- in fact, what I *object to is the way in which _market values_ -- both academic and commercial -- have infected the way we think about our work, to enumerate and tabulate it in (indeed) such crass ways. We are constantly having to *prove our value, and the value of our research -- to one another, and to the culture at large. <br /><br />If blogging can play a role in intervening in that phenomenon, then, by all means, count me in.<br /><br />As a final question (the one I could have asked -- woulda coulda shoulda): why is it, do you think, that when speaking on blogging in a professional forum such as the MLA, people seem to feel the need to "relate" it somehow to some historical antecedent, in "eighteenth century tabloids," "nineteenth century newspapers" or what have you? (Hell, I write on sixteenth century print -- why not trace it back there?). I read that impulse, that attempt to "historicize," versus saying blogging is "marginal" -- as a contradiction. That is, one the one hand, they're saying -- look, blogging is so important it has ancestors -- it's "scholarly," legitimate because historical . . . on the other hand, nah, it's just marginal, part of my personal time (bug off). Which is it going to be? And for that matter, why participate in panels at the __MLA__??</blockquote><br /><br />Much more to say, but I've got a big day at the office. Thanks to all of those who have been weighing in, here and elsewhere.<br /><p>Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-27884334.post-11482017212255766622007-01-08T23:08:00.000-05:002007-01-09T07:10:43.749-05:00The Curse of the Blue Pencil<p><br />Spend a lot of time editing, either one's own writing or others' (in my case, student papers), and the impulse to tweak becomes hard to stifle.<br /><br /><i><u>Exhibit A.</i></u> Scholastic has released the title of the final tome in the Harry Potter series: <i>Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.</i><br /><br />Hmmm. <br /><br />Scratch, scratch. <br /><br />My inner ear wants to hear "Harry Potter and the Hallows of Death." <br /><br />Prosodically, I find the latter more pleasing: <i>Har</i>-ry <i>Pot</i>-ter and the <i>Hal</i>-lows of <i>Death</i>. J.K. Rowling is shooting for trochaic pentameter; where iambic pentameter places the stress on the second syllable, in the trochee the accent falls on the first. Thus <i>Har</i>-ry <i>Pot</i>-ter and the <i>Death</i>-ly <i>Hal</i>-lows. <br /><br />The trochee is often considered a "childlike" meter, one frequently heard in children's verse -- or, say, in William Blake's "<i>Ty</i>-ger, <i>ty</i>-ger, <i>burn</i>-ing <i>bright</i>." But what makes Blake's line scan is the broken foot at the end of the line, the way our eyes and ears are forced to pause on the final word: "bright."<br /><br />In this sense, and semantically as well, I think "Death" would punctuate the title -- and thus the series -- in more arresting fashion. <br /><br />But grammatically . . . what's with the gruesome choice in "Deathly"? Technically speaking, the word functions as an adjective describing the "hallows." To all appearances, though, it looks like an adverb -- the <i>OED</i> has entries for both parts of speech -- and therefore (or once again) seems out of place.<br /><br />In his book <i>On Writing</i>, goresmith Stephen King updates Samuel Johnson's epigrammatic "The road to hell is paved with good intentions" by noting, "The road to hell is paved with adverbs." In my first year of graduate school, in fact -- filled with good intentions -- I had a professor who observed that I had a "adverb fetish." <br /><br />He was right; and King is right, too, that a well-placed adverb effectively [sic!] modifies. Used to excess, adverbs say you're trying too hard. Better to Strunk and White and come up with a more precise verb.<br /><br />Might we nonetheless divine precious narrative clues from J. Ro's awkward wording? After all, I know she and Steve share a mutual appreciation (as reported by King in <i>Entertainment Weekly</i>. Yeah, I get around). <br /><br />The third book (the one with Lupin) being my favorite in the early Potter series, I stopped reading after the fourth, though I enjoyed Mike Newell's film version of that entry. Known for his comedies of British manners (e.g., <i>Four Deathly Weddings and a Funeral</i>), Newell wittily captured the indignities of English boarding-school life.<br /><br />Nevertheless: might we surmise from the title that someone (who shall not be named) will be taking the adverbial path to hell?Gwynn Dujardinhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395051881489266724noreply@blogger.com0